There seems to be quite a bit of complaining lately from several county politicos in these pages. My father had a name for people like this: “bellyachers.” Those are people who complain a lot, but don’t seem to be able to muster the will to actually solve a problem.
Mr. Richard Nicollello seems to have an issue with our assessment system, and believes an elected assessor will cure things. Except everyone knows that it won’t because we’ve already had elected assessors and the system was no less dysfunctional. It’s a phony complaint. Advocating for it is a waste of time. But that’s the whole point.
Mr. Ed Ra (R-Sedition) writes that he doesn’t like one party rule, especially since that’s what New York voters actually voted for. This is a recurring theme in Republican circles, both in state and national affairs: if you don’t like the voters’ verdict, simply fix things so you can circumvent their wishes, and claim the voting system is rife with fraud even as the electorate finds your policies repugnant. Some people actually believe this is what democracy is all about. Others believe it’s about advocating policies people actually want to vote for.
Mr. Adam Haber, a regular contributor to this august journal, has written no less than, five, count ‘em, five pieces complaining that every branch of government besides the one he happens to work for (go figure), is making all kinds of mistakes, including village mayors who were supposed to have the resources to overcome the effects of a global pandemic, and the state, which is raising taxes, which for once, will fall on people like Mr. Haber.
Let me commend to all of these gentlemen a legal opinion written by none other than Judge Learned Hand for a case dealing with plagiarism:
“No plagiarist can excuse his wrong by showing how much of his work he did NOT pirate.”
Which is to say that ignoring their own complicity in the dysfunction of the government branches they work for gives them no standing to complain about anyone else’s. They are all handmaidens of it. They aid and abet it. They live and breathe it.
None of these bellyachers will ever summon their agency or advocacy to fix the wrongs they’re complaining about, and brought upon not themselves, but on all of us.
They have one fatal conceit: they work in a closed ecosystem that not only rewards this level of government-sponsored decrepitude, it prevents any attempt at reforming it, because without it, they couldn’t survive. They know no other way outside of the hard shell of the monoculture of Nassau politics, and when it comes back to bite them, they seem be at a loss for actual solutions.
They do exist, you know. But unfortunately, if they’re implemented, more than a few people fall off the gravy train. You can only nibble at the edges. You are forbidden to transform.
So these fish are left to constantly ask themselves, as if in a dumb stupor, “why is it so wet all the time?”
So go ahead, gentlemen. Waste your time, waste our time, waste your lives, waste your agency, waste ink, waste bandwidth, reduce your time in office to the very least you can do because that is all that is expected of you and what you expect of yourselves.
There’s going to come a time in your lives when you will deeply regret not doing what you could have done, and how you squandered your careers acting like this. And I can guarantee that regret will hurt.
Donald Davret
Roslyn
