After a monthlong break, the Pomona City Council is back in action today, and you can practically smell the excitement. I think that’s what the smell is.

Should be another big night for The Issue That Would Not Die, i.e., police traffic checkpoints, with protesters and counter-protesters and, for all I know, counter-counter-protesters showing up. Even though the checkpoint discussion is actually scheduled for 5 p.m., I expect a full house, several TV cameras inside and a lot of chanting outside.

Having sat through several of these unwinnable arguments about race and immigration, suddenly the last lines of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” come to mind:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.