I usually try to decorate these little opinion columns with pithy items of artwork to try and illustrate a point (or two).
Not this time. I want you to concentrate on the words.
I continue to be amazed at the blatant disregard for state law surrounding transparency coming from the "powers-that-be" as it pertains to the city of Fort Smith and those we have elected and hired to have the best interest of the citizens at heart.
There are a lot of "interests" in this city, but they come with a modifying adjective, to wit, "special". And it is amazingly and simply plain to see if you do not fit into the "have" side of the "have/have not" equation your cares, concerns, and desires are little more than an afterthought.
The bottom line? It permeates everything. From interactions between normal citizens and elected and hired officials to interactions between city employees and department heads, there is a constant and ever-present factor of "better-than-you" that is entrenched within every fiber of their being.
How so, you ask?
This employee breaks city policy and gets a slap on the wrist, while others are fired, maligned, marginalised, and left seeking legal redress to clear their name.
Administrators knowingly perpetrate a fraud for months concerning a city service, and when it is ferreted out, it's everybody's fault except those that should have been asking the tough questions all along.
"Certain people" can be stopped for motor vehicle violations, use their position to avoid a citation that very few would have avoided, and then the officer that was either coerced into or failed to write that citation ends up winning an "award" at the end of the year.
Donations to "charitable' organizations are forbidden by the city, yet hundreds of thousands of dollars can go to infrastructure for a project that turns around and sells a portion of donated properties back to the city for $200,000.
Votes can be taken to commit more hundreds of thousands of dollars to a project that is going to be built by "private funds" when just a small portion of those "pledged funds" are safely in hand...and hundreds of thousands of dollars have already been spent on the project.
Political cronies are handed out blank checks for, well, no reason at all that we have discovered. Yet.
Countless experts on matters of what does and doesn't constitute an open meeting have weighed in on the matter, and yet a small gaggle of woefully shallow and egotistical "haves" not only think they can violate the law, but that their opinion on the issue is the only one that matters.
Trot out a "weekly data dump" for emails and then just populate it at your leisure with what you think the public should see.
Department heads can either encourage (or authorize) hand-picked employees to violate city policy (if not state law) and when they are called on it, rubber stamp a pretend "investigation" because it suits their purpose. (Yeah. I said it.)
Numerous things --which "don't concern" or "are outside the responsibilities of" elected city officials -- are kept from them, in many cases needlessly.
We have city "commissions" that are not actually "commissions" at all but are merely shell corporations for the rich and powerful who sit on that "commission" for decades while simultaneously sitting on the "board" of said shell corporation.
They run from the possibility of one lawsuit after another while seemingly embracing the certainty of others.
They play political chess with filing dates, announced candidacies for municipal offices, commission appointments and key votes by the Board of Directors in--as someone once so aptly put it -- an effort to "stack the court" and feign incredulous disdain towards those that would dare to question their end game and the methods employed to get there.
They sit on their downtown thrones, hand-picking the next generation of royalty and lording their self-aggrandized sense of importance over the rest of us peasants.
They accuse those that dare to oppose them with the same type of profiling, discrimination, and cries of racism they have used--by implied threats-- to silence their critics.
Much like a recent Chief Executive of the United States, this core of public servants is bound and determined to bring about "fundamental change" to who we are, what we believe in and what we stand for.
They want to remake us -- the citizens, the soul and the heart of our community -- over into some sort of graven image that represents the utopia "they" want to see. Not the community we should be.
I'm just a dumb ol' boy from Arkansas but I have read a book or two in my time.
Once, between reading some comic books, 'rasslin magazines and the back of shampoo bottles in the bathroom, I stumbled across a tome detailing the life of Edmund Burke, an Irish political philosopher, and statesman who died in 1797.
"Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power, but they will never look to anything but power for their relief."
Ol' Eddie nailed it way back in 1791.
If the shoe fits...