BOSTON — The other night on our way to the Fenway AMC multiplex
in Boston my wife and I walked past a 252-foot-long billboard that
read, “Welcome to Massachusetts. You’re more likely to live here.
Most effective gun laws and lowest gun fatality rate in the
country. Gun laws work.”
“Yeah, I’m sure I’m much safer in Boston right now than
in New Hampshire,” I said. The claim was all the more galling
considering the billboard was just around the corner from where
21-year-old Victoria Snelgrove was shot dead by police with a
“non-lethal” weapon last month while celebrating a Red Sox win.
“What about those parents who just tried to sacrifice their kids
in your hometown?” my wife asked.
It’s true, for the umpteenth time in the last two years, my
hometown made national news. Last Wednesday, police, working on a
tip, entered the Saint Mary Church in Rochester, NH, where they
found Nicole Mancini in her pajamas along with her boyfriend, John
Thurber, and her three children. Police say the couple was
preparing to sacrifice one of the children on the altar.
So my wife had a point. Still, I wracked my brain for a “but,”
because there is always a “but” when you’re married. It’s an
unwritten rule.
“But,” I said, “there was no actual sacrifice.”
In my mind’s eye I began planning the billboard I would some day
bring to the Granite State. It would read something along these
lines: “Welcome to New Hampshire. You’re more likely to live here.
Most effective anti-sacrifice laws and lowest pagan sacrifice
fatality rate in the country. Anti-sacrifice laws work.”
The whole incident sure doesn’t help our reputation nationwide.
Rochester still hasn’t lived down being home of one of the alleged
molesting Catholic priests in the scandal two years ago.
Coincidentally, the former priest was my high school Latin teacher
for three years, and while he certainly used some uncouth language
and had a weird habit of rubbing my shoulders, he was nevertheless
one of my favorite teachers. I still remember vividly the shock of
coming across his file two years ago while sorting through records
released by the state AG, and trying to make sense of the good and
evil that can coexist in a single man.
Anyway, last night one of my friends who still lives in town
called me up. In the wake of the near sacrifice people where he
works kept asking him why our town was so messed up.
“I don’t know what to tell them,” he said.
“Tell them to stop being such sissies,” I said. “There wasn’t
actually a sacrifice. Tell them a small minority of people in
Rochester might be drunk fighting in the streets every weekend, but
they don’t sacrifice their children.” Then I told him about my
billboard, which might help clear up the issue. He didn’t seem too
keen on it. This sort of long uncomfortable silence following the
presentation of my latest idea has become my lot in life.
“It’s still a nice quiet place to live, even if molesting
priests, presidential candidates, and parents trying to sacrifice
their children keep landing it on CNN,” I said finally.
The press is always looking for an oddball story, as it should
be. Bored by the mundane violence of everyday life in more
progressive states, its scribes invariably find the bad things
happening in small town America a much more interesting storyline.
In fact, the evil lurking beneath the veneer of these towns has
been a mainstay of literature and cinema for decades now. City
dwellers and the cultural elite, when faced with the ugliness in
their otherwise urbane mini-societies often facilitated by the very
policies they promised would bring utopia, seem to gleefully
embrace the idea that the REAL horror is actually in the places
they love to visit, but could never — sniff, sniff — live.
New Hampshire sets an example particularly despicable to these
folks. A good, solid economy without a sales or income tax. (Even
Democrats are forced to run against taxes in New Hampshire. The
Democrat who unseated the Republican governor actually had signs
that promised “NO SALES TAX. NO INCOME TAX.”) We have low crime
rates without draconian gun laws. We put a premium on personal
freedom and responsibility in areas where our neighbors in Vermont
and Massachusetts constantly legislate what’s in the best interests
of the collective, comrade. Still, life in New Hampshire works out
just fine without the meddling of the do-gooder brigades,
professional activists, and paid politicians. (Our legislators are
paid $100 a year. Massachusetts has to pay its part-time
legislators more than $50,000 a year to get them to serve.) And it
vexes the do-gooders, who refuse to believe anyone can live without
them, to no end.
Or maybe the country really just is truly concerned that our
rate of nearly-sacrificed-at-an-altar-children is 100 percent
higher than many other states. Somehow, I don’t think that’s it.
Given the choice between occasional or institutional insanity, I
won’t need to spend a lot of time mulling which way to go.
