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And let's name the Other Woman Mata Hari or Cleopatra or something like that.
Wait. No. Miss Havisham. Not implying anything - it's the only woman character who comes to mind right now.
(Were there that many women in Dickens? I can't remember. Now I need to know. No. Now I need to write this post.)
OK. So Miss Havisham set up a meeting with Sydney.
I know Sydney because he has long been a member of a city board of which I was a member for a few years. He is also a city councilman and a federal prosecutor. I have always found him to be gracious, sincere, and polite, with the best interests of our city at heart.
For a while, Primo and I were worried that the party powers would ask Sydney to run. He is far more well known in our district than Primo is and honestly, he would be an excellent representative.
So would Primo.
Wouldn't it be nice to have to choose between two good candidates for once? Instead of holding your nose and voting for the one who disgusts you less?
Well anyway.
So Miss Havisham set up a meeting with Sydney because someone told her that it was rumored that Sydney might be planning to run for that state senate seat.
Sydney has not filed, but even if he had filed already, there is no rule against multiple persons filing to run.
Primo got the gossip back.
Miss Havisham told Sydney, who has always, as far as I know, acted with the greatest of integrity and in the interests of our city, that she was running and he should not run because there were already - and I quote - "too many white men in office."
I am not going to debate the merits of what she said - although I will say she is probably right, but - he has decades of experience in local government (a position that pays about $300 a month for countless hours of work, which means it is really a volunteer position, which is fine with me - I don't think politics should be a paid career, although then you knock out people who aren't rich so this issue is not as binary as I would like it to be) and Miss Havisham is a life coach with no political experience whatsoever.
She can primary him. I have no problems with that. I don't think any candidate should ever run unopposed by someone from the other side and I don't even have problems with primaries, except I don't want Primo to be primaried because that would suck up what little campaign money we do have.
I do have a problem with someone being that rude to Sydney's face.
I mean - that was downright rude.
And Sydney, whom I saw maintain his calm through hours of public hearings where The Public was pretty much accusing us of strangling kittens so we could feed them to sharks,
walked out.
Yes.
He walked out of the meeting.
I do not blame him.
She makes a blatantly racist and sexist remark ("too many white men in office") and you comment that "I will say she is probably right"? That doesn't sound at all like your usual desire to judge individuals rather than groups. If I were Sydney, I would have denounced her racism and sexism -- and then walked out.
ReplyDeleteIt's not racist to make an observation based on race. The prison population is mostly black and Latino (40% and 19%, respectively). That's not a racist statement, it's a statement about how our penal and judicial systems deal with race.
DeleteWhile it does sound like Miss Havisham is racist, in that she was dismissive of the idea of Sydney's candidacy solely based on his race rather than his record of public service, her statement is quite true. White men are vastly disproportionately represented in elected offices. However, that does not mean that a non-male, non-white candidate *with few to no qualifications like her*, is necessarily a better candidate. It would be nice if there were equally qualified candidates that were non-white, female, and/or non-Judeo-Christian.