Vermont Town Meeting Day

As happens every first Tuesday in March, across Vermont folks assembled last week and engaged in that most democratic exercise - town meeting day.

Most features, mine included, tend to speak about Town Meeting Day in the most general of terms, and probably in too romantically a way - making it look like a moving Norman Rockwell painting. But these images are quite powerful indeed, so there's the tendency to want to go no further than the town hall buildings, the pretty towns, the pot luck lunches, and the town regulars who make Town Meeting Day so important.

But there is more.

A good place to get a real feel for the tradition of the Vermont Town Meeting, and where it stands today is by going to Vermont Public Radio's website: vpr.net. There you can find a network made documentary produced by Steve Delaney, formerly from "Monitor Radio", the old Public Radio program from the Christian Science Monitor. The program is called "First Tuesday in March". I would welcome your thoughts about the program, just where Town Meeting Day stands in Vermont, and should what they do in Vermont even matter to the rest of us ?

The cite for the site: http://www.vpr.net/vt_news/commentaries/towntext.shtml