While you are enjoying trips to the Farmers’ Market, figuring out which evenings which pool is open and how late, and in firm denial that your children will have homework assignments in five weeks, there are political machinations underway in Oak Park. You don’t have to pay attention yet. The elections aren’t until next spring, after all.

But forces are at work to form slates, stitch together alliances, etc. Beyond hearing that buzz begin to build and listening as partisans try to pin a political tail on what was just plain non-partisan daffiness on the Lane Bryant hullabaloo, the next election is brought to mind by the death last week of a former village trustee.

Rupert Wenzel was 91 when he passed. A good life for a good, good man. He was on that courageous village board of the 1960s which straddled the end of quiet, white, conservative Oak Park and the agonizing birth of a progressive town determined to find a path between Cicero’s hateful racism and the West Side’s rolling over and re-segregating in the face of near hysterical white flight.

Unless you lived through those days it is not possible to know the fear, the panic and the utter unlikelihood of Oak Park becoming a national model of how racial integration might work.

It did become that model because of the inspired leadership of a handful of people like Rupe Wenzel. And now that generation of leaders is about gone. Their deaths are inevitable but the passing of a style of leadership isn’t. And thinking about that style, the commonalities which many, certainly not all, of our leaders shared in the late 1960s and 1970s, could be instructive as candidates are recruited for April 2007.

I’ve come ‘round to the idea that the political philosophies of most every candidate in Oak Park are in a narrow range. Liberal, good government, tolerant. They believe government has a role to play in solving local problems. The greatest range of conflict among candidates, and it isn’t really much, is over the balance between development (of which there was none in the early 1970s) and preservation (of which there was none in the early 1970s).

So we have no political counter movement that wants to turn the town away from welcoming gays, fostering integration, or getting greener. There is no Oak Park Revolution in the offing.

Instead there is the matter and manner of how we get things done, how we talk to each other, respect each other. And here is where we are falling down. We are too mean and too quick to get mean. We are accusatory not inquiring. We look to score points not to narrow disagreements.

Why, board after board, is our local governance like this? Petty ego gratification is my conclusion. Had a bright person recently tell me we are the victims of generational change. That view would say that the people whose local service I admire from 20 and 30 years back were of an era when public service was the culmination of well-lived lives. The leaders had succeeded in raising families, had succeeded in their professions. They didn’t need to be elected to the Oak Park village board to make them complete. They were already whole people.

Rupert Wenzel was whole. His ego wasn’t on the line, though death threats may have put his life on the line when he voted for Oak Park’s first-in-the-nation Fair Housing Ordinance.

Let’s agree, I’m making sweeping generalizations. Every board has had strong people and weak links. But I’m right in the overview. And as the selection process begins, each local party ought look for wholly-formed individuals. Intact egos. They’re hard to find, tough to convince to run for office. We only need three.