Consent of the Governed

Back to the Eureka Township Water Management Plan, which has already been approved by the Vermillion River Watershed Joint Powers Organization (VRWJPO) but has not yet been approved by the township. This is being advertised as a take-it-or-leave-it deal, and if we don't take it, it will be imposed on us anyway by governmental entities with more power than the township, and the township won't have any control over it. 
As though obediently adopting a plan which we are told we have no power to change can be described as local control in the first place.

Apparently, unquestioning obedience to the authority of government is what is expected of our township officials. 

I received a CD with a copy of the plan on it, and it is inscribed as "Water Plan - Final 2008 LWMP"

I wrote about this before, describing the public hearing that was held without anyone being present who could answer questions about the plan.

For anyone who is interested, there will be a joint meeting of the board and the planning commission tonight at 7:00 p.m. at the town hall, where supervisor Carrie Jennings will explain the plan to our elected and appointed officials.

With that as a backdrop, I thought it was serendipitous that this morning I came across this posting entitled, "Would you have been a Nazi?"  It describes the obedience experiments by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, and replicated more recently by Santa Clara University psychologist Jerry Burger, which concluded that the average rate of obedience to authority is about 65%, even when the experiment's subjects were instructed to inflict severe and life threatening injury on others.

These appalling results should serve as a very sobering message, and leave us with a commitment to the basic freedoms we usually take for granted.  Consider the meaning of these words:
 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

More later on the Water Management Plan.