Friends, Gilroyans, countrymen, lend me your eyes. I come to
bury Gilroy First!, not praise it. The evil men do lives after
them. The good is oft interred with their bones.
Friends, Gilroyans, countrymen, lend me your eyes. I come to bury Gilroy First!, not praise it. The evil men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Gilroy First! The noble Dr. Peter Arellano hath told you that Gilroy First! is non-partisan. If so, ’twere a glorious virtue, and gloriously hath Gilroy First! profited thereby.
Last night, I re-wrote Mark Anthony’s whole soliloquy, featuring Gilroy First! as Caesar, Peter Arellano as Brutus, and Paul Correa as Cassius. It was fun, but the end result was abstruse, bewildering, and overly oratorical. I am a plain blunt woman that love my city, so I abandon the Bard to speak plainly, bluntly.
If you’ve been following the story at all, you know that Gilroy First!, though styling itself a non-partisan group, has admitted to certain ties with the union mega-lobby. Specifically, Gilroy First! met at first in a union hall, used a union phone line as its own, and had a Web site designed by a union communications specialist. Looking at the timing, it seems probable that the issue over which it first came together was, oh horrors! that Wal-mart was intending to open a non-union Super Wal-mart.
What I haven’t seen in print yet is the datum that a union attorney filed for Gilroy First!’s FPPC number. That is their Fair Political Practices Commission number. Ironic, is it not?
Moreover, though Gilroy First! states that it does not endorse candidates, two of their members are running for city council (a third has since dropped out of the race) and one for mayor. All of their candidates, the Arellanos and Paul Correa, are endorsed by the unions and by the South County Democrats. But, Dr. Arellano says they are non-partisan …
Dr. Arellano chastised critics who found this sort of collaboration indicative of partisanship. He says Gilroy First! came together as a wide cross section of union leaders, laborers, and environmentalists, that it’s all circumstantial, that Gilroy First! is a non-partisan issues group. And sure, he is an honorable man …
I think that if that is the case, the group should call itself: “Unions First! Laborers Second! Environmentalists Third! Gilroy Last!” Granted, it is a mite unwieldy. But accurate.
I can understand how a group of unionists and associated Democrats and Greens would decide that they wanted to put together a group to get more people registered, and to pack the city council with their chosen candidates, so that the next time a Super Wal-mart issue came up they could deny permits to the business on some pretext or another.
I can also understand how a group of like-minded people could get together and decide in all honesty that they needed an issues and registration group, and just sort of not notice that every single member was partisan to the core.
I don’t know which of these two cases applies here, or what case between the two extremes. But I can’t for the life of me see why they still feel they need to insist, even in Rose Barry’s letter to the editor published Sept. 17, that they are non-partisan. Is there anything wrong with being endorsed by unions and Democrats?
The worst part is that the antics of Unions First! (and sure, they are honorable men, all of them honorable men) have forced city council to ban further forums from the council chambers. Gilroy needs a non-partisan forum, where the voters can go and see and hear honest debate and honest answers to honest questions.
Instead leftists will go to the Unions First! forum to agree with their guys, and rightists will go to some forum put on by some right-wing group to agree with theirs. The mantle of non-partisanship has been stabbed in many places. This was the most unkindest cut of all.
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To Denise Jungling and Harlan Breneman: You’re right; I’m sorry. I was unkind to the northwest quad. There are many real Gilroyans in the northwest quad: people who read The Dispatch, pay attention to local issues, shop downtown, work at the Garlic Festival, or coach soccer teams. I over-reacted to some criticism of my town, and lashed back at a stereotype. I apologize.
