Christopher Burbank: Remedy against Free Staters is showing up to meetings

To The Daily Sun,

I spent 13 years in New Hampshire’s fire and emergency services, and I learned what “Live Free or Die” means at two in the morning in January, watching mutual aid roll in — engines from three towns over, driven by plow drivers and nurses who left warm beds because a neighbor’s house was burning. Nobody invoices the family in the snow. Nobody checks how the burning house voted. We show up for each other. That is New Hampshire’s oldest agreement, and it is exactly what the Free State Project has spent 25 years trying to dissolve.

The Free Staters didn’t come to join New Hampshire. They came to use it — a laboratory for an ideology, with our towns as test subjects. The results are in. Grafton got crumbling roads and a starved fire department. Croydon activists slashed the school budget by more than half at a thinly attended meeting — until nearly 400 neighbors packed the next one and took their school back. And Lakes Region readers need no reminder of Gunstock, where commissioners installed by a Free State-aligned county delegation drove the mountain’s entire leadership to resign at the height of summer. One of those same legislators asked New Hampshire to secede from the Union. The House said no, 323-13.

Freedom here was never the freedom to be left alone while everything falls apart. It is Town Meeting, the volunteer department, the pancake breakfast that pays for turnout gear. John Stark wrote “Live Free or Die” as an old soldier toasting men who stood in a line beside him at Bennington.

The remedy is attendance. They win in empty rooms and lose in full ones. Fill the rooms. New Hampshire belongs to the people who show up when the tones drop.

Christopher Burbank

Moultonborough