Biting Flies

Whether he still writes to this day or not as a columnist I don't really know anymore. Suppose I could always Google him and find out. But Leonard Pitt of the Miami Herald used to have his editorials published in Salem's Statesman Journal, and so I would read them. Our political views were pretty similar, although as an older black man they could have diverged more than you'd think. Anyway years ago he wrote a piece that my mom clipped out and to this day still keeps pinned to her fridge. It was his own theory as to why America tends to be disliked throughout the world, and one idea he put forth is that our country is like a semi on the highway. The smaller cars have to be more concerned our movements than we have to with theirs. We dominate the road and are occasionally oblivious to how our actions end up affecting others. I still wonder if we as Council members aren't in similar positions, our decisions affecting others in ways that we can't really comprehend because the affects are different on us.
Last month we moved ahead with disenrolling 34 of our members. Unfortunately I had to vote "yes" on that resolution, since there really wasn't much room to interpret the constitutional requirements differently. It would move forward regardless of if I'd voted differently.
A couple of people stepped up to voice their opinions, one of them the father of one of the kids being disenrolled. He urged us to find a way. We are the leaders, if we want to fix this problem, then between the nine of us there must be a way. I will always believe that he was right, there would have been a way, had most of us trully cared and seen this as a problem needing to be addressed. Sadly, I don't think most of Council saw it that way. In fact I know they didn't.
You see, we had postponed the disenrollments in May because at that time the Enrollment Ordinance was under review, and there were possible amendments that included drafting language for how we would "correct" the Restoration roll. If that language would result in adding some people to the roll, then that would in turn potentially thwart some of the disenrollments. That was the reason we gave anyway for suspending the disenrollments in May anyway.
The problem is the attempts to come up with any language were half-hearted at best, and virtually non-existent during the summer i.e. the election. In late September the decision was made to move forward with the disenrollments during a meeting with one member of our Enrollment committee. If I were to die today I'd take to my grave the belief that the suspension in May was simply a ruse to get through the election without having to make the unpopular decision of kicking nearly three dozen people out of the Tribe.
I am really not sure what will happen with this enrollment thing. One would think that the disenrollments were the nails in the coffin, but I don't think so. This is an issue for which people have passion. Maybe the little cars can get the semi's attention for a change.