There is a specific time here in the Northeast that slinks in while most of the ski resorts are still in full swing, not yet ready to give up on the tourists that we welcome to imbibe on the intoxication that is our freshly fallen snow and our adorable tourist destinations. It is invisible to the outsider. However, you may notice some markers of it. It is usually the season that predates mud season and sugaring season, yes, real seasons here in Vermont.
You may notice small signs with names posted on them, as serious as if someone were running for Mayor, but instead, they are running for posts like Town Auditor, or Selectman, or Lister. Or, my favorite and the electable post that very much seems as if our entire state is the town of Mayberry, the position of Town Constable.
It is town meeting day season in Vermont. The tourists who hear of it consider the tradition just another part of our adorable culture, no different than maple syrup and how everyone sounds like the guy from those old Pepperidge Farm commercials, but town meetings are pretty sacrosanct to locals. Upon my fist visit to a Vermont town meeting in 2006, I went to the town meeting in Leicester, a town of roughly 1,000 people.
Leicester is a very small town in Addison County that has one general store, one school and no town center, the town meeting hall was filled to the brim with a few hundred people. If not everyone in town, at least 300 people had shown up to give their opinions and personally vote by a show of hands on the town's budgets for things like town industrial issues, but also paving portions of a road and the school's budget. Several things were contested and I was shocked that people were debating minor portions of a pothole/paving budget for a good 20 minutes, being fair but impassioned about what they were saying. In the meeting, things were changed, voted on, people had coffee and donuts and spoke with their friends and neighbors, and then went home, knowing they would come back next year.
It was a jarring sight to me, as I had just relocated from the Tampa area of Florida, bruised from the last national elections and still aching from the voting scandals that Florida had dealt with in 2000, I had adopted a general malaise about my ability to affect politics and my very relation to it. But town meeting day is the very opposite of that. Not satisfied with just having a say about local issues, in 1974 the town of Thetford, Vermont voted 160 to 130 to impeach President Richard Nixon, gaining national attention. Similar votes in town meetings to charge W. Bush with war crimes floated around in the last years of his Presidency.
This year I am looking forward to seeing what the outcomes in several Vermont towns are in amendments to be voted on regarding stances against Citizens United, the controversial Supreme Court ruling that allows unlimited funds to be used in elections, and ruled that corporations are people. I believe we'll probably be drowned out of the national news, like always, because our voting day is on, well, Super Tuesday, and everyone on television must talk about national politics 24/7* (note sarcasm). But no matter if our beloved institution of Town Meetings are considered laughable on the national stage, we're still proud of them, because they are the bedrock of our crazy, Vermont democracy.
No comments:
Post a Comment