This is what happens when you go to sleep in a race. All the other participants pass you, and when you wake up you have to do double-time to catch up.

The unfortunate thing is that this rush to municipalization and annexation is not over. In less than 10 years we will have had about six, if Brookhaven passes, and there will be more. It is a solution to the nonsense that is DeKalb County government.

DeKalb County got slack and lazy. Its politicians became presumptuous. It had too many political and financial scandals.

It took no opportunity to define a strategy that could improve the lives of all its people. It became a study in political mortuary science – a collective of caretaker hacks, and then 2008 came and took all the emperor’s clothes, i.e., stripped it bare.

It does not take a rocket chemist to figure out that people who feel good about themselves care about what kind of government they have; care how they feel and about what they see when they drive, walk or run around the place they live; care about the investment in growth for their political subdivision.

As long as DeKalb County continues to be second-rate in its capacity to show all its citizens the way to prosperity, and not a place of high performance leadership and initiatives, more enclaves are going to peel off to do their own thing.

Elrado Ramsay lives in Decatur.