Twelve times! Holy crap!

Really, this shouldn't be surprising. Fitchburg elected Deval Patrick with an even bigger percentage than he got in the general election. It elected Lisa Wong in a landslide. It is basically a pretty liberal town, at least as far as its voting record goes.

So why does it come across as conservative? Obviously, the newspaper doesn't help. But it goes beyond that. There's an old guard of conservative douchebags in Fitchburg. They're all over the media, they spend a lot of time writing letters to the editor and making inane comments on the internet.

They're the people who appear whenever a change (sometimes painful, usually necessary) needs to be made, kicking and screaming and demanding that things would be so much better if only we had an old white guy in charge. They're the ones who think "lifelong Fitchburg resident" is a qualification for public office, not a detriment.

If you get in an argument with this old guard, you will lose. Not because you're wrong. You're not. You'll lose because they can afford to spend ten hours a day writing bullshit about the town, and you don't have the time to debunk each of their idiotic points in turn. They can't win with logic, so they go with bulk.

But you know what? It doesn't matter.

In the end, most people in this area are on your side. Sure, there are plenty of conservative cranks ready to make a lot of noise. But nobody really listens to them. They're enjoying their own little echo chamber where they can talk about how Obama is a secret scary Muslim and Lisa Wong is all about self-promotion, not public service. They're just a little cult of ideology. And have about the same basis in reality as your average cult.

In the meantime, you and I should celebrate. We're actually not the minority. We may be the loud ones. The ones who make blogs and get in arguments and run campaigns and generally work to make things better. But we're just the representatives of the majority of people in this area, who basically support the same ideas.

Conservatism is a dying ideology. That's as true in central Massachusetts as it is in the rest of the state. At this point, that may even be the rest of the country.

Things are changing for the better. Enjoy. And keep up the good work.

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