All the Rage
Via The Brooklyn Paper: “Linda Setlech was so worked up over state Sen. Marty Golden’s proposal to shut down traffic six Friday nights this summer for a pedestrian mall, that she was actually shaking with rage.” Imagine getting that angry over a plan to allow pedestrians access to the street for a grand total of about 18 hours over a month and a half! You’d think it involved bulldozing homes and businesses.
Setlech also got very upset over the Ground Zero “mosque”:
This picture of Setlech appears in many stories on the May 2010 community board meeting regarding the downtown Manhattan Islamic cultural center:
One day, when my daughter comes to visit me in the floating city of New Chicago, she’ll pull up these images on her iPhone 26, show them to me, and ask why the true problems of the early 21st century barely merited the kind of passion people devoted to pedestrian plazas, cultural centers, and foreign-flavored turkey recipes. I’ll remove my CO2-filtering face mask, take a sip of Brawndo, clear my throat, and reply sadly, “I don’t know, sweetheart. I really don’t know.”
Brooklyn Spoke 
oh my god! seriously: oh my god! I will give her one thing. That is definitely the best letter to the editor about turkey I have ever read.
Thanks for putting together this post.
Because there are no elections or term limits and the press pays so little attention to them, Community Boards often become dominated with high-functioning mentally ill people. The Board meeting may be the only place where a person like Setlech can go to express her feelings and feel like she’s listened to. This is great for Setlech. But it’s really bad for the rest of us. We need Community Boards to serve their function as neighborhood-level forums for democratic politics. We don’t need Community Boards to be a rest home for the aged and mentally ill.
Seriously, term limits for community boards would go a long way in ensuring their legitimacy.
At my local meeting the other day I had the privilege of seeing a new CB member engaging in negative and hurtful venting. I don’t think you have to be on the board for a long time to be a jerk.