Did You Know ?
Bonnie Donovan
“The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”
— Patrick Henry
At this point, we still have our country, and we still have our flag.
We salute Mayor Randy Rowse, who brought the Santa Barbara City Council back to the council chambers. A little plexiglass, and the chambers are open so we can observe our city council and their interactions, while the citizens call in with public comment, and issues are discussed.
We admire that Mayor Rowse stands up and formally salutes the flag. A traditional respect for our flag and country is one of our values. A good kick start for the first meeting in City Hall chambers in two years.
Must say, several city council members acted the part of cub reporters, asking the police department questions they should have known after several years as council members. Many inquiries could be answered just by attending the Santa Barbara Police Department’s Citizen’s Academy. Maybe the questions were rhetorical.
No matter how inane, the city council acted as if it were conducting a congressional hearing, while the police department was giving its yearly presentation.
Yet no one asked about drugs, overdoses etc.
It appears some council members are looking for screen time. What a waste of our time.
Interim Police Chief Bernard Melekian remained unflappable and, as usual, a gentleman’s gentleman.
Kudos to City Councilmember Mike Jordan for chastising the city staff for not doing its job. He was sufficiently annoyed that, as he just discovered, that it is a state law that requires a 20 foot clearance for emergency vehicles on State Street and its promenade with the dining parklets. Remember it was all about the green bike lane, not safety. Surely the city’s manager of transportation knew this, when his baby, the State Street Promenade was configured. He probably just smirked, and said — “..yeah – dumb like we like ‘em….” But again, we didn’t get what we paid for. Instead we got someone who would leave out the truth — for the good of the whole. Isn’t lying a definition for wokeism?
A heartfelt thanks to Mayor Randy Rowse for efficiently presiding over the meeting with such fruitful results: a 20-foot emergency vehicle allowance will be on State Street. We anticipate more positive results with the coming decisions to keep open the 400 block of State Street and the reopening of West Victoria Street.
Have you received your woke lesson for today? It is time we get down to real business, enough of this funny business.
Since wokeism is a waste of our time, a subterfuge of the truth, and a spin to nowhere, why don’t we just face reality and get back to work? Just do your job. Of course, look at the elected role models we have doing their “job.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom commented on the Third World appearances of the Los Angeles train yards due to the crooks burglarizing the freight trains, and the packages littering the tracks. He apologized and corrected himself after he called the perpetrators “gangs.” He said with a straight face,
” … forgive me, they are ‘organized groups.’ ”
No, the Boy Scouts, the Rotary Club, the Optimist Club, the Democratic Party are organized groups. Gangs are gangs. Crooks are crooks, and changing the definition to alleviate the pain and destruction they cause, does not change the outcome. Evil is evil, and good is good. The sun is the sun, the moon is the moon. Get real, people.
While we are letting the world fall apart, we are told to worry about descriptions that may offend. This is madness foisted upon us. Push back and stand your ground!
In 2021, the Department of Homeland Security dispersed 273,396 illegal immigrants throughout the U.S. in only five months. In Brownsville, Texas, illegal single adult men were being processed in a building with darkened windows, then taxied to the airport to fly to Houston, Miami and Atlanta. These new arrivals, from 117 countries, each paid the drug cartel $2,000 to arrive, then were ferried by ICE to infiltrate our country.
And just to be sure that our country is unrecognizable, at least to us, the taxpayers are funding all of this — the housing, the education, the medical and the food stamps. We are being attacked from all directions. We were energy-independent. Now we stop our pipelines, while the Biden/Harris administration begs OPEC to sell us more oil. How does this make our country better?
As Bishop Robert Baron recently stated, “We have allowed the walls to be breached. The stories and the law that identify us as a people are no longer being told in the same persuasive way.
“What that leads to is a loss of purpose, identity, and mission. We have been so interested in being relevant to the times, that we lost a sense of who we are, forgetting our stories, forgetting our own rituals and identity.”
