A week or so ago, I wrote a letter to the editor about my experience at the Oct. 4 Athens mayoral candidate public meeting in which I promised a “clarification letter” on that meeting’s “postage-stamp constraint.” Here is that clarification.
In that letter, I questioned whether candidate Colonel Emeritus Morris’s 29 years of experience in a “top-down,” undemocratic military culture qualified him to provide leadership for our beautiful little democratic university city that is Athens.
I also raised questions about the format of this candidate meeting that did not permit the audience to orally ask questions and engage in some free-flowing, constructive, democratic dialogue with the candidates.
Only written questions were permitted — constrained to a tiny rectangular piece of paper the size of a couple of postage stamps, for scanning by some inspectors before being passed to the moderator for reading. I characterized this phenomenon as the “postage-stamp constraint.”
I also thought the Oct. 4 meeting had a military-like, undemocratic, “command and control,” masculine flavor.
Please note that I did not intend my criticism of the meeting protocol to be one of disrespect for the Athens County League of Women Voters, the group that both organized it and chose the format.
The league is an organization that I have great respect for because of its significant efforts to help educate us, sometimes rather ignorant, voters on important electoral-political issues.
In fact, several years ago when the league first opened itself to male memberships, I joined my wife in league membership for a few years.
I do hope, however, that the league, by opening its membership to men, has not unduly masculinized itself.
In part, my respect for the league arises out of much that I have learned from my dear wife of almost 60 years and from our three amazing daughters.
I have learned how important it is to all life on planet Earth that we recognize the beautiful significance of the woman’s unique “umbilical-cord connection with the future” and encourage its embodiment in our institutions and social-justice endeavors.
My plea to the league is that it seriously considers changing future “candidate-voter” meeting procedures so as to enable some free and unfettered oral dialogue between voters and candidates so as to enable voters to better understand where the candidates stand.
Chuck Overby is a professor emeritus of engineering and a veteran of World War II and the Korean War.
