Hopefully she has learned from the experience.

In general my response is that I agree with those that said that this is a pretty typical thing. You can’t hold the general public, especially those afraid of public speaking, to be able to express themselves as well as more seasoned and talented public speakers. She made her opinions heard, and like someone said above… if you’ve attended any public hearings she isn’t anywhere near the worst you might see.

Back to my original point though… after you’ve read your daily dose of Donklephant goodness, get out there and do some good in the world!

You’re no doubt right. Which explains why I spend as little time as possible around people.

She’s also probably a lot more coherent in one on one discussion. Many many people freeze up and/or ramble when they get up to the mike in public and face the bench, especially if they haven’t got a cheat sheet in front of them. Public speaking is a skill that few are good at, and speaking in public is THE most widespread phobia there is. For most people, standing up there at the mike in an open meeting and speaking their piece is a frightening experience, and takes courage.

Personally, I’d trade a dozen smarty pants types (like most people who blog and/or comment on blogs) for one person willing to put real volunteer time on issues they care about.

Hear hear! But I’d set the ratio higher. A good volunteer is priceless.

I grant she’s more coherent than your average Fox host, but isn’t that an awfully low standard to set?

Having attended thousands of community planning board, school board, city council and other public meetings and hearings in my lifetime, I’ve listened patiently to countless far less articulate and often gratuitously angry people say every conceivable ridiculous and/or outrageous thing. As for going on too long, this gal is the soul of brevity compared to many enchanted by the sound of their own voices.

Incoherent? No, she’s certainly into speaking as a stream of consciousness, which is true of most people not specially schooled in rhetoric, but she makes her points. I think we’d understand them better if the video were not edited (and we knew the subject of the hearing) but from what’s there, she’s supporting some sort farmer’s market coop approach to distributing ostensibly good (“organic”) and likely locally grown “stuff.”

This is what real democracy is all about, folks. Citizens get to petition their government and all that. We usually don’t say that only the more articulate citizens who can make a cogent oral argument can petition their government.

Anyway, I’d rather listen to her any day than to self-important but seriously uninformed cable TV hosts.

I thought the video was sad. I think this woman has clinical psychological problems, perhaps in addition to a cognitive disability of some sort. She’s not completely disfunctional, since she knows when and where the council meeting is taking place and managed to get there so she could speak. But it seems her grasp of very basic issues is tenuous, as is her ability to gague how others would perceive her. I think she needs help, and I don’t know that she’s getting it.

You call her a nutbag. Nice. Which is the bigger nutbag? Is it the girl who had the balls to speak out in public, or you who sit at your keyboards, chuckling at your own stupid one-liners? Here’s a hint for you; there’s no one near to laugh with you. What are you laughing at? If a camera were on you, what would YOU look like? I think you’d look pretty silly.

Michael Reynolds, you are proof that, indeed, you can stay in first grade forever. Spelling and speaking AND SUCH, are no measure of lessons learned. I got past the gang-up-on-the-weaker attitude in second grade. Good luck to you in your studies. I hope you make it that far. Second Grade rocks!

This is like giving everyone a trophy. Up to about age 10, okay, but at some point you have to start holding people accountable for what they do, and for what they say.

Let me go to a Simpsons example. The episode where Ned Flanders’ house is destroyed and the townsfolk, led by Homer, rebuild the house. Of course they do a lousy job and the result is uninhabitable. Good intentions resulting in a waste of time and no good for the intended beneficiary.

We can’t stay in 1st Grade forever.

It’s like watching the first few weeks of American Idol. Okay, sure, it’s nice that these people have the guts to get up and try, but they’ve obviously never taken a lesson or even listened to their own voice. Channel that passion into EDUCATING yourself a little bit, THEN get back to us.

The problem is that people get all passionate about something, root down into a viewpoint without ever having done any research and then stay there because they’d rather plod along in a wrong view than concede being wrong.

Allow me to play devil’s advocate to your devil’s advocate.

Is there a way to respectfully acknowledge her chutzpah and politely ask her to sit down after 2 minutes?

She seems to have spoken for quite some time. Despite her good intentions she doesn’t appear to have said anything coherent. How much time did she waste?

</devils advocate>

Who knows, though? Maybe she broke up the monotony of a tedious day and brought everybody back to the present, as it were?

There are elements of this video and subsequent dialogue reminiscent of this.

We weren’t there. We aren’t seeing an entire conversation or even an entire half of a conversation. We’re seeing what we’re presented. Do we have to buy it?