Make Independence Day Meaningful

It has been pointed out there is a snowball's chance in hell of getting an updated City Charter that creates anything even faintly resembling a democratic form of government for Dunwoody. The subtext, which we all know, is that we have what we have because the few and the powerful who pushed this City into existence wrote the original charter and installed the original bureaucracy. They still have the power, they like it that way and you can't change it.

But there is something we can do. We can put a stop to the hypocrisy, to the charade that is an insulting slap in the face of the citizens of Dunwoody and of every democratic form of government on this planet. We can update the charter to eliminate the election of the Mayor and Council. Not the actual positions, just the election. They have rendered the ballot box worthless so let's all act like grown ups and accept it.  We can stop this madness. We can do this because those in power will let us.

This may not be easy to figure out. While we may be smart we don't score very well on the Edison-Tesla Innovation Scale but then again pride has never prevented our purloining what we like from other cities so we should take a cue from Dorset, Minnesota.  But only a cue. While they did select their Mayor at random they used a most inferior technique--drawing a name from a hat. There is a far superior option--a raffle. Raffles maintain the underlying random nature of a draw but add that something special that makes it all things Dunwoody. It makes money for our bureaucrats to piss away.

For those who believe anything remotely resembling political office must somehow be subject to manipulation an open raffle allows any one person to buy as many tickets as they wish. Given enough money someone could all but buy a position. It may not be democratic but it sure as hell lines up with local politics round these parts.

While we're at it let's modify the term to a single year. It isn't as if there is much of a learning curve for positions that rubber-stamp whatever the City Manager puts before them and single year terms will serve to maximize the raffle revenue. It's not a federal grant, but in this Smart City it's what our masters call "win-win"--they win and...they win!

And we should hold the drawing at the end of the Fourth of July parade with immediate transfer of office between the seated Mayor and Council and the newly selected. This transfer of title symbolically represents the permanent transfer of real power from the voters to just another bureaucrat and signifies that government of the people, by the people and for the people has perished from this place.

After all, isn't that what our forefathers fought and died for?