The specter of the Thought Police. . .

This is a quote from former Commissioner JoAnn Golden from the December 29, 2009 City Commission meeting:

“You know it is really hard to listen to words and receive glares from residents in the city pointed at all of us here, or some of us here, and words like “most egregious”, “unprecedented”, “violated”, “misused”, “disparaged”, “castrated.” Ah, really, we really need to tone down the rhetoric in the city and hope we do that in the future, we really need to come together as a city."

To reacquaint you with the concept of banning words and manipulating language to police thoughts and ideas here is a link to Newspeak from George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four. The prospect of this word or thought control seems to be rearing its head again. This is from last Tuesday's (4/7) City Commission Meeting.

An absurd amount of space was devoted to the "shock" provided by listening to tapes of the selection committee assigned to analyze the Invitation to Negotiate (ITN) in that ridiculous newspaper by Margaret Menge (Vol 1/Issue 12). [Note that her first issue miraculously appeared prior to the City of Lake Worth elections on January 16th.]

Ladies and gentleman, let me remind you that the Invitation to Negotiate was just that, an invitation. It was an invitation to submit IDEAS. It was not an invitation to take away our Casino complex and it was not an invitation to take away the pool. It was meant as an organized way to FILTER those ideas that might or might not ever make it off the paper on which responses were submitted. 'Reporter/editor' Ms. Menge proclaims her SHOCK over the IDEA of a conference center and "destruction" of the pool.

This is faux hysteria and a very clever distortion of the facts.

Can we get back to where we can talk about IDEAS without being referred to as a heretic or corrupt or greedy? How can we come up with solutions to our most vexing problems if we are overly-sensitive to the words and processes used to create IDEAS? Remember, former City Manager Susan Stanton's IDEA of a new Casino complex came to be and it's failing. She got fired and is long gone. Now it's up to people like Mayor Pam Triolo and City Manager Michael Bornstein to come up with IDEAS on how to fix it.

Consider one problem: the municipal pool. Ms. Menge notes the pool "lost just $123,000". Here are the numbers she conveniently left out from the last fiscal year:

• $194,730 (cost to keep pool open for 29 hours a week/fiscal year)
• $71,536 (revenue over the fiscal year)
• $123,194 (shortfall)

I am at the pool regularly. I've never seen Margaret Menge there. Not once. And I've never seen Commissioner McVoy there either. Or Commissioner Maier. Or Lynn Anderson. Or Katie McGiveron. Or Peter Timm. In fact, I am probably one of the reasons the pool is doing better than expected this year. You'll see me there quite often (I'm the one with the black baseball cap):

Ms. Menge is SHOCKED about IDEAS to try and fix the underperforming Casino complex. Interestingly, she had no issue with shocking the community of Lake Worth with her idea of an "art ship" on the Intracoastal. Remember that absurdity? In Ms. Menge's world big ideas are just fine. It's just a matter of who is coming up with the ideas. They have to be the 'right people'.

In conclusion, if you were SHOCKED by what you read in that silly, ALWAYS FREE newspaper, this is where we are at presently vis-à-vis the Casino complex Invitation to Negotiate (ITN) process:

• No vote has been taken
• No ideas have been presented to the City Commission
• Nothing has been proposed by the city, only by the respondents.