MANSFIELD: The Fine, Thin Line

There’s a fine, thin — yet highly distinctive — line between legitimate, much-needed, honest “reform”… and a media-hyped and driven “witch hunt.” And it seems as if our new county executive is proposing to engage in the latter — in his noble attempt to accomplish the former.

That same media is now reporting that “a few” members of the County Council are against wholesale firings at the Boards of Revision, but that simply is not the case; reliable sources tell me virtually all eleven members are in opposition to treating these Boards of Revision people unfairly … and these officials need to be applauded for their brave stance. They are not saying that they are for keeping anyone, they simply are calling for people to be looked at on an individual, case-by-case basis. How can that be so wrong?

It might just be the circle of acquaintances I converse with, but in my admittedly very unscientific polling I can’t find one single, solitary soul who is for a policy that is tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or perhaps, more appropriately, “burning down the village in order to save it.” I wonder what the results would be if one of the local media conducted its own poll.

Of course the County Council members got the memo: They full-well know the first minute they don’t docilely go along with whatever they are told to do by certain media they’re going to be treated like a bunch of redheaded stepchildren; treated worse than runaway slaves; as if they are direct, latter-day descendants of Benedict Arnold… somehow betraying the letter and spirit of reform simply by calling for basic fairness in the matter. We can only hope these eleven elected officials stay strong when the gale-force storms of criticism begin to batter them about. They have to realize that, while it’s not written down anywhere in the job description, this type of treatment occasionally goes with the territory hereabouts.

This issue could provide a seminal, transformative moment in terms of the shape, structure and form of our new county government: Does the collective wisdom of the eleven duly-elected council members trump the decision of the county executive when they honestly and sincerely disagree, or are they simply going to be a rubberstamp body, easily cowed into standing mutely by when decisions they don’t believe in are made? Or is this the hill they are willing to politically die on in order to establish their own bona fides? Obviously the executive and the members eventually are, sooner or later, going to disagree on some matter of policy… but as any astute student of politics and power knows, having that disagreement sooner is far, far better than having it later.

If they collectively cut and run now — on this matter of critical core values — it will come back to haunt them over and over again for the remainder of their terms… and set an ugly precedent that will be difficult (if not impossible) to undo.

Now, it may very well be that everyone who labored for the County Boards of Revision were either incompetent political hacks, lazy louts who only put in half the hours they took pay for… or both. In those cases they should be the first ones out the door… with the quickness, no questions asked. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

But if there are some hardworking and dedicated employees whose only sin was they had no one to file a complaint with (without losing their own jobs) when they saw others screwing the pooch or leaving early, then they certainly deserve to be among those being considered to fill the board positions under the new regime. With that said, it very well may be that too many better qualified candidates are under consideration, and they just might not make the final cut: If that’s the case, then so be it… but the honest ones should at least be considered individually and not tainted with the broad brush of corruption when, if fact, they did nothing wrong.

In a county where corruption ran rampant for decades (trust me, people in other parts of the state and country — both in and out of government — knew how bad things were here in the State of Cuyahoga), it’s going to be hard enough to attract qualified candidates to fill the critical positions of government… without gaining a reputation for petty unfairness; that someone who is actually doing their job and doing it well can lose it at the slightest media-driven hint or whim. Who, in their right mind, would come to work in a toxic environment like that? Only the desperate or unqualified, that’s who.

There’s nothing wrong with our newly elected county leaders being hard, demanding and above board… the public expects no less than that; but basic fairness is a long cherished American tradition that should not be jettisoned simply because of the frenzied howls of media. Do we really want to become known around the country as a county secretly run by Tea Party types… overly-zealous, sanctimonious sons-a-bitches that see only what’s wrong with government, never what’s right — and then seeks to shove their own brand of wrongheaded revisionist rhetoric down everyone else’s collective throat by shouting the loudest?

What if a reporter (or, say, even two or three) at a newspaper were found to be putting yeast into their stories… or making up facts from whole cloth. Would said newspaper fire everyone in the newsroom? Of course not. Indeed, no one is even censured or taken to task for stretching the truth beyond all bounds by disingenuously writing “a few” in an editorial (to push the paper’s agenda) when that is patently untrue, and everyone on the editorial staff knows it… or at least should know it — if they are doing their jobs. What “few” are they referring to?

It could be that I’m particularly sensitive to this issue due to the fact my race has faced such blatant unfairness since being brought to these shores in 1619. Blatant unfair treatment is very hurtful indeed. But fair is fair all over the world, and everyone knows “fair” when they see it — unless spineless acquiesce, willful blindness, loathsome cowardice has already set in to rot the body politic from within in Cuyahoga County. We can only pray that it has not.

From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://www.neighborhoodsolutionsinc.com.