A Shutesbury resident wrote recently that she is “ashamed to live in a town (Shutesbury) that couldn’t build a library ….” and that a “small group of opposition” halted the process.  

Did we really need to have this wound opened after all this time?

This remark foments the divisiveness she claims to lament. It echoes one the letter-writer made during the epic struggle for the library in 2010-2011:  “I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to take a yoga class and read the New York Times.”  

Such perspectives conveyed by the writer and some other supporters are exactly, and ironically, the attitudes which gave the  “small group of opposition” (I’m not one of them, by the way), ammunition to paint the prospective library as the golden Taj Mahal for coffee-drinking newcomers. She shot herself in the foot because she couldn’t imagine someone who wouldn’t want what she wanted. That’s why a library was not built.

There are people in our town who don’t view the world through the same lens. But they are still our neighbors and townsfolk, with full privilege to vote their opinion, however they arrive at their conclusions.

That’s how democracy works – not perfect, but better than every other type of government, as Winston Churchill observed.

The small group of opposition had its doppelgänger in the small group of proponents, each exercising their political prerogative to influence what turned out to be two very large groups of 522 voters on each side of the issue.

How does a tie vote involving one of the largest turnouts in Shutesbury electoral history define a town that “couldn’t” build a library, as opposed to a town that illustrated, through democratic process, that it didn’t want to build a library, or at least, not that library? It is not the same thing.

I disenfranchised myself of becoming the deciding vote by taking myself off the voting register to mediate a series of meetings between the two sides. I was more concerned about the animosity and hyperbole that was tearing our town apart than I was with the fate of the proposed library.

The process was quite a lovely one, despite how it turned out.

I said then, and say now, that we all endanger our ethics and integrity when we desire something too much. A healthy, democratic society must rest on the bedrock of good faith and good will. Win or lose, we’re all in this together, aren’t we?

Ronald Meck

Shutesbury