For what it’s worth:

Here in my little (4,000 people) town in Vermont our government consists of a five-member elected “Selectboard” which usually meets every other week during normal times, but which has been meeting weekly during Covid-19. Via Zoom, of course. Meetings have a tendency to drag on due to citizen comment — and due to the fact that we’re all comfortably seated in our living rooms and don’t have to sit in a large conference room on wooden chairs fidgeting if we want to take part.

For a few weeks, the “how can we make the jugheads who obstinately refuse to wear masks start wearing masks?” question was much bruited about. Under Vermont law, apparently the Selectboard could actually have made it mandatory with fines (and, theoretically, imprisonment) if they’d really wanted to make the lives of the local police department a living hell, but they went instead with “requiring posters to be put up in all businesses telling people very strongly that wearing masks and practicing social distancing is a REALLY GOOD IDEA”.

Of course, that all took a back seat to BLM the last couple of weeks. I was pleasantly surprised during this Monday’s meeting where citizen comment was invited on the subject of flying BLM flags at the town office and/or along the streets that every single person who spoke was in favor in one sense or another, and only one person got peevish about “well, sure, fly a BLM flag, but don’t buy it from the actual Black Lives Matter people, they’re a partisan arm of the Democratic Party.” (Sigh.) Of course, the people who don’t want BLM flags flying probably knew better than to get on a recorded Zoom call and say so. Jerks are out there, though – we heard from one guy, a former Selectboard member at that, who had put up a BLM sign in front of his house (a 4’x6’ sandwich board style sign at that) only to have it stolen within a few hours.

Our town is overwhelmingly white and liberal so it’s easy to stand up and be all virtuous and denounce racism in all its forms, when in reality our own personal tolerance and acceptance is rarely put to the test. But that said, people did make some pretty intelligent, well-thought-out comments.

There was talk the last couple of weeks about holding a public forum to discuss racial equity and other BLM-related topics, but wise voices pointed out that absent any real kind of structure, it could easily turn into a big bash-the-cops session (even though there’s no sense that our small local police department has been anything but fair and professional). So we worked out that perhaps a small committee of people could meet to work out a plan for something more constructive… small group discussions, conversations, actions we could take. For the moment, we seem to be calling it the Committee for Racial Equity but we’re not married to that name. I volunteered to be on it, as did several others. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of it.