Civility in our town hall meetings

I was in Fort Covington last night for a town meeting about the recent dam removal on the Salmon River.

More about the substance of that debate on Monday morning’s newscast.

But I wanted to make a comment or two about the tone of last night’s meeting.

Local government has always been a rough-and-tumble business. Small town folks take their politics seriously.

The intimate private relationships in our North Country villages can make for complicated and tangled public debates.

But my sense is that the tone and civility of these meetings is on the decline — and that’s both sad and unacceptable.

At last night’s meeting, people used profanity, they shouted each other down, and there was a fair amount of mockery.

When someone scored a particularly nasty point, there was sometimes cheering and clapping.

Not everyone joined in. Kudos to the folks who tried to keep the meeting neighborly.

But the uglier aspects of last night’s session aren’t unique.

I’ve been to a number of local government meetings in the last year that had a similar tone — in Peru, for example, and Fort Edward.

For more evidence of North Country locals behaving badly, check out this Youtube video recorded in Cape Vincent.

At a time when town hall meetings on healthcare have turned into confrontational spectacles, this is a trend that we in the North Country should resist.

I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t be passionate. There are times when anger is appropriate.

But in communities where our children share the same classrooms and we see each other in the grocery aisle and the pews of our churches, the angry rhetoric of cable-TV news is a poor fit.

The person you shout down today is the person who will be volunteering on the fire squad that comes to your home tomorrow.

The “enemy” that you mock in public will be the teacher caring for your kid, or the nurse caring for your parents.

Frankly, I think we should be setting the tone for the national debate.

We should prove in our small towns that it’s possible to argue and debate and find good solutions to problems, without tearing each other down.

Tags: st. lawrence valley