Town meeting

Last night we attended town meeting. Town meeting is always a trip, and one of the unique pleasures of small town life. Once a year, around April, we get a town warrant in the mail, filled with reports and budget items for the year ahead. It’s the kind of thing that, in larger cities, town council or city council would address. But in small towns, the townspeople gather for a town meeting with the selectmen, to vote for things like the school budget, and whether or not we should buy a new snowplow, and whether curbs on development should be instituted as law.

I missed the first one when I moved to town, about ten years ago. But the second one I attended, out of curiousity, and a growing sense of wanting to be part of the community. Mostly I attended due to the hot-button topic of the day (of which there always seems to be at least one). See, the local high school had it’s football team named the Redskins, and a local Native American group had requested they change it. Being part Native American myself, I was curious about the debate, and though I saw both sides of the argument, I definitely had an opinion. I wanted the name changed too. Growing up as one of the few black kids bussed out to an all white school, I was aware of all the ways kids can be made to feel different. Before a kid gets the internal strength to embrace those differences, a key element of maturing, it’s easy to have those differences become sources of embarrassment. And having a team name that’s essentially, though subtly, about denegrating one of those differences is wrong. It’s not about political correctness. It’s about kid’s self esteem.

The town meeting is run by parliamentary procedure, with a lively moderator who keeps things moving and jokes and quips often. It’s a form of entertainment, really, a live show that also happens to be a form of government. We get past the housekeeping stuff, and the school budget approval, etc. And then we get to the juice. The school in question was shared by three local towns, in budget and responsibility. So, all three towns would need to vote for the change, for it to happen. But my town was the first to have its annual town meeting, so what we decided would likely set the tone for the others (“They didn’t vote to change, so there’s no point in our debating it…”). Several older townspeople stood up and made stands for tradition, and made arguments for how the name was an honorific, and indicative of the history of the area. Others made the case for the overabundance of political correctness, and how outsiders to the community were the ones who were asking for the change, when it didn’t even affect them. Still others spoke simply of the cost-of uniforms and banners that would have to be redone at significant expense.

The final speaker of note was one of the people who had requested the change. I can’t remember his name, but his bearing struck me. He was a large Native American man with long black hair and a western hat. He’s hung out at the back of the room for the entire meeting. As a point of order, someone in town had to recognize him, and ask the chair for him to be allowed to speak. He spoke for a very short time, telling of how he was raised off reservation in schools that didn’t teach him about his native American heritage, and raised in a world that called him a redskin as a way of putting him down, at the same time as they plastered the name across their favorite football teams. He made his case effectively, and the vote that followed elected to change the name.

At the end of the vote, an older woman, clearly a towny from way back, shouted out to the crowd in anger, that we were “changing everything. I hope you’re happy now.” I felt like saying, "Yes, I am. Thanks for asking." But I was silent. It seemed an odd end to an emotional, but until then quite civilized discussion. Weeks later, the two other towns followed suit.

So, I was hooked, and haven’t missed a town meeting since. They’ve not all been as controversial, or even internesting. But they’ve all been about how things are changing. Everything changes.

And once in a while, it’s for the better.