Robert’s Rules

From Here or Being Here

I would like you to account for the story you are telling, I say. To no one in particular. Or maybe myself. Or perhaps the guy at city council who says “I grew prosperous under this mayor,” while all I could think is that he’s been in office 18 years. A whole lifetime. He got rid of term limits. [EDIT: He had people run a ballot question extending his terms from 2yrs to 4.] You certainly had no opportunity to grow prosperous here under anyone else.

Why can’t you just be happy? the prosperous guy says.

I receive it as a corollary to “smile, honey.”

Because what an ask to make. Demand frowns be turned upside down because you believe the view would be prettier, more peaceful, if you didn’t have to hear anyone else’s unhappiness with the status quo that lines your pocket. (Minute 1:13 to hear mine)

I stand in-person, right behind the Asian elders and their translator that the school committee chair tries to give “the same three minutes as everybody else.” (Minute 47:30 to see us speak)

It was a lie, the school committee chair later says, claiming she did the right thing, before directing people to send angry letters to a local journalist who covered the issue.

They need to learn English, come prepared, deport them, certain comments under the newspaper article about the incident say.

I would feel gobsmacked at the blatancy of it all, except I had already been taken aback at the anger in this woman’s eyes at the meeting prior, when the same time-for-translation ask had been made, and the course of action she is taking now matches that entitlement and fury.

I see that it’s not because there aren’t enough Asians here to celebrate and demand a vote, but that there are suddenly too many.

The school committee could have voted to approve Lunar New Year as a holiday on a simple majority vote (at any time, really), but the mayor instead decided to hold off two weeks longer to talk with a lawyer who somehow might prevent the inevitable. Ostensibly there’s some detail in Robert’s Rules of Order that may or may not require prior notice or a 2/3 vote, even though evidence for that seems nil.

Clearly what they want to say instead is what a Facebook group they belong to already says, that Quincy is for people born and raised here.

The Asian people can just go ahead and celebrate Good Friday and speak English like everybody else. They can have an excused absence for their little holiday. But how dare they make the rest of born and raised Quincy join them in a day off for Lunar New Year.

This is still the same country that once decided the three-fifths compromise was a good idea. A nation that claimed redlining was about protecting home values. A Supreme Court that went from the Chinese Exclusion Act to gutting the Voting Rights Act this year.

Half the time getting called equal. Crumbs getting described as a place at the table.

This isn’t who we are, I had sadly said, after trump was elected the first time. But it was me that was wrong.

Now I say this isn’t who I want us to be.

I hear a teacher in the back of the line shout out a reference to the QPS public school language access plan, demanding that these Chinese-speaking women get their due - double the allotted time - to allow for translation, and the room erupts in clapping while the supposed decision-maker sits stone-faced on her dias, leadership usurped as they finish their speeches. I clap until my hands hurt.

My turn to speak is next. Suddenly all I can think of is my own family, my own heritage. I only know enough French to get myself in trouble, I often joke, referring to a cultural crime committed against the generations before my own. My Grandma and her people showing up to school in south Louisiana and getting punished for speaking Cajun French.

I cannot claim to know what caused this school committee chair to dig in her heels at all of us and refuse to understand what equity actually means, especially since she had already dared to call making Lunar New Year a holiday inequitable.

If it was the same mentality as all the teachers rapping the knuckles of my ancestors while saying English-only.

I am not a racist another school committee member says in the same breath as inferring that having an Asian spouse makes the local journalist covering the topic less objective. In her world, a white reporter with a Chinese wife isn’t seen as slightly more of an expert on the matter, but an interloper. On the wrong side.

We are voluntary multiculturalists, after all, those of us in interracial marriages, unable to see, due to our love, why people would hold out against such a thing.

But you’d think someone quibbling so hard about policies and types of votes around here would have familiarized herself with what a population that speaks multiple languages requires.

I used to find the term white woman tears a bit offensive when I saw it used, thinking that us white women are allowed to cry about stuff as much as anyone, but now I understand it is this exact kind of context that the term refers to. Someone like this and her colleague, both crying about being the victim of name calling and disparagement, not the victim of their own poor decisions, their own limited and judgmental worldviews openly named and shamed.

I can only tell you that the necessary learning is not taking place, and neither is the requisite honesty. The video of the evening speaks for itself and all of us.

The committee chair decides it’s a good idea to lash out at the coverage, put this local journo’s email address on blast, ensuring that he get his own share of angry letters from the same crowd that is championing a new Facebook group (a cheap knockoff of our very own Quincy Votes!), headlined by an ominous AI-generated poster that says “From here. For here. By us.”

“I feel like someone should ask them for clarification on what ‘from here’ means, even if we all know already,” I tell a friend. I’d just left the Quincy Multicultural Festival with my children, in possession of a henna tattoo, a Guatemalan flag, and a friendship bracelet. I didn’t see any of the “Quincy born and raised” types there, perhaps hosting a table with boxed takeout coffee, beer-battered haddock, or marshmallow fluff sandwiches, but I’d have respected them more if I did. And maybe they’d have gotten out of their bubble and learned something about themselves and the city they inhabit if they did.

Sadly for these people, no matter how many letters they write, no matter how many goalposts they move, I think they’ll find that the future of Quincy, in fact the current state of Quincy, is not all townies who think like them. It already contains a lot of mixed families like mine, plenty of people who believe we all belong, and multicultural events for the lot of us. We are not unusual here. In fact that’s one of the beautiful things about this place. So I will defend that.

I don’t believe that anyone who avoids understanding and inclusion of those of us born elsewhere is fit to hold office or provide a leadership role.

I do not have to be “old Quincy” to vote. I do not have to be “born and raised” to recognize or be involved in what’s going on. I do not have to be “from here” to matter. I just have to be here.

I will love this place. I will call it my own.

Nonetheless, I have a new question. Namely, what kind of entitlement does it take to plea bargain down two instances of white collar crime, one of them in the six figures, into a misdemeanor, then argue that you deserve to be completely untarnished by a criminal history when speaking in a public forum?

I ask this because last week a fellow city council open mic’er that I’d referenced as a serial embezzler came into my own blog comments here saying she was “not a felon,” admonishing me to leave her husband out of this (even as I recall her screaming “I’m a firefighter’s wife!” into a microphone), and saying that speaking at city council should be open to everyone, including her (who had been there to argue against civility).

Better to be thought a thief than get on your keyboard and remove all doubt, I thought at first. But second thought shows she has nonetheless gotten more credibility and time than many people who are honest tax paying residents simply speaking another language.

I feel more amused that a man at city council open mic smiled and laughed as he mentioned that I’d likened him to Clint Eastwood, then thanked me for it. Seeing him light up, momentarily happy, I liked him a little more, even though he’d been rude to me. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, as these MAGA types usually do see themselves as operating in the manner of Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, or The Punisher. A certain vein of masculinity.

However, I soon saw a different and softer layer. His daughter, owner of a consignment shop that I’d learned earlier in the same City Council meeting has got the lowest rent in the city-leased and taxpayer-provided Munroe building, came up and spoke. I found her description of the consignment model as being the same thing as hosting pop-ups for a fee to be a bit of a stretch, but she was well-spoken and clearly proud of her business. I realized he’s keyboard warrioring and up there every time city council meets not because he doesn’t have anything better to do, but because protecting this administration’s way of doing things is also protecting her livelihood and bottom line. He’s doing this for his kids. All his glowering and complaining and gatekeeping is because they are the ones behind the gate.

And that’s honestly one of the more difficult things about an entrenched patronage machine that’s race and place-of-origin based, or otherwise. There are beneficiaries. There are people who would very much like for the gravy train not to end. There are people who grow prosperous within such a system, because of such a system. At the expense of others. And most of the time they feel deserving of the perks they are getting. They want them to continue. They do not see it as waste or mismanagement or someone else unfairly getting left out or left holding the bag, future opportunities curtailed. These types do not for a moment think it’s unfair to ask me and you and especially those who don’t share their language or their holidays to pay extra to keep their shop open or water their grass.

So it’s one small slippery slope between an Asian resident asking for extra time to speak in public in favor of a cultural holiday, with the help of a translator, to demanding bigger things, scarier things, like an answer to why they can’t get some cut rate rent in a public building for their own small business. It upsets the delicate balance of power for the rest of us to be entertaining such questions, such ideas, then doing our local voting, daring to be in the room, up at the mic, calling out what’s happening for what it is.

So I see why these things get inverted. The wrong people getting treated as impudent, uppity, intemperate. Spoken of as if they’re the ones stealing time and resources, being rude and ungrateful, while the people making the false accusations, trying to limit others’ time and reach, partner with actual convicted thieves to do so.

I’ve been told a lot of silly stuff in my life by men explaining things to me, trying to keep me in my place. Some of it about lawnmowers or finances or water lines, but I’ve never until now been admonished, by a man I’ve never met, telling us all that he’s sure the golf course water bills I learned I’ve involuntarily helped pay for (and maybe he does too?) are actually a refund they were due for an unused sewer bill. That was a new one. And he sounded so sure of it too. Very invested in the idea that Granite Links is on his side and isn’t picking his pocket.

But using his logic, lemme see if I too can get a water abatement, after I submit a request talking about how my front yard garden is state of the art (I did grow like 80 daffodils this year, to be fair) and I’m not sending the water I use for it to the sewer. Love to see how well that works out for me.

So that’s a few layers to sit with. That there are the Asian residents and the newcomers, but also plenty ordinary people in this administration with political patronage jobs, political patronage overtime hours, and political patronage office and business spaces that are shaking their heads and shaking in their boots and shaking their fists. If I was one of them, I expect I would also be nervous about all the questions the new city council is asking, all the room the new school committee is about to support, all the ways things will change.

Sometimes it can be hard to tell who are simply defending a paycheck and who are defending a worldview, since they all hang out with each other, the cronies and the bigots. All supporting each other’s entitlement and indifference.

They probably have more in common than not. Really it’s not just Asian people they are viewing as inferior. Thinking they can get one over on. It’s all of the rest of us. Anybody here in Quincy who isn’t politically connected. Isn’t also on the take. It’s just more blatant when you see it happen with Asian people.

And that’s why I’ll keep calling out the bullshit, encouraging our elected officials to meet a more representative standard. Have checks and balances. Use our communal resources in a way that’s actually for the whole community.

But meantime stereotypes about fortune tellers and thieves in cahoots abound for a reason. So I slowly put down the imaginary newspaper, filled with headlines I’ve written, worthy of The Onion.

Local man threatens to give city councilor something to cry about, by dressing up in a racist caricature of her while crying and speaking pretend Chinese.

School committee head announces new math initiative where Asian people get less time, fewer votes, and no holidays. “That should make it more equitable,” she says.

Area Dad sells his soul to get his kid cheap rent.

Then I sidle up to Clint Eastwood and ask what’s a cowboy like you doing up in all this mess?

After all, we are the City of Presidents and also the home of that viral video about the baby feckin’ whale, bro.

Roberts’ rules say you’ve got to choose a side.