For the People, by the People

[DonViejo]

For the People, by the People

What I saw when I participated in one of the truest forms of democracy.
By Amy Crawford

Posted Wednesday, May 22, 2013, at 06:17 PM ET

We tend to ignore local government until something goes wrong—municipal bankruptcy, perhaps, or unplowed streets after a mishandled blizzard. Turnout in local elections is notoriously low, and attendance at city-council and school-board meetings is usually negligible. Most Americans have become accustomed to putting our communities in the hands of a few purported experts and leaving well enough alone.

So when I moved to a small town in Massachusetts last summer, I was surprised to learn that I would have the chance to be part of an experiment in direct democracy that dates back nearly 400 years. My town of Westborough (and hundreds like it across New England) is governed by town meetings, a system in which citizens act as their own legislature, coming together to deliberate and vote on everything from whether to buy the police department a new cruiser to how to zone for medical marijuana dispensaries.

I had spent years covering municipal governments as a newspaper reporter, and I had seen the infamous “town hall” meetings at which Tea Partiers berated members of Congress in 2009. Those partisan spectacles, at which discussion of President Obama’s health care bill routinely devolved into chaos and name calling, exhibited the worst side of our system of government. When I decided to attend my own town meeting, I was expecting either a raucous free-for-all with anti-tax tirades or a boring procedural with bad coffee and a handful of elderly or pensioned regulars. It was neither.

Town meetings are the last ...

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