The wheels of the political economy are most greaed with tears shed over Robert's Rules of Order. We all knew this, but it's funny to watch it once again. The rather banal details of board and committee meetings are probably just the sort of underlying social essentials that undergird democracy. Somebody send a million copies of Robert's rules to Iraq... I mean, I saw a roomful of otherwise apparently rational people from 20 to 70 years old motioning, seconding, and voting on things like the approval of the previous meeting's minutes.

I went to the regular (3rd Wednesday of every month) meeting of these fine folks, who function as a general neighborhood improvement and action kind of group, and oh, incidentally purchase lots of properties in the neighborhood and get them rebuilt and redeveloped and resold. Tonight there was a discussion of 2001-02 auditing to be done since over $1million was transacted through the group that year. The quorum assembled was a half dozen, with three/four spectators, two other community group reps with joint business to conduct and report, and the two cops assigned to the area who couldn't stay long since they had to answer a call.

It was like almost every single other committee or board meeting I've ever been to, with one exception: the meeting neither opened nor closed with prayer, and didn't include a Scripture reading or meditation. I laugh that this was the exception, since it tells you what kind of meetings I mostly go to. (However, we met in a classroom here, so I guess it all evens out.) The meeting even included greedy eyes trying to figure out how to rope me into the board's work.

Fight blight, preserve the good, cheerlead for the neighborhood, combine forces with the URA, gripe to the city gov't about nuisances of all sorts. Maybe it doesn't sound like politics to you, but it's the business of the polis.