I spent three gut-wrenching hours watching the May 26 Easthampton School Committee meeting about the consequences of the June 9 override vote on our school community. On the very real people who will be affected. Educators who received non-renewal notices on May 15 stood up and talked about the students they love. Students talked about the things that make school worth showing up to. Things worth staying alive for — and that is not hyperbole, which anyone who’s ever spent time with kids or taught kids knows to be true. It was heartbreaking and it felt like everyone in the meeting was in tears.
And then I checked social media and saw the same, overly simplified argument I’ve been seeing for weeks from people who are voting no: we can’t vote yes because of the specific individuals who can’t afford it.
I understand that argument comes from a real place. But I want to gently name what that argument is actually doing, because I don’t think most people who make it have followed it all the way through. The no vote is framed as compassion, but only for certain people and at the exclusion of others and at the exclusion of a functioning city. Protecting only certain vulnerable individuals from the specific effects that only those people will experience with a yes vote, often framed without compassion for the consequences other people will experience without the override.
But at its core, that argument makes a judgment that I don’t think any of us should be making: that one individual person’s life matters more than someone else’s. That someone’s financial hardship matters more than another person’s job. More than a child’s access to the arts. More than a veteran’s home visit. More than a senior’s ride to the doctor. The impact of these things on a person’s life can’t really be quantified and the effects of a yes or no vote can’t be summed up in the simplified way.
I believe that we shouldn’t act that way as humans who are part of a community, which is more than the sum of its individual parts. We can’t weigh one neighbor’s suffering against another’s and decide whose counts more. The moment we start doing that, I think we’ve already lost something important about our personhood.
And here’s the part that makes me feel especially upset: it’s not even an accurate tradeoff. The no vote isn’t actually protecting the vulnerable neighbor it claims to protect. That same neighbor loses their ADA rides to the doctor if the override fails. They lose the Medicare counseling that helps them understand their benefits. Their spouse loses the Veterans Services worker who checks in on them. The people in that room on May 26 — the teachers, the students, the city employees facing layoffs — they are our neighbors too, and their losses are just as real, human, and worthy of our concern.
Protecting someone’s tax bill while cutting their services isn’t compassion. It’s a tradeoff that harms them in ways that are harder to see.
A community isn’t a collection of individuals each managing their own costs, buffered from each other and unaffected by each other. It’s a fragile ecosystem. What happens to the schools affects whether families stay in Easthampton. Whether families stay affects whether businesses survive. Whether businesses survive affects the tax base that funds the services our most vulnerable neighbors depend on. You can’t protect the most vulnerable by cutting the infrastructure that makes their lives livable.
What a community does — what we should be doing — is try to hold everyone. We fund the schools and the other services and programs people count on in Easthampton with a yes vote, and we help the people who struggle with the tax increase. We don’t make people choose between the teacher who just lost their job and the neighbor who can’t afford the bill. We find a way to take care of both. For the neighbors who genuinely can’t afford the increase, there are programs worth knowing about — tax deferrals, circuit breaker credits, exemptions for low-income seniors, and possibilities like a proposed Neighbor in Need program. And beyond the formal programs, people in this community are already talking about how to build mutual aid systems to help neighbors who fall through the cracks. That conversation is happening because people here care. A yes vote makes it possible to keep having it.
We can’t make this choice based on the idea that certain individuals matter more than others, or which hardships are more important than others. That’s not a community. That’s just every person for themselves, and that’s exactly what a no vote produces. A yes vote is an investment in a community that can find ways to hold us all up.
Easthampton, please vote yes on June 9.
Elyse Langer lives in Easthampton.