Don’t we wake up every day now upset about something? There’s enough worrisome news to go around. Enough to fill our every waking—and wake-up—moment with concern, if not with outright despair. But my issue on this gray Monday morning is this: in the early hours of Sunday morning someone tried to burn the contents of the ballot drop box outside the Boston Public Library.
Yes, I am outraged and horrified that this could happen in one of our country’s great foundational cities outside one of that city’s most significant public institutions. But what gets me just as much is that the Boston Globe’s story about it ran in the second section. Ok, in a banner on the first page, but still the second section. “Metro” is a perfectly fine, important section, the place where you expect to read about who’s considering a run for mayor and how remote learning is working in the schools. But am I the only person who thinks the burning of ballots is a page one story?
The B1 placement feels like part of Boston’s—oh I hate to say it because I really do love this city, but—smugness. Its assumption that destroying ballots might happen in, say, Alabama or North Dakota. But. Not. Here. Feels like part of Boston’s history of looking away from racial inequalities and injustices that exist, yes, right here. In what we need to recognize is a majority minority city.
We should not be looking away from any of it. We pat ourselves on the back at the outpouring of counter-protestors when a “straight pride” or anti-Black Lives Matter or whatever demonstration occurs and, yes, of course, there are more people of good will than not. And we’re happy and relieved to know that. And we are a city in which big first steps toward greater justice for more people have been taken. But we can’t take anything for granted.
We’re not there yet if “there” is a place of equal opportunity and equal dignity and respect. We can’t look away from that. Here is where our country began its struggle for self-government. It’s also where someone tried to burn ballots.