I’ve lived a rather quiet life. I’ve had people yell at me and I’ve yelled back, but for the most part, I feel I’ve been pretty non-confrontational. Until tonight.

We’re still fighting that ridiculous Provo City rezoning issue. They want to make it illegal for us to rent out our basement. So Dan and I gathered a group of fellow concerned residents and went to a neighborhood meeting tonight. Our goal was to force a vote and oust the existing neighborhood chair, the lady who is behind this ridiculousness.

We are completely within the city code to do so. She’s up for re-election. Its time to have a vote. So we called the election in the meeting. And then a funny thing happened. All hell broke loose.

About fifty people started to talk at once. It was like an old Hollywood movie. Except no Jimmy Stuart. There was a lady there from the City Council. She kept calling me “Dear” and told me that I was wrong and that this was not the way things were done. When I told her that it most certainly was because it was in the code, she said it didn’t matter because the existing Neighborhood Chairwoman didn’t have to call an election if she didn’t want to.

To that I told her that “oh yes she did because her term was up and in a democracy when term limits expire an election must be called”. And do you know what that city representative woman said to me? A person elected by a governing body of voting citizens? She said, and I quote directly, “this is not a democracy, dear.”

I studied a bit about American history in school. Just a bit. And I do remember this whole “Revolutionary War” thing that happened when the founding fathers fought with blood and teeth to create a democratic government. But I guess I got that part wrong because “this is not a democracy, dear”.

I said a word I shouldn’t have at her and left…I’ve never been that angry in all my 25 years of life. I felt like given the chance I could have punched through a wall. But I just left and come home and wrote this blog post.

So to all you out there who thought you were living in a democracy…I guess we were all wrong. Oops! Better move to China.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.