12/30: Letters to the Editor

December 30, 2009

People hold power, not muckety-mucks

Though I cherish Scott Maxwell's column, I gag each year when he unrolls his muckety-mucks list ("Influential local leaders affect lives," Orlando Sentinel, Sunday).

America — those revolutions of yore — was about shedding oligarchic yokes, which squelched the people's voice toward an unhealthy "emolument or aggrandizement of particular individuals" ( Thomas Paine, Rights of Man).

What ailed old Europe was the sheeplike submission by the peons to an unquestioned sovereign who taxed but allowed them no power.

Just how scarily akin to those old-world coteries Central Florida's elite circles have become may not be obvious until one bucks development in the rural enclave or sees major boondoggles waved through without public vote.

Things that alter the face and character of an entire area merit serious consent from local taxpayers, but rarely get it, thanks to sundry "plugged-in" tentacles with a stranglehold on decision outcomes, to which poobah lists pay homage.

Bigwig fawning ranked with our founder patriots about as high as Edmund Burke's apologia for hereditary monarchies. The good of society rests not on sycophancy or power-worship, but on the grounded, humble actions by everymen, who weave the social fabric.

Thomas Jefferson warned that "when we get piled on one another in large cities as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe," and he was right. To James Madison he wrote:

"They [the people] are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty. After all, it is my principle that the will of the majority should prevail" — i.e., not the will of "Central Florida's Most Powerful."

Rebecca Eagan Winter Park