More on the Mayor

Two of my recent posts have speculated on what might happen if we vote to oust Mayor Mark Funkhouser (Mayor Bill Skaggs?, Recall the Funk). The unstated point of these posts is that there are two issues involved in the Mayoral recall:

• Whether or not the Mayor should be removed.
• Who will replace him.

Strong emotions in regard to the first issue is not an excuse for neglecting the second.

Yet every time I try to point this out, someone reacts as if I'm defending the current Mayor. It's a puzzle. Is there some deficiency in the human prefrontal cortex that causes strong emotions to overwhelm rational thinking about the future? (For those of you not up on the latest brain science, the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain responsible for looking before we leap. In aswer to my rhetorical question, the deficiency in our brains is that the prefrontal cortex, as one of the newest parts of our brain, is often overwhelmed by the older animal parts.)