In Favor of In Person Town Meeting

continued from page 1 power is exercised directly by the people rather than through representatives. City-states were formed (Athens, Sparta, . . .) and people showed up to conduct the business of the city-state. Sounds like a Dummerston Town Meeting.

Over time there were too many people to accommodate at these meetings (imagine everyone who was eligible showing up at the Dummerston Town Meeting). The republic was formed. A “republic” is a form of government in which the people hold power, but elect representatives to exercise that power.

With the current complaining and party bickering among elected officials on a national scale, many have become upset with ‘the system’.

In Dummerston and many other communities in Vermont the town meeting represents the last vestige of pure democracy. Residents can stand face to face and hear what is said. They can also watch the facial expressions of their neighbors. The social aspect of being able to argue, discuss respectfully, and then sit with neighbors at lunch is gone with a virtual town meeting or simply Australian ballot voting.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist and prominent Soviet dissident. Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, in particular the Gulag system. His writings (The Gulag Archipelago and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) made him persona non grata in the Soviet Union. He decided to leave the USSR, settled in Switzerland for a time, and ultimately found a home as close to the environment he had grown up with in the Soviet Union in Cavendish, Vermont. He fell in love with the pure democracy of town meeting and attended on an annual basis.

Amid popular complaints about elected officials and rising taxes, one wonders, “How can you complain when you have not made your voice known?” What good is freedom if you do not exercise its provisions? Town meeting is the perfect antidote.

If you’re suffering withdrawal—something is missing without town meeting and its opportunity for social and political gathering— contact your selectboard and let them know.

As Thomas Jefferson said in a letter to Joseph C. Cabell in 1816, “Town Meeting is the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government.”

All of this, of course, is conditional upon the disappearance of the pandemic.