Presented by the Park County BOCC – Attended by a full house of We the People, split right down the middle of the aisle
Perceptions from either side of the aisle.
There’s the Commission’s majority faction, Constitutional Conservative, Christian Nationalists Dave Wissel and Amy Mitchell.
UPDATED FORMAT – Indexed video with comments following. (I will delete prior posts about this topic.)
by George Seaton
…with a little inspiration from Sally Forthright-Truther
I have to say this before I get into the meat of the town Hall.
The righteous among us get on my nerves. Mainly because they have an unshakeable belief that they’ve figured everything out and the rest of us haven’t. Take, for instance, the schoolmarm personality—you know the type—who believes civility is the key to public discourse, inevitably leading us all to a kumbaya moment where we can agree to disagree with smiles and good tidings in our hearts. It’s suggested that the study of civics necessarily provides the worth of civility in our public discourse.
I’ve often thought that if the Framers had been a little less civil in their deliberations they would not have left us with a document inevitably destined to take us to civil war. Their civility in accommodating the “peculiar institution” led to the deaths of over 600,000 Americans.
It’s not only the schoolmarm personality. They’re not the only righteous ones in the neighborhood. Even more visible are the political far right-wing righteous—notably narcissistic, Christian Nationalistic, Code of the West adherents, who are so thoroughly parochial as to be strangers to the rest of the world around them.
In fact, there is audio and video evidence of Park County’s righteous ones embracing incivility in a public setting to spew a particular ugliness that will, in my mind, forever define them. To believe the righteous are the constant friends of civility is to believe a lie. But, alas, there’s a lot of that going around these days.
I don’t know about you, but this fantasy promulgated by the righteous belies the whole history of the world from caveman to me and you. That’s not to say your local HOA meetings and Bible study groups don’t embrace civility. They probably do. They’re structured to do that. But public meetings, town halls, for example, where the essence of democracy is encouraged to shine, where the righteousness of enforced civility is exposed for what it is—a fruitless exercise in head nodding and tongue biting? Nothing in this world has ever been accomplished without the heat of a passionate argument exposing truths that otherwise would remain cloaked in darkness.
This topic always brings me back to Soren Kierkegaard, who said this in “Either/Or,”
“Let others complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is paltry; for it lacks passion. Men’s thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace, they are themselves pitiable like the lacemakers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful. …Their lusts are dull and sluggish, their passions sleepy. … Out upon Them! This is the reason my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. I feel that those who speak there are at least human: they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations, they sin.”
UPDATE from the prior postings on this matter.
This is the full 1 hr. and 58-minute audio in video format. Start the video, then on the lower right-hand side click on “YouTube.” Once you’re in YouTube, below the video you’ll see “Show More” in the comments section. Click on “Show More,” and you’ll find indexing that allows you to go directly to the Question asked, and the Answers received. NOTE: The images displayed in the video are generally not who is actually speaking at the time.
General Comments: Yes, the meeting was raucous, with the two sides literally split down the middle of the room’s aisle. The Commissioner’s comments can be characterized as Mitchell consistently endeavoring to play the middle of any issue while remaining woefully ignorant of RFPs, and buying Wissel’s take on the Rosalie Property. Elsner consistently answered the questions fully, explaining the facts in detail. Wissel consistently resorted to demagoguery, historic perspectives only interesting to him, and his narcissistic tendency to talk about himself.
Certainly, others listening to the event will have their own perception of what occurred. I will endeavor to add my comments to this post for each of the indexed parts of the audio/video as time goes by.
