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ACCORDING TO LIZ - President’s Day evolved from holidays celebrating Washington’s birthday (February 22) and Lincoln’s birthday (February 12) to honor two of the greatest American Presidents.
A bill merging and moving them to the closest Monday as Washington’s Birthday went into effect in 1971, however, the new holiday became commonly known as Presidents Day with retailers using images of both historic presidents to promote sales on the long weekend.
Although it is commonly regarded as an opportunity to honor all those who served as President of the United States… does Nixon deserve such an honor? Was Trump ever presidential?
The initial use of the word “presidential” was in 1857 to refer to a political system in which the head of government is constitutionally independent of the legislature, unlike the UK, Canada and Australia where the government is captained by the head of the majority party.
It quickly came to mean anything befitting a president including motorcades, and the qualities expected of a world leader – statesmanship, diplomacy, gravitas. Not the tweeting, burger-chomping image projected by the previous and unlamented inhabitant of the White House.
Do Presidents have real power or do they just get to act the part?
If we let the holiday stand as one for as a multitude of unspecified presidents, good and bad, should it also stand for presidents of companies, both good and bad?
Should we extend this day to include the Presidents of our Neighborhood Councils? Unquestionably, some bring true statesmanship, diplomacy, and gravitas to their often thankless jobs, more than can be said about certain Councilmembers.
It’s stressful. On top of the rules and strictures governing all City residents, there are more obligations, more regulation. And not much real power.
Even the most experienced are caught between factions on their boards, between their boards and DONE, between members of their community who think that they have power and the City government who know they don’t.
At best their boards’ roles are advisory, and the number of hoops they have to jump through to accomplish anything keeps compounding. Plus the current mandate to return to in-person meetings as required by the grossly outdated Brown Act – hello Sacramento, are you living in 2023 or 1953? – has generated myriads of complications.
Then there are the conflicting dictates of the City Charter and ordinances, the City Attorney and various other supervisory bodies – are board members elected officials? Are they employees? What about committee members? Do they answer to their stakeholders or to the City?
Often, on top of working full time to support their own households, it is on the Presidents’ shoulders to chart a course between these multiple iterations of Scylla and Charybdis.
A lot of board members and stakeholders attending meetings are very passionate – that’s why they got involved. But they habitually butt heads with similarly passionate people who hold different viewpoints.
Volunteers keep the cost of maintaining a citywide system for and by ordinary Angelenos low, but the downside is that it’s hard to get rid of the flotsam and harder yet to control the jetsam without a paycheck to hold over their heads.
And then there are all the pitfalls of the me-too generation that can mire headway in a morass of pronoun acknowledgments and perceived gender aggression.
What happens when purported anti-bias training is framed in ways to accuse people taking it that they are guilty from the start? Where is democracy when a bureaucrat can remove an elected official for breaking rules they feel are irrelevant and unimportant?
When the bureaucracy maintains a double standard by not removing staff members who have been reported for abuse, allowing them to continue to intimidate and harass?
And takes away the right to control how money allocated to their community is spent. There is a huge difference in donating a few hundred dollars to help children, and diverting more than 10% of their money to an organization that is not a City entity for an event occurring outside its jurisdiction in the name of outreach to a community that it does not serve, especially when a significant number of their actual stakeholders strongly oppose the organization the money would benefit.
And mandates that all board members attend in person an event put on by a County entity, some of whose employees have targeted people of color in the past. As an older white woman, I don’t think I would be comfortable, so by what right does a City employee demand, on pain of expulsion, that all board members attend?
Neighborhood Council Presidents put in many extra hours in the execution of their duties, preparing for and running meetings, ensuring paperwork is completed and distributed, and many make even more time to network with their peers to address problems and brainstorm solutions to the myriad of thorny challenges that flow into their inboxes.
And yet some of our elected officials can’t take the time to learn the basics of the Neighborhood Council system.
That it was created as the ultimate symbol of grassroots democracy, established to advise the City Council of concerns in all areas of Los Angeles in direct response to the corruption and inadequate City governance of the last few decades of the previous century.
That the Neighborhood Councils exist to tell the City Council what we the people want, not to divert activists from criticizing them, not to rubber stamp City department directives.
No City Councilmember has the right to try and change election procedures and certainly not at the behest of people from outside the City trying to game the system.
If they don’t watch out, there will be more and more individuals, griping because they lost elections streaming to Councilmembers’ offices to complain instead of trying to learn how to attract support in the future.
It will also put more pressure on the City Council to give the Neighborhood Councils, led by their Presidents, some actual power to bring the demands of the people of Los Angeles into City Hall.
And, if last year’s elections proved anything, it’s that the people of Los Angeles are getting fed up and that they are not going to take it anymore.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
