{"id":1047,"date":"2009-09-11T08:01:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-11T12:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/09\/11\/civility-in-our-town-hall-meetings\/"},"modified":"2009-09-11T08:01:00","modified_gmt":"2009-09-11T12:01:00","slug":"civility-in-our-town-hall-meetings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/09\/11\/civility-in-our-town-hall-meetings\/","title":{"rendered":"Civility in our town hall meetings"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was in Fort Covington last night for a town meeting about the recent dam removal on the Salmon River.<\/p>\n

More about the substance of that debate on Monday morning’s newscast.<\/p>\n

But I wanted to make a comment or two about the tone of last night’s meeting.<\/p>\n

Local government has always been a rough-and-tumble business. Small town folks take their politics seriously.<\/p>\n

The intimate private relationships in our North Country villages can make for complicated and tangled public debates.<\/p>\n

But my sense is that the tone and civility of these meetings is on the decline — and that’s both sad and unacceptable.<\/p>\n

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

When someone scored a particularly nasty point, there was sometimes cheering and clapping.<\/p>\n

Not everyone joined in. Kudos to the folks who tried to keep the meeting neighborly. <\/p>\n

But the uglier aspects of last night’s session aren’t unique.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

For more evidence of North Country locals behaving badly, check out this Youtube video<\/a> recorded in Cape Vincent.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t be passionate. There are times when anger is appropriate.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The person you shout down today is the person who will be volunteering on the fire squad that comes to your home tomorrow.<\/p>\n

The “enemy” that you mock in public will be the teacher caring for your kid, or the nurse caring for your parents.<\/p>\n

Frankly, I think we should be setting the tone for the national debate.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was in Fort Covington last night for a town meeting about the recent dam […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[4819],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}