Lessons from Select Boards Past

The Select Board learned today that Amherst's privately sponsored Fourth of July Parade will not take place because of rising costs, which the organizers cannot absorb.

Over at Only In the Republic of Amherst, Larry Kelley—who, as residents know, has some strong feelings about the matter—reviews the history of the event: The publicly sponsored parade ended after the national Bicentennial in 1976 (well before my time here). In the wake of the September 11 attacks, a private group revived the parade in 2002, in part as a tribute to the military and local public safety employees. In Kelley's summary, the town persecuted the parade organizers because they focused on the celebratory and thus excluded political protesters. The dispute came to a head in 2008, when "then town manager Larry Shaffer arbitrarily decided the town would run a 7/4 parade and the private committee would not be issued a permit." After protest by locals such as Kelley as well as the ACLU, he says, "the town quietly backed down."

He concludes, "Last year with a new town manager and normalized Select Board, for the first time in our short history there was no controversy--no mention of anti war protests one way or the other. Like all the previous years, the parade itself went off without a hitch."

I appreciate the collective compliment, though we can take no real credit for a simple hands-off policy, and I make no comment on our predecessors, not least because I did not follow the intricacies of this controversy at the time.

It is, however, interesting to note that Select Boards can err in more than one way when dealing with the delicate question of political protest and public space. The old Amherst Town Hall seemed to insist on a parade that included protest. By contrast, fairly long ago and sort of far away, another Select Board saw its role as consisting in denying the right to protest.

On this date in 1971, protesting anti-war Vietnam veterans, anticipating the "occupy" movement, were arrested after refusing to abandon an illegal encampment on the Lexington Green, where the American Revolution began. In the view of the Lexington Select Board chair, Americans had in effect fought the Revolution in order to ensure that every local bylaw was enforced to the letter rather than to safeguard, well, the right to popular protest and revolution. Read my post from 2010 for the story behind what Mass Moments calls "the largest mass arrest in Massachusetts history"—and the aftermath, including the fate of that Select Board.

Now that Town Meeting is over, I've had more time to be out and about, and I invariably run into acquaintances at the grocery or garden store. In the past ten days, both Amherst folks and residents of the outlying towns have told me they watch Select Board and Town Meeting on TV, and asked: It looks so deadly boring. How do you stand it?

My answer to them is the one I've always given in these pages: that's the way we like it (1, 2, 3). As the collective chief executive of the Town, our job is to establish general policy directions and oversee the political process (as well as handle a lot of mundane—and yes, "boring"—tasks such as licensing and appointments). We don't need more drama. We don't want to be the main story, and we shouldn't be.

Just consider the alternative (see above).

This past Memorial Day weekend, we were grateful that we could avoid needless controversy and instead focus on the real significance of the occasion: take part in the parade and ceremony honoring our living veterans and our war dead—including, during this sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the African-Americans and other residents who fought to preserve the Union and end slavery. (a post on that is forthcoming).

Indeed: that's the way we like it.

Updates

• Scott Merzbach, "Fourth of July parade in Amherst to be cancelled due to insufficient funds," Daily Hampshire Gazette, 31 May 2012
• Diane Lederman, "Amherst July 4th parade off because of funding woes," The Republican, 31 May 2012

Occupy Hampshire at last gets underway

On November 17, at 11:00, a handful of students—some walked out of classes, others were free in any case—assembled in the wind and cold on the Library plaza to demonstrate their concerns, prior to joining a town-wide "Occupy" rally on the Common in the afternoon.

It was a relatively small but impassioned group. I was the only faculty member present at first, though about a half-dozen others eventually arrived. Two of them, from my School of Critical Social Inquiry, were featured speakers. Margaret Cerullo spoke for nearly 15 minutes on a wide range of topics, from the nature of the movement and the subversive appropriation of time and space to the penetration of the policing mentality in society at large. Chris Tinson spoke for about five minutes, on race and social justice and the nature of true radical thought and action.

Below are some video documents of the event, which I offer without commentary. I had only my phone with me, so I recorded what I could on that. Regrettably, I cannot share recordings of the two faculty speakers; due to a technical problem, those clips lack proper sound. Fortunately, someone else captured them here and here.

I hadn't been quite sure what to expect: the Occupy movement has common global and local concerns, as well as numerous specific local ones. It is a dynamic phenomenon, still evolving. By the time of this rally, it had established itself as a real force, but was also facing a moment of decision if not crisis: how to respond to both the onset of harsher weather and harsher police actions. Certainly, such a movement takes on different contours in a metropolis such as New York or Boston vs. a small rural college town such as Amherst.

At first, the talks did seem (as I had expected) to deal with global issues in both the literal and figurative sense. Soon, however, the talk turned to the situation at the College, which I found much more interesting. Hampshire College may be an "alternative" (or as we prefer: "experimenting") educational institution, but it is also an elite and extremely expensive one: combined cost of tuition, room, and board (or TRB, as the administrators call it) is over $ 53,000 per year. One wondered how students at such an institution (even if 83 percent of them do receive financial aid) would view their own situation.


Chant: "money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!"




Chant: "whose school? our school!"




denouncing the destruction of "Occupy" camp at Liberty Plaza; solidarity with the movement around the world
"This is our country, and we're going to take it back."




Chant: "they say no, we say fight, education is a right!"




Chant: "from Oakland to Greece: disarm the police!"




explaining the "human mic"




"working at Hampshire College should be a good job"




"I don't know what it would be like to go to a college in what we call the real world, I think I would go fucking crazy" ("human mic" breaks down in this one)




UMass student: "we gotta get out of this reformist rhetoric" in this capitalist, racist, society. They will not fuck with us anymore." "shit just got really crazy."




"Occupy Wall Street--not Palestine!"
Student praises alleged "divestment from the Israeli occupation of Palestine," criticizes College's process for creating new socially responsible investment policy




Sodexo which runs Hampshire dining services, is also "the largest provider of prison food in the United States." We are part of "a pipeline that is funneling us into the capitalist system, that's preparing us to be quote-unquote 'productive' members of society"





"human mic" discusses the international links of the movement: not just the US, but slavery, colonialism, imperialism "without which it wouldn't be"


Chant: "What solution? Revolution!"