E. Boyer
I think we’re making progress. "Newspaper bickering," as I like to call it, seems to have settled down a bit. For a while, there it felt like we were on the verge of another epic Piedmont showdown..reading The Post has been a little like sitting ringside at Madison Square Garden!
Based on what I’ve read and with the word superintendent now permanently emblazoned on my corneas, the latest topic for a potential Ali-Frazier redux seems to be that of the search for a new superintendent. I’m not preparing you for a sermon on my thoughts regarding the next superintendent or how we should conduct the search. Heaven knows we’ve *ahem* covered that sufficiently! Full disclosure? I’m not as interested as I should be. There. I said it. I know all of the reasons why I should be interested, but I’m just not. It’s rather like the recent movie, Boyhood. I was supposed to like it and I was told it was brilliant. The truth is that I found it boring and the only thing I thought brilliant about it was the marketing that convinced everyone that it was brilliant. I did, however, find the “emperor’s new clothes syndrome” that it produced, genuinely fascinating. But, since we already have someone covering movie reviews in The Post, I’ll stick to the superintendent saga.
Based on the around-town-chatter, some of us may or may not have gone a titch too far. How far is too far? Society has a way of letting us know. We might ignore one’s frequent intoxicated episodes, but privately, we find them sophomoric and uninteresting. And, we might smile politely at the delivery of yet another know-it-all sermon, but it mostly reinforces our decision to scratch you from the short-list for being insufferable. Indeed, there are the unspoken limits, which when exceeded can land you in the penalty box. So, how far was too far in the “superintendent situation?” Well, there are always two sides and in this case, they’ve been described thusly:
Side A: Too far with less-than-transparent handling of a public issue that demands transparency and a whole lot of cockamamie in-house shuffling.
Side B: Too far with scrutinizing the aforementioned issue under something akin to deep-space capable magnification! I think we’ve reached node lambda on the scrutiny (and coverage) of this one.
Yep, just like that and our local newspaper turned into a hot bed of cuckoo-pants!!Like any town, Piedmont has issues that can be polarizing. Measure E, which happened, the community pool complex which didn't, Moraga Canyon playfield..didn't, the under grounding fiasco..did, and Measure H, which didn’t. The list goes on and on. You win some, you lose some. Sadly, differing opinions have the power to sever life-long friendships. It’s hard to believe that people in our town still don’t speak to one another because of plans for a sports field.
Funny, how topics of School officials, theater renovations and sports fields can throw everyone into a psychotic state while issues of much greater consequence are mostly hushed. I’ll never understand it. Ahh, well…first world problems, for the most part here in Piedmont. Not bad when you consider the bigger picture. Still, I can’t help but wonder if sometimes we’re a little too eager to put up our dukes when we disagree.
Up next? The discussion about short-term rentals in Piedmont. Ding, ding, ding...and they come out swinging!!
