Almost 500 people gathered at Mashpee Town Meeting Monday night to resoundingly vote yes on a wastewater treatment system for Mashpee Wakeby Pond. Both the outcome of the vote and the turnout restored a little of my faith in our ability to come together and self-govern. Local government and town meetings, with all their warts and flaws, remain an example of how governance can, should, and still does work.
My take-home from this one meeting, but I think it has universal resonance, is that people matter. The advocates that were invested on both sides were clearly motivated to attend, but most of the attendees came to listen, make judgements on what they heard and then acted collectively and resoundingly to do something positive for their community and the environment. The irrefutable fact that people with widely disparate macro political views came together to act for clean water shows that there is hope to bridge locally what seem to be chasms that separate us nationally.
There are many lessons here. The people of Cape Cod are committed to improving our environment and want better water quality. Local government officials should be commended and appreciated for developing and presenting projects to their voters. And perhaps most encouragingly, community consensus remains achievable, and we don’t have to resolve everything before we do anything.
Let’s build on success, one environmental improvement project at a time. Nothing breeds success like success. Keep ‘em coming.
