The Charlestown Poopline! Special
Edition.
By Regina DeAngelo
 |
| It's now called "The Poopline" |
[A
version of this ran in the Westerly Sun on August 29. Like many Charlestown letters to the editor, it did not appear in their electronic version, so there is no link. This is Regina's original]
Like many of my neighbors in
Charlestown, I read the official town newsletter called The Pipeline.
The Pipeline calls itself "A
Municipal Informational Newsletter."
It used to inform its citizens of useful
facts: things like hurricane preparedness; town phone numbers; annual
beach-sticker fees.
In June, the town council published and
mass-mailed Volume 17 Number 2, a "Special Edition" of The Pipeline.
Whoa, I thought. A special edition! That means something is up! Something
important. Like an emergency or something.
Instead, what I received -- what the
trusting populace received -- was a fear-mongering piece of agit-prop about how
hard the sky would fall if something happened. About what would happen if possible
changes were made to the funding formula that supports our Chariho school
district, creating an Armageddon otherwise known as a single taxing district,
which would result in OUR TAXES GOING UP!
Here's what's weird about this:
- Nobody introduced legislation to create a "single taxing district (STD)."
- None of the Chariho Town Councils discussed it (and they'd be the ones to discuss it.)
- Nobody voted for it.
- There is no “single-taxing district.” Nor is it likely there will ever be one.
- As a result of this non-thing, our taxes are not going up.
According to our (formerly) trusted
Pipeline, a mysterious body calling itself the "Charlestown Ad Hoc Chariho
Withdrawal Committee" has taken the authority to inform us, via SPECIAL
EDITION, that it is AGAINST any and all possibilities of a single taxing
district, no matter how remote, imagined, dreamed or gossiped.
That's like me and my friends, one
evening over beers, forming a committee and tossing out a press release that
reads
Dude! If, Like, Taxes Go Up, Like, in Charlestown, We Will Not Hesitate to…Riot in the Streets! Yeah, Riot! In the Streets! And You Should Too!
Our press release would go on to show
charts illustrating how, should our drunken delusion reach such heights of
logic, our taxes could go up, should something like, I don't
know, some reconsideration of school district-funding or packs of rabid
Sasquatches come rampaging through town in the night… well. That Would Be Insupportable,
and our Ad Hoc Committee Would Not Stand for It, and Neither
Should You! -- written entirely in the subjunctive mood.
That's what this "Special
Edition" of our once-trusted Pipeline was: a fear-mongering propaganda
piece about an imagined tax consequence of an imagined scenario in which an
imagined single "taxing district" were to be created. In the
imagination of this mysterious Ad Hoc Withdrawal Committee.
This is the kind of propaganda our Town
Council is feeding its citizens under the guise of official publication.
Why? Because elections are coming, and
any politician, from rural town councilor on up to United States House of
Representatives, knows that when it has no real issues to run on, it's time to
light those trusty fear-torches so they're blazing bright in the hearts and
minds of voters come November.
Which is why the more informed populace
of Charlestown now refers to our once-trusted Town newsletter as "The
Poopline." Which is why between now and November we'll all be watching our
incumbents (and their "Ad Hoc Committees") carefully should they try
to again misinform its citizens under the guise of official, taxpayer-funded,
town-government publications.