Thankfully, the West Marlborough Township supervisors meeting on Sept. 1 was a brief one. Because it was hot, the township garage in Doe Run (which serves as the board's meeting place) had its doors wide open. As soon as it got dark, thick swarms of gnats -- I mean, thousands of them -- invaded the place, attracted by the overhead lights, and crawled all over those of us in the audience. I flailed around with my reporter's notebook trying to smack them. Baz Powell, normally the gentlest of Quakers, pointed with pleasure to the pile of corpses she had swatted. The normally stoic mushroom farmer sitting next to me left early, and all the gnats that had been crawling on him turned their attention to me.
The instant the meeting ended, I escaped to the comparative darkness of the parking lot. Bizarrely, my first thought was of Erich Fromm's psychology book "Escape From Freedom," in which he contrasts negative freedom ("freedom from") with positive freedom ("freedom to"). Most definitely the former, in this case: freedom from gnats!
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