Jeff Whitten, local columnist

If you ever want to be lectured, run for local office. Chances are you’ll find out about your shortcomings real quick.

Which is a roundabout way of saying you couldn’t pay me enough money to be on the school board or county commission or a city council – assuming, of course, I could get elected, which I probably couldn’t, so why bother.

Besides, I don’t like pandering to people. If it was up to me they would’ve shut the gates on the developers 25-30 years ago and sent ‘em all down to Florida, where nobody cares because 99 percent of the folks there are yankees anyway. Wait, that’s not just Florida anymore.

But I liked things as they were 30 years ago, not what they’ve turned into. It’s getting so you can’t go anywhere and get there on time. Heck, I live about 18 miles from downtown Savannah and at the rate it’s going my wife is going to have to start leaving the night before to get there.

What’s more, people nowadays are far more know-it-all than they used to be. Thanks to Google just about everybody’s an expert on just about everything you can imagine. Lest you doubt, attend a meeting of the local government. If there’s a hot button issue going on, and all of a sudden there seems to be no end to them, then there will be no shortage of volunteer experts showing up to share their brainpower on the issue at hand.

I bet if Richmond Hill City Council suddenly decided to colonize Uranus there will be 15 people who worked on Uranus and know all about it showing up and signing up to speak out about the idea in one direction or another.

“You can’t colonize Uranus, it’ll mess up the rocket traffic,” one will say, for five minutes while referencing charts and graphs.

“It’ll squish the fish,” another will say, taking up his five minutes, because, as we all know by now, Uranus has a thriving fish population. They look like eels, but technically they’re fish.

“And our tax dollars will have to pay for it,” someone who doesn’t even pay property taxes will say, taking up his five minutes, because, well, nobody knows how property taxes work anyway. Some of us just pay ‘em. And pay them, and pay them until we’re dead or they take our house because we can’t afford to pay them anymore.

This is how Democracy is supposed to work, of course, though to be honest I kind of miss the old days when, apart from government employees and greedy developers trying to get one over, about four people showed up to government meetings on a good day and all of them were old retired farts who didn’t like anything about anything, or how the local reporter covered stuff.

“If your butt was a story you couldn’t find it with both hands,” one would say, and sort of chortle. I used to think that sort of fun interaction just happened to me, because I frequently need both hands to find my backside. Then I found out that not only can many old farts run local government better than the people elected to do so, but they’re also natural born high school football coaches and journalists. If you ever don’t want to be popular with old farts, get into community journalism or lose football games.

In the meantime, nowadays there are often standing room only crowds at local government meetings and many in the audience aren’t old farts, they’re young ones. This may be in part due to social media, which tends to get middle- aged teenagers stirred up in all sorts of ways that aren’t good for them.

It’s also apparently made local influencers out of a couple of folks, who’ve actually alluded in meetings to their importance in the community, as if to put officials on notice they’re not messing with some regular citizen but one who has the backing of hordes of Facebook friends. Beware. Big deal here.

And here, an aside. You’re not a citizen of a city or a county or a state. You’re a resident of a state. You’re a citizen of a country. I don’t know why, but every time I hear someone say they’re a citizen of (fill in the city here) I remember my journalism school copy editing class. It might be the only thing I remember from that class, come to think of it.

Anyhow, all this public participation has turned what used to be short, bitesized meetings into marathons of people standing up to say the same thing over and over and over – mostly they want local government to quit letting developers stick it to them (fat chance of that).

Sometimes, though, they get mad about other things, like taxes.

Once, someone got so worked up about a proposed millage rate increase he went to a school board hearing and spent his five minutes fussing that former President Barack Obama, who was still in office at the time, was raising his property taxes. I bet that guy voted for Trump more than twice. Maybe six or seven times, just in case.

And once, at a city council meeting in another county, one old long-winded blowhard got up at the end of the meeting and went on for more than 30 minutes about a neighbor who was infringing on his part of the alley between their houses by parking on it, among other no-nos. I almost never got home that night, and at the time I lived about a block from City Hall.

And once, not nearly as long ago, after several folks got up at a candidates forum to complain about the school board and the school system it governed, I weeks later bumped into one of the school board members who said, off record, that most of those doing the worst of the complaining hadn’t lived in the community a year if that long.

“I don’t care about myself,” he said, and I’m paraphrasing in quotes. “They can attack me. But they’re attacking the teachers and principals and superintendents and all the hard work so many people have put in to make this system what it is, which is one of the reasons so many people move here in the first place. We have good schools, and we have good leadership. We’re not perfect, but we work hard to try to be as good as we can and all they can do is tear things down without knowing anything about what went before.”

Oh, and he was mad at me for quoting some of the vitriol spouted at the forum, but not that mad.

Lest it appear I am picking on those who show up at public meetings to have their say, nope. Far from it.

While some of the newer breed of participants in the public participation arena can come across as downright condescending – and maybe it is nerves – and others seem to be playing to the crowd or using it as a platform to run for office at the state or federal level, where it’s safer, most are no doubt sincere folks who care deeply about their community or at least what happens in their backyard.

But the government isn’t a business. A business makes money by giving you what you want – well, they don’t give it to you, they want money for it, usually.

Government can’t always give you what you want even though you pay for it – or ought to pay for it, though many do everything in their power to avoid doing so -- and those in office who promise to be all things to all people aren’t doing anybody any good. And just because you or I want something to happen doesn’t mean it ought to happen.

That shouldn’t stop us from asking, or demanding better from those we elect to office, but the government, like any one of us, needs to be able to say no. Which isn’t where I’m going with this column but just a thought I wanted to get squeezed in.

Where I was going was that while I might empathize with some of those in office who get scolded and lectured and talked down to at meetings or on social media, where the keyboard warriors run amok, I’m not sorry for them. Even though they’re outnumbered by the thousands, social media is now a 24/7 nuisance or worse, they signed up for it. In fact, I tend to recall one or two of them did the same thing to an incumbent or two before they got elected.

So there. Go public participation. Even if it’s sometimes painful to watch, or sit through, or put up with. It’s how it is supposed to work, and Congress should take note.

And if you ever want to be told what you should have done or ought to do or how dumb you are, run for local office, not state or federal, where you get to hide out in Atlanta or Washington D.C.

Just bring a thick skin.

A former editor, Whitten is an occasional columnist for the News.