Has the Des Moines City Council Gone Mad with Power?
Let us replace them, all but one!
Last night the majority of the Des Moines city council voted to push forward with new rules to persecute the homeless. Citizens showed up to their meeting, which I assure you, zero living, human citizens actually want to do.
But people felt compelled to try to stop them from making Des Moines a more fearful and hostile place to live.
A few days ago, the same Monday night meeting was supposed to include a resolution to make life harder for chicken-keepers — which includes me.
Their anti-chicken project got delayed to another week. Wouldn’t it have been a sight? To have both the city’s angry chicken-keepers AND the city’s angry homeless advocates collectively clamoring against the city council’s pencil-pushing overreach?
Of course there is some overlap between people who advocate for the homeless and people who keep chickens, but there’s also two distinct groups (of humans) involved here: there are zero to no homeless chicken keepers, but there are also very few renter chicken-keepers; chicken-keepers are, as a rule, homeowners.
Homeowners are people for whom things have more or less “gone right” in this society. The homeless lie at the polar opposite extreme.
Yet the Des Moines city council… I should stop here for a second and point out that there is ONE member of the city council who has been vocally opposed to his council-mates’ proposals, has voted against them, and who honestly I feel bad for because he actually has to work with these jerks — I am speaking of Des Moines’ very own Ward III Hero Josh Mandelbaum, the environmental lawyer who very nearly became Des Moines’ first Jewish mayor, a genuine mensch who is wonderful, hardworking, and isn’t trying to make life in Des Moines harder for anyone.
Josh is great! But these other people, what the heck? They’re wielding power in the manner of a Council of Karens HOA — like a condo association given dominion over an entire city and evincing the very worst of the petit bourgeois power-madness that sees anything that’s not “curb appeal” as a direct attack on their “property values.”
Because, to these cornholes (pardon my Midwest), chickens and homeless people aren’t that different, they’re both just “eyesores” that upset real estate agents — yes, real estate agents are their true constituency, not the rest of us, not citizens in general.
I’ll make it clear as a chicken-keeper that NOT fining and arresting homeless people for being homeless is a HIGHER priority to me than even my very own backyard flock.
But both issues demonstrate the same problem with the Des Moines city council: they are committed to making life harder for everyone who doesn’t contribute to their glossy brochure market-based conception of what our city should look like.
At the meeting last night, it was pointed out that the proposed changes would cost the city money — and that the same money could be more effectively spent on rent support and making shelters more desirable, less frightening places to stay. But the majority of the city council (not Josh) voted to push forward these changes anyway.
The majority of the Des Moines city council has gone mad with power, and they need to be replaced. They need to be replaced by people who will make decisions based on what’s best for citizens in general, including the outliers, including the people for whom life has not gone well, and including the people who want to grow (or raise the hens that lay) their own food. People in this city, like everywhere, just want to live their many and various unique lives. One member of the city council GETS that. The rest of them need to GO.
Pinched, cramped, uninteresting, unholy people.
Go Josh!! ❤️