Let the Jury Decide

Dear Readers,

Hey! Stop shouting! Don’t you know we’re trying to hibernate down here?

It’s mid-2018, and you people are bellowing at each other about Takoma Junction louder than when we bedded down in the bunker a year and a half ago.

If more of you had read this column from 2014 to 2017 when the development process unfolded, you wouldn’t be at each other’s throats. And you’d have your facts straight!

All About You

We covered the Takoma Park city council for about a dozen years, so we’ve observed patterns - YOUR patterns, dear city resident. We've got better algorithms on you than Facebook!

First you elect perfectly normal, good neighbors like yourself to the city council. It’s a lousy, tedious job you elect these people to do. You trust them to follow complicated details of city government. You trust they will deal with issues the way YOU would - if you had the time and interest to learn the fine details.

Then an issue comes before the council that catches your attention. Of the scores, hundreds or thousands of details involved in this issue, a handful of facts - by themselves - are alarming. Maybe you get an e-mail about it, or it comes by word of mouth. Maybe a flyer gets slipped into your grocery bag.

Your logic goes like this. 1) my councilmember, whom I elected in all trust, has all the facts. 2) I have a few facts that make this sound like a really bad idea, 3) THEREFORE: my councilmember is EVIL.

We said it was logic. We didn't say it was GOOD logic.

Break out the pitchforks and torches, storm the city council meeting! Wave your few facts like bloody shirts in their bewildered faces.

The councilmember may say “you don’t have all the facts, here are the rest of them,” but you are not to be denied your righteous indignation. Once you've decided that two or three facts are all you need to know, you dismiss the rest as “smoke and mirrors.”

We're not just referring to the Junction issue. This is ALL. THE. TIME. people. ALL. THE. FREEKIN'. TIME. 

Mother

The Takoma Junction development issue is Takoma Park’s Mother of all Issues. Thousands if not tens of thousands of facts are involved. And if you don’t know most of them, and if you didn’t see the process unfold, you are standing on quicksand when you voice an opinion based on just a few of the facts, especially facts handed to you by an interested third-party.

Here, dear readers, is the shortened, slightly edited version of what I wrote to your councilmembers, even the evil ones, on July 9.

Dear Councilmembers,

You are in the best position to make decisions on Takoma Junction, a better position than anyone else's.

In this case, the council is like a jury. You’ve seen all the evidence and heard all the testimony. The public has not. Aside from the stalwart Arthur David Olsen, no citizen has attended all the meetings, hearings, open houses and so forth. No citizen has complete information.

The public may have opinions, but an opinion based on incomplete information, misinformation or bias, is not useful. I urge you to gently discount such opinions, especially if it seems part of an orchestrated effort. 

I leave it up to you, I’m sure you’ll make the best informed decision.

Now you people just pipe down, please, so the council can get home at a reasonable hour - and so we can go back to hibernating!

But before we crawl back into the bunker, has anyone got a nightcap? We’re dying of thirst here.

Gilbert

PS. Granolapark is on its old blog.com site rather than the Takoma Voice, because, like Gilbert, the Voice is in hibernation, and its easier to do it this way. Enjoy the retro!