Historically, May begins Annual Town Meeting season in these parts. Town Meetings are so quintessentially New England that artist Norman Rockwell painted a famous Saturday Evening Post cover, one of his “Four Freedoms” series, depicting the audience at a local meeting to illustrate “Freedom of Speech.” As described by Wikipedia, the speaker is shown “standing tall, his mouth open, his shining eyes transfixed, he speaks his mind, untrammeled and unafraid.” The Recorder has countless file photos attesting to the ubiquity of this scene. One of those, alongside the Rockwell painting, is shown with this column.
Last year, however, things looked very different, as towns scrambled to find a Town Meeting format that conformed to coronavirus restrictions. The default venue seemed to be out-of-doors.
In Buckland, for example, the Saturday morning meeting was held in the parking lot of Mohawk Trail Regional School. Voters stayed in their vehicles for the most part, voting by raising bright orange cards out their windows. Addressing attendees required walking to a microphone, which was sanitized after each use.
In Hawley, residents stood (or parked their lawn chairs) outside Town Hall at designated parking cones, masked and socially distant.
Inevitably, the 2020 Annual Town Meetings tended to be short on attendance, length and drama, as town officials reduced the warrant to its essential points or delayed controversial items so as not to prolong public discussion. Gone, too, were standing in line to be checked in and receive your wristband, standing in line to cast written ballots for a close vote, and the post-meeting parking lot dialogues.
This year, as the Baker-Polito administration relaxes some of its pandemic restrictions, some towns are bringing their meetings back inside. We don’t expect to see packed auditoriums, but we hope the spirit of Town Meeting will return, too: participatory, respectful and a little feisty, as attendees flex their atrophied rhetorical muscles to the delight or dismay of their neighbors.
Annual Town Meeting is still the shining exemplar of freedom of speech and well worth your while to attend.