I'm Not Deaf, Blind, and Stupid, You Know.

I know how this looks.  So many posts, like so many others.  They appear stark, two-dimensional, caricaturish.

Ross and Anderson, reasonable, level-headed, goal-directed, grounded.  Watts, out of her element, self-conscious, tangential at first, then growing a perspective, and even an inchoate wisdom, offering sound reasoning and argument.  Cooper, in some weird, unfathomable orbit, rarely connecting with anything approaching a reality base, relying mostly on strange and unimaginable, to anyone but him, hypotheses and what-ifs.  There is no big picture.  There is no forest.  Only fantastical trees, growing upside down.  And Jacobs, who often appears to think Cooper, and everything else, orbit around him.  Stumbling, bumbling, feeling his way very much in the dark, and trying desperately to suppress and control everything around him.  Whose favorite refrain, when he has had enough of the meaningless chatter of other people is "I'm calling the question."

I know how this sounds.  I know what you're thinking.  It's mean-spirited, there is a wretched quality about it, and it's intensely slanted.  These people are not like this.  Jonas is off on some tired rant.  I know.  It looks like that when I read it myself.

So please (PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE!) come to meetings.  See what this really looks like.  And when you see how mistaken I am, just let me know, and I will turn this blog over to you, so you can post your own summary.  You tell it like it really is.

Look, we were all given an explanation for what has happened to Commission meetings in Biscayne Park.  Steve Bernard described it painfully clearly, on many occasions.  We were under the influence of suppressing brutes, the majority of the last Commission, and no one could function, or breathe, because the vile beasts were controlling the air.  People gave up completely, and even stopped coming to Commission meetings.  And it was true.  People had, over a few years time, perhaps even before the tenure of the culpable Commissioners, stopped coming.  But Bernard explained it as he saw it, and he only wished, on behalf of all of us, that we could have a new, kinder, more open regime.  Well now, we have one.  And the attendance is more pitiful than ever.  The usual suspects were there last night-- Janey Anderson and Chuck Ross, the long-suffering spouses, of course-- and I was there, and so was Barbara Kuhl.  Dan Samaria, Linda Dillon.  Karen Cohen and Linda Brewer.  As I say, the usuals.  But we did have one most unusual guest.  The First Lady herself, Mme Elizabeth Jacobs.  It was never clear what that was all about.  But we have never gotten the promised, or at least implied, neighbors back.  And no explanation, either.

So please, straighten me out.  Straighten out this column.  I need some help here.