Sitting around talking about pumpkins doesn't make them grow any faster, especially if no one put the dadburn seeds in the ground when the idea first came up!People who have bad dogs usually have misbehaving kids so why not buy the whole town a dog-training book and save the sheriff the hassle later on?
No good town deed ever goes unpunished and all public service is compared against what a given citizen thinks someone else is getting, regardless of his or her own needs.
Irrespective of what good thing happens, there are always dozens of people who somehow take all the credit. All bad things are blamed on the current Mayor even if he lived in another state at the time.
The people who are the most opinionated usually do the least amount of actual work.
Every dog in town is bad but one's own, regardless of how many people it bites or front doors it pees on. Thus, all dog fines are a personal vendetta from that no-good Mayor and are not based on what the dog actually did - given that he/she is just a little angel - at least around the house.
People in town who don't even eat eggs will want chickens in their yard if someone else has them.
For people with junky yards, the time spent complaining about other people's yards versus cleaning up their own is about 40-to-1 - although they promise to clean up their own yard when that other no-good 'so-and-so' does - thus creating some sort of junky 'vicious cycle' of inactivity.
Far too many citizens prefer for the town to fail at something because saying "I told them so" is so much more personally satisfying than saying "that's really nice". (Heaven forbid that anyone say "hey, that's great, let me help next time!)
More often than not, the people who are visited by the sheriff the most never seem to have fertility issues - and this genetic trait extends from generation to generation - as do the sheriff visits.
There is an inverse relationship between talking to kids at the dinner table and shouting at the top of one's lungs in the front yard (shouting of any kind, except in an emergency, is a surrogate for calm, thoughtful communication - plus, everyone within ear-shot will know that the shouter is a 'hands on' individual and not a neglectful parent like all those other people).
For many, nothing the Town can ever do is right, and when the town does something right it was never soon enough or they just did it out of spite to prove that they can do something right just to make them look bad.
Citizens who don't obey traffic laws cannot be trusted to keep their word when working with the town to do things like clean up their yards, control their dogs or mind their kids - but ironically seem to make the most promises in regard to changing behavior.
No one hates town improvement more and works harder against it than the people who can't manage to keep their own houses and yards in order - because all disorder is relative, after all. The general axiom is 'No place is truly junky as long as there is someplace worse.'
And finally - few opportunities in life provide a venue where more good can be done for more people with the least amount of effort than when done in a small town government setting, even if no one notices but those doing it or people who haven't been in town for a while.
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