A new urgency was added to the deliberations of the Shelby County
Commission as it met Monday to consider the overdue matter of funding the
county
schools during the current fiscal and academic year. But that’s not all. A new
audience
was on hand as well.
The crowd that turned up for the meeting — composed in large part of
newcomers to commission proceedings — was loud, disruptive, and insulting. At
one point,
Commissioner Walter Bailey — a stouter-than-average man, to say the least —
was called
a “little potentate” by a man who stood up in the middle of
proceedings and shouted
out the epithet at the top of his voice. Other commissioners, and the
commission as
a body, came in for equal — and equally inappropriate — abuse.
Bailey and Chairman James Ford made several attempts to assure the
audience — clearly as determined to cut the commissioners down to size as to
pursue
their stated aim, that of resisting a tax increase — that their concerns
would be
dealt with. And, until the crowd’s more vocal members committed the strategic
error
of overkill, it was clear that several commissioners were responsive to the
anti-tax complaints and even to an organized stunt whereby several audience
members symbolically brandished empty wallets.
Inevitably, however, the demonstrators — for such, in effect, they
were —
pushed their luck to the point of using up both it and the patience of the
commissioners. Finally, it was one of the council’s known conservatives, Buck
Wellford, who
had enough. Pointedly saying, “We’re not going to have anything like
Nashville
here” (a reference to disturbances last month which erupted in occasional
violence
and which many think prevented the state legislature from properly finishing
its
work on a budget), Wellford called for a recess and for the additional
presence of
several uniformed county police and sheriff’s deputies.
“What I found interesting,” Wellford said later after the
commission’s
deliberations had resumed in a more sedate atmosphere, “was how many of
those
folks took off once they realized they weren’t going to be able to disrupt the
meeting. They didn’t want their reasons to be heard. All they wanted was to
put on a
show.” The East Memphis Republican member, who has placed much emphasis
on
curbing increases in the county property tax, said he thought the crowd had
been artificially “whipped up” by a local radio talk-show host, who
apparently,
said Wellford, was emulating two Nashville broadcasters who used their
broadcasts
to generate the mass turnout at Capitol Hill in Nashville last month.
In all fairness, the local broadcaster in question, Mike Fleming, may
not
have condoned the tactics which led Chairman Ford to say, “I have never
experienced that level of contempt for a public body in all my years of
service.” But the
behavior of the ad hoc throng summoned by Fleming was clearly beyond the pale.
All citizens have a right to be heard, and that includes their elected
representatives, whose rights were under assault on Monday afternoon. Indeed,
it is
our hope that the outburst in Nashville, which resulted in broken windows at
the
state capitol and physical intimidation of various legislators, will prove to
have been
a watershed event of sorts.
For some time in the late ’60s and early ’70s demonstrators of the
political
left pushed so recklessly against responsible constraints that they eventually
generated a backlash. Something like that is almost certainly in store for the
cureent demonstrators.
