When I taught writing in Vermont prisons, I had to leave everything but my keys and teaching materials in my car.

Up until recently, I had only known the National Rifle Association as the sporting turned Second Amendment lobbying group that has fought against proposed gun restrictions, including ones for the AR-15, the assault-style rifle used in the Parkland, Florida, school shooting that left seventeen students and teachers dead.

In 1981, a year after the Religious Right abandoned Jimmy Carter, a born-again evangelical Christian, for Ronald Reagan, Billy Graham remarked, “It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.”

It’s Town Meeting time. But so what? Why should we care?

I wish Americans today might follow the sensible example of an organization I’ve belonged to for quite a few years now.

A neighbor told me recently that his fifth-grade son was interested in Town Meeting. “He wants to learn more about – what’s that ‘order’ thing?”

As soon as the smoke had cleared in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, the cry went up - how could such a rampage, claiming 17 lives, finally be prevented?

On Nine-Eleven, 1997, the late actor Charlton Heston, best known for his role as Moses in The Ten Commandments , spoke at the National Press Club on behalf of the NRA. Yes, the NRA had opposed the Brady Bill, but with Heston as its spokesperson, the gloves, or the silencer, came off.

Legendary Vermont Political Scientist Frank Bryan is fond of saying “Real democracy takes place in small places” and drawing a direct line from ancient Greece to our New England Town meeting.

It’s happened again. This week massive ice jams and flooding set in motion by warm weather, rain and rising waters put people and property in danger.