Vermont Selectboard Un-Candidate #15

       I walked into the selectboard meeting and immediately felt like I had fallen down a rabbit hole into an ethical hell. I looked at the plans on one wall to radically change Putney Road for a new highway, then glanced around me and saw that everyone else was unconcerned. I felt so out of place, and that feeling continued for four hours at the near record length meeting. My eyes got misty and red. I was hardly the near-fearless Seal about to enter battle for the good of America and to help his brothers get through the ordeal and back to base alive. No brothers at this meeting. It dawned on me that this was old business much like the Indigenous Day for everyone but me. I kept checking the map, trying to make out the lines of the new highway. New England is famous for being cramped but quaint because of its painted wooden buildings. It looked like this road was going to take all the parking away from the tire and vehicle repair company and a store. It was seriously going to encroach upon other businesses. I was, as unmanly as it is, horrified. For years, I have been noting the number of businesses failing and wondering how the town was going to get the money to fund its operations.
It appears to me that most of the town is made upon of people on government programs. How are you going to get more money out of them when your businesses fail? Surely someone must know something I don't know. Were we going to open the town to marjuana use or prostitution to bring in money? Are we all just True Believers and don't care? I looked around for a table with the Kool-Aid cups.
    The presentation was headed by a state transportation official and backed by a couple of men from some green highway building company. The official said that there were fifty parcels of land to be affected by widening the road and most of them were commercial. During the short talk, he repeatedly used the shield word "safety." Reasonably enough, he discussed traffic flow.
     In spite of my phobias and general cowardice -or maybe because of them- I couldn't say nothing. I got up to the mike and cameras and tried to be "inclusive" by saying I had noticed in our discussion we hadn't mention an important factor in safety and traffic flow: self-driving vehicles. It really surprised me that these four or five engineers hadn't at least mentioned self-drivers just to show us they were alive and awake. The question seemed to stun them so you could tell they hadn't considered it. How do you miss something so obvious and revolutionary? The spokesman asked me to say more. I admitted I couldn't, that neither he nor I knew what was going to shake out, but it would be "revolutionary." I could see the Reformer making fun of that if the staff doesn't just decide to ignore me like a bad smell in polite company. The spokesman pressed me again - see I was getting the pressure as if I were the presenter, not him. Again, I sounded lame, simply saying it would be more efficient, effective, and something else. He then pointed at the map and asked something like,"Then you think that may not be necessary?"
     "Yes," I replied.
Peter Nickerson, 352-359-0850, peternickerson12@yahoo.com, philosophy major.
Motto of my un-campaign: "Evidence, reason, and freedom. Humor too, aye?"