The A Spot

(Or, the story of how one activist motivated an apathetic, apolitical citizen (me!) ) by A Spot Guest Blogger Gretchen Elias

My roommate, Jess, works for Toxics Action Center, a nonprofit spin-off of the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). The PIRG is a nationwide advocacy organization with a network of affiliated nonprofits in nearly every state. Jess has been working there for the past two years as a community organizer, providing coaching, mentoring, and advice to citizens fighting toxic pollution in their communities.

Right now, Jess is working with a Vermont-wide campaign, Safe Power VT , to shut down Vermont Yankee (pictured above, during a cooling tower collapse in 2007), a decades-old nuclear power plant in southern Vermont. It’s going to be a tough battle. The nuke plant has a powerful lobby on its side, along with some effective media coverage portraying the plant as a cost-effective and environmentally-friendly way to produce energy. Of course, the citizens groups that Jess advises feel differently—and in my opinion, the facts are in their favor. But to beat the nuke lobbyists and convince the legislature to move forward with shutting down Vermont Yankee, they will first have to convince a heck of a lot of ordinary citizens across Vermont.

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Last Tuesday was Town Meeting Day here in Vermont – a State holiday that allows voters in small and mid-sized towns to get together and debate the coming year. In my rural town, more than half of our 903 residents turned out to discuss the annual school budget, the purchase of a new fire truck, and how much support we should offer to a library in a neighboring town. Children colored and played in a near-by schoolroom, and in the middle of the meeting the town recessed to share a lunch of shepherd’s pie and jello salad.

The discussion was civil and orderly, governed by Robert’s ubiquitous Rules of Order. Everyone who wanted to have a say on a given issue, for or against, was given the chance to speak and make their case. The whole affair was eerily reminiscent of the Norman Rockwell painting Freedom of Speech, in which a weatherbeaten rural citizen — with more than a slight resemblance to Abraham Lincoln — rises to speak his mind at a public meeting, the rest of the crowd leaning in the better to hear him.

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