This week's lesson in my ongoing civics class is that town government runs more on tradition than on ordinance. In Unity there are no ordinances related to elections or committee appointments. These things are done by tradition and that mostly works. I've noticed that some nearby small towns have ordinances related to specific things and you can tell that the ordinance arose out of a conflict that tradition could not handle. Palmyra, for example, has a huge ordinance to govern the recall of a selectman, and I'm guessing that they must have had a big problem with a selectman to go to the trouble of passing an ordinance. Ordinances are like the healed weld around a broken bone, stronger than what was there before, but something had to break to get it there. If tradition mostly works in a town, I hope that means that civility and consensus are part of the tradition.

One huge ordinance that Unity has is a Land Use Ordinance and the Comprehensive Plan that it grew out of. I've recently put copies of those documents from 1993 online. That ordinance happened because we had two talented planner types around who saw that we needed it to retain the town's character as it grew. A Family Dollar Store was recently built in town and that has some people wondering if maybe it's time to revisit the comprehensive plan. The Dollar Store doesn't bother me; it kind of replaces the old Discount Den, but I think it may be time to look at some of the rules about signs in town and ask if those are being followed. Unity's most recent ordinance (March 2011) is a wind turbine generator ordinance, following a flurry of wind turbine construction in our area. Unity has no big hills and would not be a good candidate for a wind turbine project, still...

At the film festival we saw all three hours of Once Upon A Time In The West, and another made-in-Maine film, Nor'easter. The story involves a priest who hears a confession in which a boy names the pedophile who has taken him. The secrets of the confessional thing used to have some credence. Now I think the priest should do jail time for not telling the police. Our last film was Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus, a BBC film about Jim White and followed by a live performance by him. It was the high point of the festival for me and the footage in pentecostal churches put me in mind of the history of ecstatic religious movements that I'm reading about in the Barbara Ehrenreich book.