Posted by
James Broadwater on Tuesday, December 04, 2007 1:43:37 PM
If you'll pardon another local story, I've written before about the illegitimate, unelected, so-called "government" we have in our community of Byram, Mississippi - a community of about 12,000 people who are trying to become a city. I've written before about how wrong it is for them to even call themselves a government, and how it must be illegal for them to do so, and also about how wrong our law enforcement officials are to allow this nonsense to go on.
Well, two things have happened recently to give me cause to think that they may now be at the beginning of getting their just desserts.
The first one was when, recently, it was announced where the boundary lines would be when Byram finally becomes an incoeporated city - and all five of the self-appointed "interim aldermen" were left outside of the city limits, meaning that they will not be elligible to run for REAL alderman positions after incorporation. Only the pretend mayor may be living inside what will be the city's boundary lines when we do become a city, and we had better make sure that we run someone better than him for REAL mayor when the time comes.
The second was the defeat of five-term State Senator Richard White in this year's November General Election. Now, I'm a Republican, and I don't want for the State Senate to be controlled by Democrats, which it now again is. But I also don't like it when an elected official - any elected official - takes it for granted that he will be reelected and ignores the people who he has been elected to represent. In my opinion, Senator White got too big for his britches, and the people of our majority Republican district taught him a lesson. This does not mean that the people in our district are now majority Democrat; it means that they had had enough of Richard White and voted for change. This fact is reinforced by two other facts - the fact that the people of the state house district that roughly encompases the same area reelected Jim Ellington as State Representative for a sixth term, even though he hasn't done a spectacular job himself, meaning that they must have been pretty mad at Richard White to have voted him out, and the fact that the people of Mississippi elected Republicans to seven of our eight statewide offices. This should be a lesson to any officeholder of any party: Don't take the people who elected you for granted. Work for them, do what's best for them, and let them know what you're doing, even when they disagree with you, because they have a right to know ... and because they do have the power to fire you. You may and probably will make some mistakes, but if you act like you don't care, then they may eventually send you home packing, and they should. Not that caring alone is enough - you need to also have skill and be right on the issues, but it is the first and most important quality in a statesman.