Newsletter for Meeting of September 3, 2014
September 3, 2014 Newsletter
By John Hammer
Charlotte Shelburne Rotary
Wednesday, September 3, 2014, 7:15 a.m.
Trinity Episcopal Church Community Room
Welcome
Incoming President Richard Fox opened the meeting with the Pledge. Doris Sage gave the invocation.
Guests: Bob Maynes – Past member of the Club
Jim Donovan – Prospective member
Rick and Mary Mazer – Guest Fritz Horton and he is a member of the South Burlington Rotary Club
Margaret Woodruff – Guest of Lara Keenan and Charlotte Librarian
Ginny Gascott – Rotarian from West Virginia and guest of Evan Webster.
John Harris – Guest of Fritz Horton.
Noël – Linda Gilbert’s sister and guest.
Upcoming:
September 5 – Latin Dance Party 7-10
September 10 – Club Assembly
September 11 – Board Meeting (7:30AM)
September 17 – Visit by District Governor, Bruce Pacht.
September 20 – Shelburne Farms Harvest Fest. Volunteer opportunity to park cars.
September 24 – Humane Society of Chittenden County
October 1 – Syndi Zook, Executive Director, Lyric Theater
District 7850 Calendar: Hot Link http://www.clubrunner.ca/Portal/Events/EventsCalendar.aspx?accountid=50051
Announcements
Shelburne Veterans’ Memorial – Sam Feitelberg reported that they have raised $78,000. Bricks are on sale at the Farmers’ Market.
Projects – Michael Clapp reported that the club’s construction crew for the Hinesburg Shed project at the Hinesburg Community School worked last weekend. The crew consisted of himself, Doris Sage and Dennis Webster. There will be another work party this coming weekend from 8AM until 1PM.
Shelburne Farms Harvest Fest- It’s that time again for Shelburne Farms Harvest Fest that falls this year on September 20th. Bill Root is once again organizing the parking detail. There will be three periods which need covering; 7-9AM need two to help park vendors behind the Farm Barn and two sessions, 9-12 and 12-4 when 4-5 volunteers are needed. Bill circulated a list for volunteers.
Car Raffle – Hold the date! November 7th.
Paul Harris Fellows - Ric Flood, in his role as Grand Eminence presented Steve and Elaine Dates, each with their third Paul Harris Fellowship pin (three sapphires). Congratulations. Steve said that Elaine was doing well in her program for recovery from cancer, but still has some surgical procedures ahead. They were not unexpected and are part of the programed recovery schedule.
Sergeant at Arms – Evan Webster encouraged anecdotes from visiting other Rotary Clubs.
Ric Flood – Off on a five-day bike trip in Marion, MA and happy to have Bob Maynes here.
Russ Blodgett – Sends his best to Elaine Dates.
Linda Barker – Celebrated her mother-in-law’s 90th birthday in Toronto last weekend.
Noël – Happy to be here to help with the Latin Dance Party.
Linda Gilbert – Thanks for those who have already bought their tickets for the Latin Dance Party. Looking forward to seeing a lot of members there on Friday night.
Kris Engstrom – For Elaine Date’s recovery.
Ginny Gascott – For her nephew-in-law to be, Evan. She described her visit with a Rotary Team to Ghana where they did a fact-finding tour to determine which programs in the north and south were effective. She described it as “Enlightening.”
Jim Donovan – Looking forward to being a member.
Doris Sage – Looking forward to a great fall coming up.
Chris Davis – Made up at a Rotary Club in Chinatown, NY. Up three floors in the back where they put on a multicourse lunch. He recommends it.
Mark Joczik – Super excited that football season starts tomorrow.
John Hammer – Reported his make-up at the Rotary Club of Downtown Hong Kong where it is held in one of the five star hotels on the harbor. It cost $150 dollars to enter – they pay for guests. They too had multiple course lunches for about three hours. The room is white with red and gold accents, there are porcelain plates, silver flatware and the waiters are dressed in livery with white gloves. Now there’s an experience. By the way, it was conducted in Chinese, but one of the members sat beside him and translated.
Howard Seaver – Attended a wedding last weekend on a mountain where the guests arrived by double chair lift.
Ed Cafferty – Even though he lost the election of Sheriff of Chittenden County, he found the election process a great experience.
Dennis Webster – Great to find out how well Doris Sage wields a shovel.
Gary Marcotte – Sorry to have missed the work party in Hinesburg last weekend.
President Richard – His older daughter opened a late-season lemonade stand last weekend and turned a profit.
Fritz Horton – Daughter and her two demolition experts are gone. Last Wednesday he had a one-way conversation with the device on a sailboat known as a boom. It was a one-way discussion.
Lara Kennan – Happy to have Margaret Woodruff, Charlotte Librarian, here as her guest.
PDG Steve Dates – Happy for Elaine’s continuing recovery.
Dave Rice – Off to Toronto for ten days.
Bill Deming – Nice weekend at Breadloaf as alumni of Middlebury College.
Doris Sage won the draw and picked the Three of Diamonds to roll over the approximately $200 pot.
Speaker. Frank Bryan, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at UVM, educator, commentator, writer and humorist. He is a former Golden Gloves boxer, rodeo enthusiast and bull-rider and his current interest includes oxen, hunting and fishing.
Spoke on the survival of the Vermont character. In traveling not long ago and he was wondering how to start his talk with an introduction which included a description of Vermonters to a conference of International Trial Lawyers. He wanted a short approach. He noted that he had been impressed with the pithy statement by Bernard deVoto who once said, ”There’s no more Yankee than Polynesian in me, but when I go to Vermont, I feel I’m traveling toward my own place.” South of Rutland he saw a great big sign that said, “Vote No!”
It described Vermonters to a tee! At the last primary this year, the turnout barely made 9% of the registered voters. Vermont politics used to be pretty fully Republican and the primary decided how the state would go politically. The Republican Party was split between the progressives and conservatives. The primaries often had a larger turnout than presidential elections. Now there is a no-party system because “interests are no longer aggregated under the banner of an organization (party) which would then present them to the people. Then (in those days) the people themselves would make their choice.” Because this no longer happens, voting numbers are tending downward. It matters because at the same time the critical aggregative mechanism that you have to have in a democracy is no longer there. There is no way to aggregate the interests so the public can make a choice. This is where the interests make their link to the public. You can count on people to vote with a party’s interest because most citizens don’t study the issues to the depth that is done so by the effective party. As societies become more complex and the issues have become more centralized, the need for parties has become more important than it ever was before. It seems that the interests are getting more centralized by the government and the parties are losing their way in aggregating common interests.
For instance when Governor Shumlin was discussing his pre-kindergarten policies, he went so far as to go right down to where he said, “I think if we could just involve children even earlier than Kindergarten, at the very earliest stages, even back to the womb, then salaries would be better, people be happier because they are better educated.”
Bryan said, “Think about that statement, he’s saying that the government should be involved in education back to birth. Do people have to send their very young right to a schooling situation? We are almost in a pied piper society wherever the children, where they are in fact the state’s children. This is awesome in its imbecility.”
Example. Bryan lives on Big Hollow Road in Starksboro. He asked, “How are you going to get the three-year-old kids to the Kindergarten and back again. Are you going to put them on a school bus? They could be on a bus for 45 minutes. What will you do with your 3 or 4 year old on a bus in the dark sitting there before they even get to Kindergarten? No one in the state could answer that answer. The question is whether they need to learn that stuff at that age. We don’t think things through to their ultimate consequences.” Education is as a good an example as any. “Education is a metaphor for politics in the modern period.”
The overall assessment? “It is important in modern society that you have aggregative mechanisms that group interests under identifiable labels or banners so that you can know what you are voting for. What we have now is media politics which is interest group politics and there is no responsibility or accountability at all.“ We have to decide if we are going to aggregate these interests at the center, we need to decide who is going to do it. We have to do it with some sort of organizational structures and these organizational structures have traditionally been political parties. “Now we are in a very amorphous situation where the political parties have declined at the same time the interests of the government has increased.
At the very time that that is happening, the most important critical mechanism that will allow government to operate well is in decline. The party system is in decline at the same time that the government is growing more powerful. The critical serious issue at hand is how do we wade through the details because there are no party-like organizations that can aggregate the concepts into a more understandable package. We need to be able to vote for something like a party that will carry forward the aggregate ideas that we desire. “It’s a challenge for democracies all over the world.”
The digital information consists only of detail. It is not aggregated. It’s unstructured. It only exacerbates this kind of anarchy. The parties represent people’s interests.
Bryan stated that he is a decentralist. He believes “in big government as long as big government is in a very small place.” He’s a town meeting democrat (with a small “d”). What is going on now is not democracy up to and including what is going at state level. It’s not government on a human scale. What’s going on now is called ‘interest group pluralism.’
Question/Answer – The Swiss do democracy well because they have a decentralized government. We have to turn our information technology inward. We should let the people in each town decide for themselves as to what is taught in the schools. There is still suspicion that there will be a tyranny of the majority in small towns and so the state needs to act to protect against that. The empirical data show that any town in Vermont now is nearer the mean education level in the aggregate of the state than ever before. The towns are more and more a microcosm of the state.
The electronic revolution is decentralist in character. You can get all the information you need, so there is every reason to leave decision making at a local level. If you have no variety, you will have no progress at all. We’ve turned into a pied piper society where the pied piper is the government and we are turning our children over to the state at a very early age. That’s a metaphor for the increasing centralism, homogeneity; therefore, it is the weakness of governments everywhere and the solution is to entrust people at the local level to make decisions.