Callaghan for Hanover Selectboard

Three candidates for two Hanover Selectboard seats are on the ballot on May 9. I am one of them.

With a dozen years of prior service on our local school boards, current service on the Hanover Finance Committee (since 2015) and a long-standing commitment to our community, I feel ready. But I don’t step forward without some trepidation. As fortunate as Hanover is, we have our challenges, including: affordability, development pressures, costly investment needs and livability pressures. The last of these spans climate change resiliency, care for our environment, energy transformation and various forms of accessibility.

If elected, I would:

■Work diligently to support high-quality services for our community, at a reasonable cost. We should seek to attract and retain the best available professionals across our departments while also ensuring accountability and performance so that the value proposition for taxpayers is compelling

■Energetically support and help integrate our new town manager and our new finance director. Their success will go far toward meeting the challenges we face

■Explore avenues for greater dialogue and cooperation between town, schools, college and other stakeholders in pursuit of economies and to explore potential avenues for growth that are least harmful to existing community members.

Having raised children in this community since 2005, and with substantial business, board and other nonprofit experience, I am motivated and prepared to work for the betterment of Hanover and all its residents. I have been fortunate to further develop skills in budgeting, governance, communication and board leadership while supporting our community. It would be an honor to serve Hanover by extending this record as a member of our Selectboard.

Irrespective of your position on my candidacy, I urge you to vote via Australian ballot on May 9 during the hours of 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. In addition, be a part of our town’s distinctly New England form of “assembly democracy,” on display at the business portion of the meeting beginning at 7 p.m. It is an increasingly rare form of community conversation and participatory decision-making.

Carey Callaghan

Hanover
candidate for Selectboard

Actions over lawn signs

Vermont has been a consistent bulwark against obnoxious advertisements littering our beautiful byways; in no small part because of the brilliant billboard ban. We value tenets such as personal responsibility, discouragement of conspicuous ostentation, a welcoming attitude to newcomers 0151 kindly paired with the “good fences makes good neighbors” philosophy as a testament to traditional community respect — respect for privacy is an unwritten law here in Vermont.

Vermont is also a beacon of understated class, an all too common fleeting gesture where material wealth and glitz don’t define personal character. Our land has always been a prognosticator of simplicity as vanguard. What’s a bit unnerving lately is to view all the unsightly and divisive lawn signs dotting yards, public roads and historic town centers. Surreptitious little billboards cropping up indirectly pushing one’s values onto a passerby without a polite introduction. Political views are best kept withheld until broached by decorum, or, waiting for the voting booth.

As for “the environment,” a copious amount of material and energy will be saved sans signs. The transitory messages printed on the signs should remind their owners that actions — that leading by example — always speak louder than lexical ripostes. Try: Create a cornerstone of trust with differing views with your neighbors — this usually works best for long-term cooperation, more so, for progressively keeping Vermont handsomely winsome.

Nick Fabrikant

Vershire

New order on the way?

Sudan and Ukraine are only more recent examples of entire countries being held hostage to wars between men — and I mean men! — that nobody seems able to stop as entire landscapes, economies and citizens are destroyed in front of the eyes of the world.

My first question is: Why can nobody seem to halt this ongoing wholesale and wanton chaos, murder and general destruction that is suicidally ruining entire cultures? Is it that, as the patriarchal system that has both destroyed and repeatedly reconstructed our world for the last 5,000 years has begun to decompose, as humans begin to evolve past it into another as-yet-unnamed system, many men (and the women who support them) are fighting desperately to maintain our malfunctioning culture, using only the tools they understand — those of violent confusion and strife?

My second question is: Is there enough power remaining in the world’s damaged, brutalized and largely disunited women to finally unite and claim the power we were born with, to galvanize a new direction for our species?

My dream is, as in the Greek comedy “Lysistrata” and as was hinted at in the mass female-guided revolt in Iran recently, women will finally rise up en masse, and with the aid of evolved men, finally transcend the omnipresent violence and murder and replace it with something still to be imagined ... something that includes all colors in a genuine, roots-deep democracy, something that substitutes life for death.

I hope — and I must admit something in me believes! — that the seeds of this new way of being have already been planted, and that though my generation (born in the 1930s) may see only hints and whiffs of a truly new order, it is inexorably on the way.

Nan Bourne

Woodstock

]]>