About 13 months ago, we wrote on this page about the ridiculous waste of time by Burlington’s city council entertaining proponents of a supposed United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons who wanted to pontificate on their desire for world peace and the elimination of any threat of nuclear war.
Change the date and venue, now to Mebane’s city council in April 2023; the advocates are, we’re sure, just as devout and sincere, but just as starry-eyed and unrealistic about the value of some meaningless municipal resolution.
We’re just sure Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping are breathlessly awaiting a decision by Mebane’s city council weighing in on whether the United States should unilaterally disarm in the face of nuclear capabilities by other world powers.
Are we really to believe that China and Russia, for instance, which possess nuclear weapons, are actually going to disarm? Much less that they are going to do so as a result of a United Nations pontification on the subject? Or one from Mebane’s city council?
This week’s focus in Mebane on nuclear weapons is apparently the brainchild of liberal city councilman Sean Ewing (both speakers at this week’s city council meeting credited him with pushing such a resolution behind the scenes).
We’ve known Ewing was liberal (he also hasn’t given up his partisan position as a vice chairman of the county’s Democratic Party while serving in an ostensibly non-partisan Mebane council seat), but we hadn’t thought of him as simply a loony liberal, with half-cocked national or even international rhetoric.
Just as we said a year ago, such a resolution is not appropriate, neither as a substantive matter, nor as a legitimate agenda item, for Mebane’s city council – any more than it was for Burlington’s city council last year.
As in Burlington, Mebane’s council members need to be dealing with basic, essential city services. Those, alone, should take care of filling most of the time at city council meetings.
Also, as we’ve noted before, it there’s anything that should make one take a second, critical look at any resolution on any topic, it is the prefatory phrase “United Nations.”
Countless hours are wasted at the United Nations in New York City with endless debates about meaningless resolutions, most of which aren’t going to make one iota of difference in any person’s, much less any nation’s, existence. And they’re certainly not going to lead to world peace.
We can only imagine the plethora of issues on all manner of other national and international issues that the Mebane city council will be asked to weigh in on if Mebane’s council is gullible enough to entertain actually taking this one seriously or voting on it.
And, just by the way, this week’s city council meeting was already filled with other, equally silly and nonsensical proclamations – on the virtue of municipal clerks (Mebane has had a great one), small businesses, public works departments, or even (believe it or not), the value and beauty of the Monarch Butterfly.
We cannot think of a faster way for Mebane’s city council to relegate itself into being a meaningless public body, and a laughingstock to its citizens and beyond, than to keep up this pace with vapid decrees, proclamations, resolutions, or other lectures, statements or the like about topics far afield from what’s actually happening, or important, within its municipal limits.
Read similar editorial page views from 2022 when Burlington’s city council was being lobbied to adopt the same type of resolution endorsing the U.N. Treaty: https://alamancenews.com/consideration-of-nuclear-nonproliferation-treaty-what-a-colossal-waste-of-time-misplaced-energy/
