Watching democracy die at Canton’s annual town meeting

Dear Editor:

I moved to Canton because it featured democracy at its most basic, the town meeting, held annually. And I have watched it devolve over the last 22 years.

Like last Wednesday’s town meeting in which there were eventually more people on the town’s payroll there than interested citizens. One scene of the various Canton Babbages conferring about a set of Russian dolls, amendments within amendments, and how to allow discussion, was juxtaposed in my mind with the famous painting in Faneuil Hall where our better educated, more moral forebears were writing the Articles of Confederation. They strained at a camel and brought forth a flea, but was it ignorance or a carefully staged scene so that the engaged but enraged honest citizens would get disgusted and leave?

And this perversion of the democratic process resulted in exactly what they wanted: another development in town, partly for the elderly with no nursing home to take care of those 85-year-old citizens in “independent and assisted living” units. Another plan enriching a few with no exit or alternatives at critical points of failure. Where do we dump those elderly when they need a nursing home? Where are the charnel houses of Dickensian London when you need them?

Questions to the developer were answered with, “That’s still under discussion” for quite vital and pertinent aspects of this deal. Of course, the lawyer/moderator most likely to get rich from this charade kept saying: “Me, myself and I have studied this for ages, and we have decided that it is best for the town.” The “me” being the Board of Selectmen, the “myself” being the Finance Committee, and the “I” being the Amen choir, those commission volunteers chosen by the BOS.

With my frequent “nay” votes, I represented the absent 90 percent of Canton citizenry who have become so disgusted with this Kabuki theatre they no longer attend. This only served to prevent the moderator from declaiming “passed unanimously.” Since rules have been intricately written to prevent discussion, I had no opportunity to comment on the sum of the many loans we gave the Finance Committee the right to pursue (you can only comment on the article as written before you, which was often changed right before the meeting). Standing before the mic, politely waiting to be recognized by the moderator, I was ignored. Another close vote was taken by the barbaric method of voices yelling over one another, before I could ask for hands to be counted.

Blessings on the concerned citizen who said, “I come faithfully to town meeting year after year, and year after year, you give us last-minute changes to the warrant that change the substance or even contradict the articles within it. I will vote “no” until we get the right to study this matter and have a public hearing on this changed article, not this hurry-up stuff that gets this town into trouble.”

Wonder if he was talking about the disastrous Canton Torture Center, aka the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, where children are legally tortured with portable electronic devices by “attendants” hired off the street and have made Canton notorious throughout the civilized world. The selectmen welcomed the paroled Matthew Israel and his army of PR flacks to the town 20 years ago, still up there on Route 138 torturing emotionally disabled children at $225,000 a head.

As modified Articles 16, 17 and 18 were hammered into acceptance, it was obvious that we the people are considered unnecessary impediments to the serpentine tentacles of Canton’s rulers, which reach throughout all the commissions, consolidating power in the few. When will we stop this charade and go to representative government?

Sincerely,

Alice C. Brown

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