On Brookline

You can gaze out the window get mad and get madder,
Throw your hands in the air, say “What does it matter?”
But it don’t do no good to get angry,
So help me I know.

- John Prine

As chance would have it, this Monday column installment falls on the two year anniversary of On Brookline. Not being the sentimental type, it’s rather difficult for me to give myself over to making sense of this milestone. Especially because it makes very little sense that I continue on with this.

But continue on I will.

There have been moments when I’ve wanted to pack it in (e.g., each time PAX Co-chair Martin Rosenthal opens his yapper or enduring the outright stupidity of Selectmen’s Chair Nancy Daly). I’ve often debated my better self on the merits of continuing the fight; and whether this site can help bring about the reforms we need.

But then events intercede to render my internal quarrels moot. An event like the Arthur Conquest matter, where police were within a hair’s breadth of charging a black man with assault for daring to question the acts of a public official. An event like the town hall cronies coveting the property of a neighbor for their own financial gain. And the event of last month’s local election.

If I had to choose the low watermark for the Brookline polity, it would be the override campaign conducted by town government’s proxy organization “Yes for Brookline.” The group headed by Selectman Betsy DeWitt and former Brookline School Committee Chair Judy Meyers notched an impressive victory at the polls.

Now, I happen to know a little bit about the way people behave in systems that favor a bias for the status quo (i.e., markets). To get people to act against their self interest (i.e., paying more in taxes), they need to see a compelling threat should they not act. Scaring people witless—over threats that aren’t real— is a tactic left to the most cynical, and we can now count them among us.

“Yes for Brookline” employed a Karl Rove approach to electioneering — they lied and they cheated. And it worked like a charm. They used town resources to scare the bejesus out of parents, who turned out in droves in the belief that they were solving a problem that still vexes our town government. The Proverriders were just clever enough, thanks to the help of Associate Town Counsel Joslin Murphy, to skirt many campaign finance laws regarding the use of public facilities for electioneering.

The result is that the least among us will now have to choose between winter heat and paying their property tax bill (or an increase in rent because of such). We have added $800 thousand in school funds for a World Languages program, but we’ve done nothing to close the racial achievement gap that exists in our schools. And town government is still staring at a long term operating deficit.

Was it all worth it? To DeWitt, Meyers and numerous other town officeholders, I’m sure it was. Our elected officials don’t concern themselves with thoughts of the less fortunate. They need to prove a point. And now, it seems, to prove it at any cost.

Incompetents Who Are Capable of Anything.

We all seem to dance around it, but the reality is that we only have a few genuinely bright people serving in town government. When it comes to our executive branch, I can only point to Selectman Dick Benka as operating on all cylinders. Our town managers have no idea what they are doing, and the town administrator is woefully ill-equipped to lead them.

For many of our big earners and at least one of our selectmen, Brookline town government is the highest rung they’ll reach on the career ladder. And they’ll do anything to keep their perch.

The pre-election hit job by the Brookline TAB (a Gatehouse Media publication) of Gil Hoy (ensuring the re-election of Nancy “The Asterisk” Daly, pictured right) is the most striking example of these lowlifes at work. But it’s not the only one. The demotion of Dennis DeWitt from Preservation Commission Vice Chair (engineered by Selectman Bobby Allen), the Brookline Greenspace Alliance and Brookline PAX mob scene directed at former Selectman Michael Sher when he raised questions over a federal grant filed by the Brookline DPW, the character assassination of former Selectman Gil Hoy by Town Administrator Richard Kelliher and Police Chief Dan O’Leary rank equally significant.

God knows, they’ve smeared me every way they know how. It just makes me want to fight back even harder. But for most people, after being called a nut, or catching wind of a whisper campaign about them the instinct is to retreat. (That’s the intent, of course.)

I suppose that all of this leads me to re-commit to the site, to the cause and to continued aggravation from struggles over public records, inane discussions with the witless and batting down nasty rumors. Or perhaps it’s just more cause for my involuntary commitment.

Why do it? I’ll blame it on my lifelong identification with Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote, especially when he says: “Too much sanity may be madness, and the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.”

It’s the pardonable vanity, I hope, of knight errants to chase an elusive ideal; at least until they become the madmen people say they are.