4/26/25
Before we get back into who said what, and the specifics of park plans and meeting agendas, I feel it’s important to say this: The people who serve our town as Mayor, Town Council members, and all the different advisory boards (like 4B for economic development in the town) take so much time out of their lives to serve us all. These people have volunteered for this, and they make our town so much better because of it.
I have tried to make it clear that I don’t hold animosity to either candidate for mayor. Neighbors of both Saji and Paul have a lot of good things to say about each of them, and I really do think we are lucky to have two competent, experienced leaders volunteering for the job. I’m not that worried about the election, I have my own preference but both of them understand the changes we need to navigate as the town grows and as the Dallas metro area grows around us.
The fact that the Cash campaign was behind the cricket field text message has angered a lot of people. I hope that this feeling stays directed at the tactics, and not the people. In a couple weeks, Paul Cash will either be our new Mayor, or he will be just our neighbor in Sunnyvale, who still wants to contribute to our town and deserves to enjoy our friendship and fellowship. Same goes for Saji George. Please let’s all refrain from personal attacks on either candidate, even if you don’t like their record. They are still our neighbors and our community.
On that last point, there is one more issue related to how I’d like to run this website. The Greek philosopher Socrates famously is said to have given three filters to test the information we share:
- Is it true?
- Is it good?
- Is it useful?
Through that lens, the immediate reason for writing about CricketGate was because the campaign message was not true, and it was not good, even if it might be useful to someone trying to win an election. I felt that by ignoring my yard chores and instead writing about what really has happened with our parks we could apply those filters retroactively, and help nudge our local political leaders to follow these filters the next time we have a big election.
Now, in the past 12 hours, a significant number of Sunnyvalers have contacted me about a different news story involving something else entirely. They have sent me links and PDF files, and urged me to post about this story. I have responded to a few individually, telling them it appears to be a private disagreement and I’m not comfortable writing about it. But I will briefly restate my reasons for doing so here in the context of the three filters:
- Is it true? Unproven. If I read correctly, we probably won’t know for at least a month.
- Is it good? Nope.
- Is it useful? I don’t see how. The story as it’s been presented to me doesn’t seem to suggest any actions our town should take differently. No one has explained to me how this private disagreement presents a danger to anyone.
If there are smear campaigns, I will gladly try and counter them even though they’re not “good”, but I want to be very careful about other stories that don’t pass all three filters. There are so many other topics we can focus on that are grounded in truth, goodness, and utility, and I think we’ll all feel better reading about those instead.
That’s all for now. Next on my list is covering the 2024 park planning meetings, so goodnight!
