I've got to digress a little bit from what I usually talk about to reflect a bit about all the nudity stuff that's been happening here in Brattleboro. What got me really thinking was a visit I had at my house on Saturday afternoon. A guy in my neighborhood stopped by and asked me if I would sign a petition asking the Selectboard here to make the interim anti-nudity ordinance it passed last week permanent.
I didn't sign. For a lot of reasons. One was the wording of the petition. I don't remember the exact language, but it made it seem like citizens of this town were being confronted by a constant stream of nudists pouring into town to jiggle various body parts in front of innocent, law-abiding folks just trying to live their lives and buy their groceries without having to see naked people. I don't know about you, but I don't feel we're being overrun. I personally have never seen one.
More to the point, I don't see all this nudity as being that big a deal. Clearly some people do, and they are our friends and neighbors and, God love 'em, they can get passionate about it if they want, but this town faces so many more serious problems. It's still digging out from financial woes, property taxes are high, affordable housing and jobs are hard to find ... I could go on.
A number of people have cast the adoption of this ordinance as a business issue, but I found their arguments highly unpersuasive ... other than the fact that naked people have no place to carry their wallets.
On a more gut level, this whole naked thing is just much ado about nothing. This is not a scourge. It's just a few people expressing themselves or doing it just for the attention. This whole prudish uproar has distracted attention from the real issues the board needs to work on. In that sense, it mirrors what often goes on in Washington, where senators and representatives and executive branch get all in a dither about some pointless thing while Rome burns. Don't we all shake our heads when that happens? And now it's happening here.
For all those reasons and just a gut-level devotion I have to individual liberties and a real concern that there's too much legislation of morality in our country now, I didn't sign the petition. I told my neighbor I felt the town had bigger issues to grapple with, and I wished him well. This whole nudity thing is a tempest in a tea cup. Besides, for eight months of the year, it's too cold for nudists. And even when it warms up, black flies must be a real problem for them.