Image Credit: Compilation/Jennifer Stahn

Last weekend I drove several hundred kilometres down a gravel road. When the road ended I hiked for another day and a half into the woods. Finally I found the lost paradise I had been seeking: the little patch of province not polluted by municipal election signs.

I have little patience with local politicians. Whichever ones we elect will have neither the courage nor the intellect to direct traffic, never mind create visionary cities. The vast majority of them will merely show up to meetings and do what they’re told by city “managers” who couldn’t manage their way out of a paper bag. As a result, councillors quickly run out of anything useful to do, and end up wasting their time and ours with ridiculous by-laws about dogs and weeds which everyone sensibly ignores. If they are ever called upon to make up their minds about something important they are hampered by not having any, and waste tens of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars on “consultants” or set up a committee to “investigate” until the problem goes away by itself or they are un-elected, whichever comes first.

And these are the morons who are begging us to give them each a decently-paid job doing very little at all. This unseemly clamour for votes is nowhere more offensive than in the clutter of ugliness that litters lawns and boulevards as far as the eyes can see.

How stupid do they imagine the electorate to be that we would cast our ballot in their direction simply because their name appears by the side of the road? If you care enough to vote you are probably not going to elect some idiots you’ve never heard of because their signs contained your favourite colour.

Worst of all are the boards with pictures of the actual wannabe busy-body on them. It is a fact that beautiful people do not enter local politics. Indeed, the entire charade seems to be designed purely as a means of giving local celebrity to the unattractive. Having ones daily drive ruined by an endless parade of their gurning mugs is enough to put anyone off democracy. And lunch.

And the slogans are terrible, composed entirely of banal fluff like “your voice for the future.”  I don’t need some tired ex salesman or grinning wide-eyed innocent to be my voice, thank you very much. Where are the slogans that tell it like it is? “Please help, I need a job” for example, or “I’d be perfect for Council because I love interfering in other people’s lives.”

On the basis that if you can’t beat them join them, this weekend I shall be out and about putting up signs of my own wherever I find a cluster of these eyesores. While “Vote for Git – No Bullshit!” does have an appealing ring to it, I would rather tar and feather myself than enter local politics, so mine will just humbly offer some of my wisest advice: “Don’t Vote, It Only Encourages Them.”

— The Grumpy Old Git complains about everything right here every Thursday.

News from © iNFOnews, 2014