Free Idyll Banter by Chris Bohjalian Page A

barbecues that commemorate the great spirit of ’76, I will also watch that unique homage to the outhouse’s place in colonial history. I will take the time to pay my respects to the thunderbox, to cheer on the Revolutionary War’s armored personnel carriers and commodes, and salute those women and men who remember the courage of Hancock and Hale by racing one-holers.

MEETINGS MESSY BY NECESSITY
    WHENEVER I WORRY that town meetings are going the way of the dinosaur and thumbing a ride to extinction, I talk to my neighbor Dave Marsters. Marsters has been moderating town meetings in Lincoln for twelve years, standing serenely at the front of Burnham Hall before the long rows of folding chairs still made of wood.
    Once again Monday night he will be on stage—literally, as well as figuratively—protected from the chaos he calls neighbors the other 364 days of the year by a slim book called
Robert’s Rules of Order
.
    Marsters, more than anyone else, is capable of reassuring me that the town meeting is not quite ready for the respirator. “Attendance goes up and down,” he says thoughtfully, “but I haven’t seen a pattern of diminishing attendance over the last decade.”
    A decade is roughly how long I’ve been going to town meeting. I went to my first one in 1987 and have since learned the three basic rules:

    â€¢ When the moderator requests that you keep your comments “germane,” it means it’s time to sit down. You’ve lost all touch with the discussion at hand, and what you think sounds to your neighbors like the Gettysburg Address is in reality a big bowl of meandering word goop.

    â€¢ “Graders” and “grader chains” have something to do with the town assets and the town budget—not the school assets and the school budget. “Grader” questions, therefore, should be directed to the Board of Selectmen.

    â€¢ Never propose an amendment to an amendment, unless the article involves a budget appropriation in the upper six figures, and you want to make sure the debate goes on into April . . . or you want simply to fluster the moderator.

    Marsters loves town meeting, especially when the discussions grow animated. His biggest fear? We’re growing too civil as a culture.
    â€œI’m really scared when people tell me, ‘I shouldn’t say that in town meeting.’ The fact is, if you feel that strongly about it, you should say it,” Marsters insists. “Think back on the things people used to say. People really did debate things, and things really did get hot—and it wasn’t just because of the old stove that used to sit in the center of the town hall.”
    One of Marsters’s favorite memories is the town meeting four years ago when it looked like the Lincoln school budget might fail—a first for the town. The irony of that memory is that Dave Marsters, private citizen, father and teacher, wanted desperately to see the budget pass.
    He recalls how “the debate was long and detailed, exactly what it needed to be. People finally agreed that we absolutely couldn’t afford the budget as a town, yet that didn’t matter: It was important for the kids that we pass it. And what was really meaningful was that people left the hall feeling that they’d had the opportunity to speak their voice.”
    Marsters wonders if the biggest threat to town meetings isn’t one of the usual suspects we round up this time of the year: suburban sprawl and the demise of the village; the end of the volunteer ethic; the time pressures put upon the two-career couple.
    Marsters fears a more insidious drift. “There is a cultural trend in our society to make democracy quick and easy, just like everything else. And that eliminates the hard work that real democracy demands,” he says. He cites the initiatives that appear every year to replace public voice votes with Australian, or all-day secret,