More about Monringside

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I met the other night with a few friends here in Mornngsdie Gardens who were dismayed by my support of Glenn for president. The outcome of the organizational meeting was a clean sweep of officers. My friends were especially distressed that I had voted for Marlo as first vice president. They felt that as an ethical person, I should not have voted for Marlo because of what they perceived as his unprincipled attack on Chi (see LINK Board Affairs) in the weeks leading up to the election of board members. I did not have a good answer when I met with them, but I have thought about it since and I conclude that it is exactly because I am an ethical person that I could not automatically consider Marlo ineligible for office. I’ll explian, but first ...

Having decided that I was going to support Glenn for president, I also decided that it was appropriate to support Glenn’s preferences for the other officers. I would have preferred having Jerry as one of the vice presidents, but for reasons I cannot go into on this blog, in the eyes of the Big-endians on the board, there was a serious cloud over Jerry’s head. If I had voted for Jerry, it would have driven a wedge between me and the Big-endians on the obard at the outset of the year.

As for Marlo, the only thing against him is a tendency to go to the cooperators with matters that should have been dealt with on the board, as in his going to the cooperators with information about Chi. In the Chi matter, the board condemned his action, as I wrote at LINK. For me, that ends it – he has been rebuked, whether or not he acknowledges that his action was improper, and now we move ahead. The improper part of that action, by the way, was not the “going to the cooperators” but the revealing of information that he would not have had if he had not been a board member and that was therefore privileged.

As for “going to the cooperators,” on at least two instances this past year board members sent memos to the cooperators on matters that should have have been taken up by the board. In each case, they claimed that they had tried to bring up the matter and had failed – that in fact they were “stonewalled.”. While there are different perceptions as to whether a serious enough attempt was made to bring the matters to the board, the fact remains that in each case the matters were indeed brought to the board members’ attention before a board meetig and were not taken up at that board meeting – so the claim of being “stonewalled” arises out of genuine experience.

It is still true that the level of mistrust on the board is high, as is the level of mistrust among those cooperators who are partisan. I know that Glenn hopes to lower the level of mistrust and I intend to help as much as I can. But it’s a tough row to hoe and I am not certain we will succeed.