HUYA Gahanna

     In response to last Saturday's post my friend Marianne commented:  
     HUYA could be awarded closer to home. Too few Gahanna folks voted and of those, 1/3 voted for a 26 year old who has some pretty bigoted tweets. If his candidacy continues, our city will get a HUYA.
    Alas, my friend speaks true, and she is referring to the fact that for the past four days our town of Gahanna, Ohio, has been all a-twitter over a certain tweeter whose indiscreet tweets have thrown a ripe anchovy into the gears of Gahanna's upcoming mayoral election.
    Anyway, last Tuesday was Gahanna's mayoral primary election.  Of the five candidates who ran, the top two vote-getters  are now scheduled to run against each other in November.

The candidate who came in fist place with the most votes is a 26-year-old fellow named Joseph Gergley.

    ...who ran on the platform that he would fight the failed liberal policies of the past. 
    Now, for the past 30 years that I've lived in Gahanna all our mayors have been moderate to conservative Republicans, but never mind.
        Joseph Gergley promised to shake up the status quo, and sure enough, by the day after the election there was a whole lotta shaking going on when some anonymous source sent The Columbus Dispatch 1,100 tweets gleaned from Gergley’s campaign twitter account.  The source of the problem this created for Gergley was two-pronged:
    1.  Instead of creating a new account for his campaign Gergley apparently just stacked his campaign account  on top of his personal account, and
    2.  There were some right-down nasty tweets posted by Joseph Gergley lurking deep in his personal account.
    Here are some of  Gergley’s tweets shared by The Dispatch and a local news station:
    From 2014:  "The Easton Walmart might as well be Ferguson.” ( N.B.: Easton Walmart is the local Walmart for Gahanna folks).   
    From 2012:  "Why are Sesame Street characters all of a sudden speaking ebonics?  Did I miss something?"
    From 2012:  "The hungover girls on college campuses who go to Planned Parenthood are really just getting their breasts examined. Thank God for Komen!"
    From 2012:  "If you support Obamacare, I urge you to go to a DMV or a courthouse and remember...These people will be in charge of your health care."
    From 2011:  "Having drag queens play softball in a family park during pride weekend isn't the best way to get people to stop saying, 'that's so gay'."
    From 2011:  "If I saw Kurt from ‘Glee’ in real life, I would bully him and tell him ‘It gets worse...’" (The character of Kurt is gay).
    So in the course of his tweet-fest mayoral candidate Gergley managed to offend blacks, women, gays, transgender people, people who work for the courts or the DMV, people who’ve been victims of bullying, me, and anyone I’d care to sit down and have lunch with.
    Quite an accomplishment for a 26-year-old on his maiden voyage into the roiling sea of politics.
    Of course, as was to be expected, Mr. Gergley  excused his offensive tweets as flights of youthful indiscretion back when he was a green lad of five and twenty.
    He also stated in his defense that the tweets were taken out of context (what context, one wonders) and were "completely irrelevant to the dire issues facing Gahanna".
    Ah yes, the dire issues facing Gahanna.
    Last Thursday evening I went for walk around downtown Gahanna to seek out these dire issues.
    Alas, this was all I could see:

    Then the next morning Tom and I took another foray into the heart of Gahanna in search of the dire issues,

...but got side-tracked by the wonderful breakfasts we had at the Gahanna Creekside Café.

    I do know, though, from perusing Joseph Gergley’s campaign Facebook page that he is in fact direly concerned about the construction of apartment buildings presently going on in our town, 

    I suppose he's talking about the likes of  these luxury apartment homes (as described by the sign posted on the construction site) going up on Hamilton Road.

    Gergley promises that if elected mayor he will fight to stop the construction of apartment buildings in Gahanna.
    To which I respond, good luck with that, youngster.
     And that's what's going on in Gahanna as we speak, except for one more thing.
    My friend's dire warning for Gahanna  has already come home to roost:
    Texas, hand it over: Gahanna, Ohio has just been named this week's recipient of the National HUYA Award.   (See post from 5/9/15).
    Now, Gahanna did not win the HUYA Award because one-third of the few people who cared enough to vote  in our mayoral primary cast their votes for The Indiscreet Tweeter.  None of us knew about those tweets at the time (but the internet is finally good for something, right?), and even if we had known, well, it's everybody's right to vote for whomever they wish.
    No, Gahanna has earned the HUYA Award because, of the 24, 824 people in our town over the age of 18, only 3,746 of us bothered to vote.  So only one-eighth of our fair city's population gives a tinker's hoot who our mayor is.
    Gahanna, that's HUYA lame.
    But we all get another chance in November to choose  our mayor.  So people, VOTE!
    And if this time Joseph Gergley gets the most votes, we'll, he'll be the mayor we deserve.