hands-on civics
This week has been all about petition signatures. The town clerk said we needed 96, but I looked up the number of voters in the last gubernatorial election in 2018 (787) so that has been changed to 79. We are almost there on signatures, but I am rethinking our strategy. I just emailed someone I know in the League of Women Voters and suggested that they develop a workshop on how to get things done in our small Maine towns. So many questions that your project could fail on if you get the answer wrong.
Questions like:
How many signatures are needed on a petition?
When is a petition legal? Do the selectmen need to turn down a request before it is legal?
What constitutes a "campaign"?
When a petition with the required number of signatures is turned in, how long can the town wait to schedule a hearing and special town meeting?
What is best for our project, a vote at the annual town meeting or a vote at a special town meeting?
These questions don't even touch the issue of what qualifies for TIF funding.
I like hands-on civics even though it sometimes threatens people to ask questions. The process of building the library is methodical and peaceful; the process of getting any town funding for it is nerve wracking. We have enough local donations now to license the Balsam software and buy barcodes through them and start cataloging book donations. Dorothy is working on our logo. I love the little house view and made it the favicon on the site. Next week I will turn to grant writing, starting with the Stephen & Tabitha King foundation. They love libraries.
We have gathered enough signatures on our petition but we will wait to present it so that it will be voted on at a special town meeting rather than at the grueling 5 hour regular town meeting. There is always some tiny technicality they will kneecap you with. I'm pleased with how diverse our supporters are and how willing they are to gather signatures and donate.
The Abdi book was a plunge into the chaos of ancient tribal nomads with twentieth century weaponry and the bureaucratic nightmare of the refugee trying to find a safe place to live. I was relieved when Team Abdi finally got him to Maine, but disappointed that most of his peers just wanted to go back to their tribe and their religion in Somalia. He used stories of his early days working on batting crews to show how tribal and trapped his Maine peers were.
I'm just starting the goddess Stacy Abrams' book. The fight to become a real one-person one-vote multicultural democracy is in full swing. As I write this the republicans are worshipping a golden statue of Trump at CPAC and writing minority voter suppression laws everywhere. A recent Andrew Sullivan post put me onto a book called The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream by Richard Alba. Sullivan points out "In a weird and creepy echo of the old “one-drop rule,” you are officially counted as “non-white” by the Census if your demographic background has any non-white component to it. So the great majority of Americans whose race is in any way ambiguous or mixed are counted as “non-white” even if they don’t identify as such." Alba's thesis is that binary racial categories are being dissolved by intermarriage.
Americans are under the spell of a distorted and polarizing story about their country’s future--the majority-minority narrative--which contends that inevitable demographic changes will create a society with a majority made up of minorities for the first time in the United States’s history. The Great Demographic Illusion reveals that this narrative obscures a more transformative development: the rising numbers of young Americans from ethno-racially mixed families, consisting of one white and one nonwhite parent. Examining the unprecedented significance of mixed parentage in the twenty-first-century United States, Richard Alba looks at how young Americans with this background will play pivotal roles in the country’s demographic future.
