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There is nothing quite like Town Meeting for democracy in action and local drama. When I saw how the back of the school cafeteria had filled up I knew we would be voting No on something. I am not always or usually on the same side as the anti-spending back of the room. But the selectmen, actually one of them (Peter Kenney), was proposing a half-million dollar town office not in walking distance of downtown with no alternate locations or designs. His way or no way. I spoke against it and suggested that we form a committee (you know, more than one person) to consider other options. When the back of the room applauded, I knew we were doing ok. Dave Smith then amended the article until it was just a directive to form a committee of at least 5 people with no more than 2 selectmen on it to rethink the whole idea. That passed overwhelmingly.
I think it was at that point that the Peter stormed out of the meeting. The paper says he's resigning on Monday. He put a lot of work into his idea, but he never had community support for it; he just assumed that everyone would see it his way. Don Newell did a great job as moderator, handling admendments to admendments and ruling out of order anyone who used inflammatory language (eg, the "Taj Mahal town hall").
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In keeping with my election year reading theme, I'm about a hundred pages into Haidt's excellent Righteous Mind. I bought the hardback so I could leave it on someone's coffee table when we go south in a few weeks. He points out how reviled E.O.Wilson was when he first introduced the biological basis for human morality as sociobiology in the seventies and how it came to be accepted under the name "evolutionary psychology" in the nineties.
I think of Righeous Mind and the other two books I'm reading (Rules for Radicals and Confederates in the Attic) as characters interacting with each other in a play. Not the authors, but the books themselves playing off each other.
For mind calming moments, I have Carse's Finite and Infinite Games on the iPad.