so long farewell auf wiedersehen goodbye!

To all my readers who might pick up a copy of the Colonial Heights Patriot to see what kind of offering I have for the week, I regret to inform you that after three years the paper can no longer afford to pay me the measly amount of money they do to continue to write Butterside Up. They do not, however, own my blog on BlogSpot which leaves me in a sort of dilemma as to whether to continue to write these little missives.

I am not totally sure what is going on with the paper. It seems as if they have come to the conclusion that they cannot afford to give the paper away and therefore are making cuts. The first, and biggest, loss for the paper was firing Ryan Lazo, the Sports Editor. I guess, at some level, letting Ryan go is a business decision. And for that there are good business decisions and bad business decisions. I’ll let you, my readers, decide which type that was. In the meantime, Ryan has caught on with the New York Post. Hurray for him.

But still, I am left out in the field wondering if I should continue with my blog. There are hundreds of my little essays on this site, and I could just continue to address the things that pique my curiosity or cause my brain to percolate.

There are things going on all the time in this area that need the light of day, I think. Someone needs to bring this information out and serve as a gadfly so as not let the powers that be run roughshod over the populace as if they have a right to do so merely by having been “elected.” There are many cases where the decisions that are made have negative ramifications to the people they represent, but they opt instead to stay their course because it is what they want to do.

In some cases, they believe that having been elected, what they decide to do is driven by the people who voted them into office. But that isn’t really so. We elect people to do our bidding. We expect them to act in ways that befit and benefit our community. They are there to set policy and manage the affairs of the city.

But some people think that being elected means they can be the lords of the community. “My people” is the thought, but in reality they speak only for their specific groups. There are many more people in the community than those who voted them in.

The question arises at that point as to whether they should represent their electorate or if they should represent the entire community. I attempted to explain one time that there was a huge number of people in the community who did not favor some of the things that the city council was doing.

“But I get all these emails,” I was told.

The people I am talking about, I said, will never email you. You likely will never hear from them. They may not even take the time to go to the polls on Election Day. Are those people any less deserving of the actions of council?

No one ever said the job was easy.

In some ways, a person has to be out of their minds to serve. Especially when it comes to local politics. One hopes, that like in the old days, serving on council or any political body is an honor. But there are those on councils everywhere for whom the honor is an ego stroke. They need to get off their petty personal agendas and do what is right for their communities and not just what seems to fit their own little fiefdom.