As Below, So Above

How the civic abuses of national politics trickle down to Main Street

Photo: Maan Limburg / Unsplash

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I’ve decided to turn off the Wrestlemania passing for national news and focus on my local reality. I was hoping that helping neighbors, engaging in mutual aid, and working on local issues might just engender a kind of solidarity. And if we all did this, it would eventually trickle up to the way we handle big issues at scale. Maybe the hands-on way we interact down here on the ground in the real world will stand in such stark contrast to the sensationalist puppet show on Facebook and the cable news, that we’ll all come to realize the debates on TV are not an adequate representation of who we are, nor an appropriate venue in which to work out our collective problems.

So far, anyway, I’ve been proven wrong. It’s the same shit down here on the ground.

The first local issue I jumped into was our town’s decision whether to “opt out” of New York State’s legalization of cannabis lounges and dispensaries. It was intense. Some parents were horrified at the prospect of their kids becoming marijuana or hard drug users, in spite of ample evidence that marijuana legalization and dispensaries don’t increase teen use. (If anything, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, they tend to decrease adolescent cannabis use because dispensaries put black market dealers out of business, and make smoking weed look less cool to kids.)

But still, it’s a hot-button issue and the town’s Board of Trustees could have done a better job of communicating about the issue, soliciting feedback, and forging consensus in the months leading up to the decision deadline.

After a few weeks of vitriolic rhetoric on Zoom meetings, the Board—just like the town—split 50/50 on the issue. The Mayor broke the tie with a compromise, permitting dispensaries and opting out of consumption lounges. It looked to me like she had taken the wise, Solomonic approach: if everyone’s a bit unhappy, then chances are you’ve made the right judgment. (Besides, our tiny town with too little parking and strict zoning rules is not getting a dispensary any time soon. The whole issue is symbolic — more a way of deciding whether marijuana is to be considered as socially acceptable as alcohol.)