Inside UDJ by Editor K.C. Meadows

While I understand why people think it's effective, I wish people protesting or encouraging actions by public bodies would stop bringing small children into council and board chambers to plead cases for the adults around them. At Tuesday's hearing on the proposed batch asphalt plant near Willits, three small children were sent to the podium to "testify" to their opposition to the plant. Please. These three children are no doubt very bright and I am sure they are "concerned," but they have no business addressing the merits one way or another of an asphalt batch plant they could not possibly really understand or care about except for what their elders tell them: that it will pollute the air they breathe and be bad for the environment. A couple of years ago, the local anti smoking folks from the health department and the American Cancer Society looking for, I seem to recall, a cigarette sales ordinance, ushered a group of small children before the board of supervisors to tell them how their mommies or daddies died of cancer or heart disease from smoking. Those children could barely remember their scripts and had to be promtped from behind to say things like "My Daddy died from smoking and I miss him."
Unless the children are on hand to ask for more ice cream trucks at Todd Grove Park or to testify as to why they like or dislike the tacos in the school lunchroom, I think they should be kept out of political board rooms. It only makes the adults look that much more desperate.