Same with my councilman, Gifford F!#%*&@ Miller. Not only is he a sponsor, and Council Speaker, but this is his last term. So he doesn't give a crap about re-election. Not to City Council, anyway.
I knew it would be an exercise in futility but I had to call anyway. I also knew there was no point in yelling, for the above reasons.
I simply asked the girl on the other end of the phone how Miller was planning to vote on the measure, and she said "He's voting for it."
I said I had figured as much, but I wanted to go on record as saying it was a hideous mistake, and I told her why. I said this was going to make a lot of people across the country very angry, and make them regret wasting their money, their sympathy, and in some cases, their presence, on us after 9/11. I said that I didn't believe Gifford Miller had really considered how ungrateful this resolution might make us appear to others.
I also said that it looked to me like the city council was jumping on the bandwagon after a lot of smaller cities and small towns with leftist councils, and that the largest city in America shouldn't reduce itself to being a sheep in the flock. That the resolution was completely out of the city council's bailiwick, that it could do absolutely no good and might do a good bit of harm. I pointed out that several cities which had passed similar resolutions had been forced to repeal it after public outcry, and did she think Mr. Miller would relish the idea of having to do the same her? I also told her that one town had lost tourism through cancelled conventions and reunions, after its town council had passed one of these things. Don't we worry about angering people to the point that they'll spend their tourist dollars somehwere else?
I then said that it didn't sit well with me at all that 51 people were proposing to speak in the name of ten million, without a public referendum or even so much as one public hearing on the matter.
That's when the receptionist said (rather patronizingly, and quite naively IMO), "It's only a resolution, you know."
I said "'Only a resolution'? Yeah, right. Take my word for it, this is going to go over like a LEAD BALLOON if it gets any national publicity at all!"
Only a resolution...grrrrr...that was definitely a tear-your-hair-out-in-handfuls moment.