Local talk radio in Massachusetts prattles on in the background about the decision by the Board of Selectman in Amherst, Massachusetts put a resolution onto their Special Town Meeting to invite two Guantanamo Bay detainees into their community.

It is not cast in stone, as the Town Meeting has to vote on it.  It may not happen, but the cat is out of the bag, and the political furor has already started from an article being put on the warrant that only requires 100 signatures to happen. 

For those unfamiliar with the area Amherst Massachusetts sits at the center of five academic institutions, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Amherst College, the University of Massachusetts, and Hampshire  College.  Amherst, then, follows the stereotype of academic settings of being rather left of center.

And so talk radio rails on about this community inviting Guantanamo detainees into its midst.  Little has come forth as yet as to the background of the two individuals.

It's a "Not in My Back Yard" or NIMBY question that reaches far beyond the confines of the bucolic little New England Village setting idealized by artists for years.  

Specificially:

• These five colleges have 2,200 faculty teaching 28,000 students.  Those 28,000 students have parents scattered around the world.  NIMBY fears, then, spread through the understandable tentacles of parental concern.  
• The Quabbin Reservoir, made years ago by flooding five communities, serves as the drinking supply for the Greater Boston Area, and is not guarded well at all.  NIMBY fears, then, spread east to the concentrated populations centers of Massachusetts.
• Cable news pandering to target segments of the population will undoubtedly pick up on this and use it as a weapon in the divisive partisan rhetoric wars.  NIMBY fears, then, will spread to the galvanized camps that have become our political parties as we continue on with a politics of demonization rather than one of conciliation and compromise.

But what if these two individuals truly are innocents or simple foot soldiers in the ill-defined army of the terror threat?  What if they were simple conscripts who just agreed to do something simple like courier data about which they knew nothing in exchange for the safety of their family?  The notoriety makes it virtually impossible for them to assimilate into a community without intense scrutiny.

It's a tough, tough issue, this.  We know such things as sleeper cells exist.  We know those who did the damage on 9/11 had moved freely throughout our country for quite some time before turning on us and acting.  We have an understandable bias based on this.

The perfect scenario is that these two individuals thrive in an academic setting, availing themselves of the opportunity and being able to become productive in their lives and to serve as role models to those with heightened fear of Arabic people.  

I do not see how that is possible, though.  I do not see how they will be able to live peacefully assuming that sufficient vetting was made in advance of the offer and that is what they would want to do.  Either that, or they may simply not come.

 That happens, and, while no lives will be lost, the demonization will start about racism and bias and all the rest. 

I drove through the area to and from prep school with my mother often.  It was a longer route than necessary, but she attended Smith College, and liked it.  There's a turnout overlooking the Quabbin Reservoir I know well.  Every time we passed it, I heard the same story of her and my father driving back to Smith from a function at my father's college in the early morning hours when they pulled over to listen on the radio to the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

This story was never told without rancorous utterances about the Japanese being thrown in.  It was a deep seated animosity that never left her being.  Her reaction to my first new car purchase being a Toyota is down right unprintable.

So will this gesture ameliorate that understandable fear in people still traumatized by 9/11 by showing them through example the fact not all Arab people are enemies?  Will it result in ugly interactions from these people with two individuals who will have no privacy whatsoever based on the splash this news event makes?  Will another tragic event occur on these soils at the hands of terrorist enemies who just happen to be Arabic, with this compassionate gesture being blamed regardless of whether these two people ever interact with the perpetrators or not? 

Sadly, I have little faith this event will end well.  I am not necessarily concerned with the threat of these two individuals as I am with the damage to our public dialog around the threat to our national security that terrorism does pose and will likely forever continue to pose.

I have lost my enjoyment in discussing politics precisely because of the way in which it has devolved into blame games with little effort made by EITHER side to view the other side with compassionate understanding.  

On a local level, I have returned to a community where I was deeply involved for a decade, with some people asking if I am interested in getting involved again.  I simply do not have the stomach for the arguing and attacking anymore.  I do not want that in my life anymore.  I do not want to put my time and effort into trying to live by my principals to help others in this capacity only to be mocked and ridiculed as being "just another politician" when politicians are viewed with such contempt by society.

To hell with it.  I give up.  I quit.  If society does not want to believe in the good intentions of those who enjoy public service, then society will not create an environment where that happens.  Good people can only take so much denigration.

And yet culturally we seem to thrive on denigration  these days.  It is tough to escape.  Flick on news programs you enjoy, and invariably, if you leave it on too long, another show comes on with a screaming, demonizing talking head representing -- or pandering to -- one of the armed camps that were once our political parties. 

So my first reaction when I heard left-leaning Amherst Massachusetts had invited two Guantanamo Bay detainees into their community was simply to utter aloud, "oh shit."

May no lives be ruined by this decision, yet, sadly, I do not see how that is going to be possible.