I attended a school board meeting the other night, and am amazed by the information being circulated by
those who claim to speak for the majority. The information provided to the public by various media
outlets regarding the meeting and its substance is limited by time and copy capacity constraints, and
resultantly, seems to me to be misleading. My purpose is to express my frustration with how we have come
to make decisions which impact the public, and our understanding of what our government is, or is
supposed to be. The "grabber" line of a letter of opinion claimed, "Democracy died at É
meeting." The decisions made at that meeting were made by representatives for that constituency
that were elected to office, by citizens, in accord with the laws of our democratic republic. We don’t
live in a simple democracy. Everybody has a boss, and every voter has the opportunity to
"supervise" their representative through the elections system.
Our system of government is well established. I learned in school that the system consists of three
branches: the executive, charged with enforcing the law; the legislative, charged with creating the law;
and the judicial, charged with interpreting the law. I encourage you to monitor your representatives, to
insure that they are doing the job of their branch, not attempting to do that of another. Those branches
were established to provide for a fair, reasonable, effective and efficient government by means of a
system of checks and balances.
There are a number of emotional issues that we face today. They range locally from us having to consider
how we and our government(s) can and will respond to the economic challenges that we currently face, to
having to consider how to respond to the challenge of our perception that our children are not provided
equal opportunity by equal playing time on the pee wee baseball field, or selected as the lead in the
play, or first chair clarinet player. I encourage you to make your decisions with your head, not your
heart. Base your decisions on fact, not unsubstantiated opinion.
I encourage you to seek and share facts and to be involved (not rock throwing) in your government, if you
are interested in being part of the solution to that which you perceive to be a problem. Don’t be
satisfied by the information that you get from limited media portals, or the claims of the "squeaky
wheels" claiming to represent the majority. I’m encouraged by the people that I heard during our
most recent presidential election that said that they have always voted the party ticket either
Republican or Democrat, but stepped away from that line and became educated before casting their votes.
Allow that philosophy to be your guide in attending to issues that are important to you.
Bradley Biller
Bowling Green