The other Oak Park paper, The Oak Leaves, ran an eloquent letter from a well known villager on l’affaire Buchanan . . .

Shut up, she said . . .

Berkeley on the Prairie

. . . which some or many might have missed. 

Matt Baron found the trustee’s “sustained table-pounding, finger-pointing diatribe that occupied the better part of four minutes” “deeply dismaying,” he wrote.

“The irony and hypocrisy [were] thick.” The board was working on a statement affirming “its commitment to, um, a variety of viewpoints, among other lofty aspirations.”

Lofty indeed.

He offered a “broader context.” In his more than “six years of serving on local government boards,” he had “never witnessed anything remotely resembling such a scene.”

Moreover, and more telling, as a newspaper reporter he had covered

hundreds of local government meetings—including some that were wildly dysfunctional—the only close analogy would be the three-ring circus that was the Town of Cicero’s public proceedings. And even by that measure, Trustee Buchanan established a new low for conduct.

I concur, after 40 years of watching boards and meetings, often taking notes, especially…

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