I really like it when ordinary citizens scream at city officials, there are mass demonstrations, people are arrested and carted off.
It seems when the civic volcano blows its top, that’s the only time the powers that be realize there’s a problem they must respond to.
Otherwise, the complacency is so thick, you could cut it with a knife.
Nothing really happens until the pressure builds again to the eruption point and citizens once more start screaming at officials. That sure seems true regarding the Albuquerque Police Dept. crisis.
Bayer Merry, our aspirin mayor, says the APD volcano is really just another minor headache similar to other headaches in other cities that are also exploding with racial tension and police/citizen violence, so it’s just business as usual, the new normal, and all that stuff. Just let cooler heads prevail.
When cooler heads do prevail, so-called reason takes over, and people begin to talk calmly about what might or could or must be done about the volcano in the living room whose existence a lot of folks would just as soon forget.
I get to fretting so that civic engagement will just be another opportunity for independent facilitators to make more dough because it’s not polite to scream at others and we all have to learn how to play together in the big sandbox of life.
That is exactly why the city is spending a hundred and fifty grand on up-coming police forums to discuss in a rational way what to do about the APD volcano. Half of that money hoard is going to these here independent facilitators from UNM.
Dang, why did I have to be a ratty English teacher all these blessed years, when all that time there was money to be made as an independent facilitator! I could do that! I could make people talk until they’re blue in the face. I could put a cork in the volcano as well as any bloke or blokettte out there.
I wonder, though, if the same citizens who were screaming at the mayor and city council, whose kids and relatives were killed by police, who were demonstrating and being arrested, if they will be at the “reasoning table,” calmly discussing how to put things back together again in a different semblance of normalcy.
(Photo by Ben Cumming / CC)
Responses to “Screaming at the Mayor and City Council Is Where It’s At!”