At the heart of an absurd and drawn-out spectacle consuming the Worcester, MA City Council is a depressing disregard for basic political responsibility.
On the evening of February 11th, 2025, the City Council of Worcester, Massachusetts—the second largest city in New England—voted to designate themselves a "Sanctuary City for Transgender and Gender Diverse People." As with most city council meetings, it was open to the public, and comments from citizens were on the agenda, particularly from representatives of the LGBTQ+ community, who had been attending meetings en masse every Tuesday for the past few weeks.
All Worcester City Council meetings are live-streamed and uploaded to the City of Worcester website for the public record. And, like most city politics, this one was largely ignored thereafter. However, the subject, high rate of attendance, tenor, and colorful constituency of this particular meeting attracted a lot of outside attention, launching the city into the viral morass of social media and national news (particularly the right-wing outlets), complete with an already infamous supercut of impassioned Worcester residents exercising their right to civic participation.
The video was weapons-grade cringe of the woke variety, and don't pretend like you don't know exactly what I'm talking about. The supercut was cherry-picked to cut out all the good (or at least sane) speakers, of course, but I watched the whole damn thing, and it was a lot of hysteria, histrionics and self-indulgence. People of all political leanings responded emphatically to the circus, with laughter, scorn, disgust, fremdschämen, weltschmerz, and probably a whole bunch of other German words that you experience when you're watching a large group of human beings testifying like lunatics. But when a moment this big goes viral, shouldn't someone dig into it, beyond the spectacle?
