I'm fascinated by the way that people in meetings in Norwich so often introduce themselves by telling how long they have lived in town. If you have lived here for less than ten years, there seems to be a sense that you should apologize for daring to speak at all.
Now most people would think it pretty peculiar if somebody stood up and said straight out "I'm John Doe and I live in a 4000 square foot house on a ridgeline". And it would sound equally crass if somebody stood up at a school board hearing and said "I'm John Doe and I went to Harvard Medical School". (Fortunately there are plenty of more effective and subtle ways of transmitting the same information.)
I suppose the "seniority preamble" is a useful convention because it helps counterbalance the class distinctions a bit. But I'm not sure it brings us any closer to a world in which nobody cares a fig about any of those things.
I think it is just dandy that some people are rich, others are well educated, others have lived in Norwich of six generations, served on 27 town committes, or live off the grid in a treehouse. But it would be just as relevant to learn that they are building a birch bark canoe, learning to wiggle their ears, or memorizing the poetical works of Longfellow.
I guess this falls under the rubric of clause one of the Serenity Prayer.
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There is one important function to this seniority preamble in my opinion. It reveals whether an individual has lived in town long enough to have a reasonable chance of gathering why certain walls were built before advocating to tear them down.
ReplyDeleteThe social necessity of testifying to one's term of residency is a nod to the cultural struggle occuring here in Norwich and throughout rural America to some degree. At its worst, that struggle flares up in the form of a Ruth Dwyer and the "Take Back Vermont" sloganeering of a few years back. At its core, the struggle is far less invidious, but probably much more important.
The rural agricultural traditions of this town and region are giving way to an urban/suburban ethos which values the physical rural character of the place, but runs roughshod over the rural character of the community and its institutions. In the past two decades this town has abandoned traditional town meeting, instituted a town manager form of government, and professionalized its police force and fire department. These changes aren't necessarily bad, but they signify a departure from the libertarian self-reliance and consensual interdependence of the community and institution which they replace.
I'm as guilty as anyone in town, spending some time on the town manager review committee and toiling for some years in an effort to bureaucratize land use regulation in town.
I don't think having spent my entire life in Norwich would have changed my views -- there have been plenty of life long residents behind these efforts as well.
I do think I've been around long enough to recognize some of the costs to these changes, enough to question those costs at least. And they aren't insignificant, but that's another topic.
I've lived in Norwich less than three years and I am already an elected official here (Justice of the Peace). To the extent my longevity in town has ever been an issue, folks seem to have deemed it a positive, treating me like the proverbial "fresh voice." I attended town meeting this week and did not hear any speaker allude to how long they've lived in Norwich.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it doesn't happen as much as I thought it did. I haven't volunteered much in Norwich for reasons that I hope to get to eventually.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, maybe it is one of those subliminal/serendipity things and now that I've mentioned it you'll start noticing it. Like when you learn a new word and then you hear it three times in the next week. Was the word there before and you just didn't hear it, or is it some kind of weird Jungian synchronicity?
Regardless of how common it is, I Watt is right about the value of it, as long as it isn't exclusionary - which Don seems to be saying it isn't.
I agree that the challenge of social change that Watt alluded to is very real and is maybe the biggest issue facing Norwich today.
(Though I would say that it is inseparable from some process issues that provided a lot of the animus we witnessed in the recent selectboard election.)
Longevity is just one of several indicators, none particularly reliable, and certainly none authoritative.