Goodbye, Democracy: It Was Nice Working With You

I am a reporter for a midsized daily newspaper in Massachusetts. Last night, I covered the yearly election in a nearby town of about 15,000 people.

It's a nice town, formerly a farm community. Sixty years ago, the kids used to drop out of high school to work on Daddy's dairy farm. Nowadays, a lot of the kids go to college.

It's a patriotic place. A woman born here died in the Sept. 11 attack. People have sons in Iraq, in the Army. There is almost no rental property. Some of the few remaining farmers have gone organic.

In the morning, you can hear the birds sing. At night, you hear nothing.

There's a homemade sign in the police station noting that they're backed up on firearm permits. Patriots In their dozens are applying for gun permits, eager to protect their constitutional rights.

I stopped in a convenience store for a cup of coffee before I went over to town hall to wait for the election results. You can buy the New York papers in that convenience store. People here stay informed.

The town hall is red brick with white wooden trim, as it should be in a New England town. On the first floor, offices sprout off a long hallway. Assessor's office. Board of Registrars. Town clerk.

Five plaques hang on the walls of the hallway. One lists town residents who served in the Civil War. There are other plaques for World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. The town has several active veterans associations, including a Veterans of Foreign Wars post with a busy bar.

On Tuesday, April 9, a little over 1,000 people went to the polls here and voted in the town election. That's about 14 percent of the town's registered voters. In these New England towns, the city council is called the Board of Selectmen. The chairman of that board ran unopposed, as did candidates for seats on five other boards.

There were four other boards with vacancies for which there were no candidates. All seats will be filled by write-in candidates. There was a race at School Committee, three candidates competing for two seats, and a race for the board that governs the public library — again, three candidates for two seats.

And this is American democracy, just as much as debates over gun laws, abortion and same-sex marriage. If you take up your gun and go out to fight in the revolution, if you are willing to die for your constitutional rights, this is what you will be defending.

The evil government may well have a plan to enslave you, to take your AR-15 and your Bible. We may be on the way to the New World Order, and your kids may indeed be putting condoms on bananas over at the high school.

But no one put his/her name forward to run for the three-year term on the Planning Board, not where I was working Tuesday night.

It's not a very big town, but it has a $25,000,000 annual budget. About $15,000,000 of that goes to the schools.

If you are one of those people who likes to talk about government "confiscating your money," then this is one of the places where the confiscated dollars are spent, apportioned by people who are voted for by almost no one.

I sat in the town clerk's office until they gave me a computer printout of the election results, then I drove 11 miles back to the newspaper office and wrote my story.

And while I did this, people were posting quip-ish things on my Facebook page, things about how much the Obamas spend on vacations, about how many Americans are killed by knives every year versus how many people are killed by hammers and about "the Founders."

The national debate continues in one long scream, in snide little jokes and funny, doctored pictures posted on Facebook.

But democracy is drying up like a stream in a hot summer, and the shallow places are going dry first.

And we forget that small streams feed the big rivers.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

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