The broadside was produced by "concerned landowners of the Town of Otsego," otherwise unnamed and unnumbered. It was a call to arms against the Town government’s purported plans to subvert, even cancel, everybody’s property rights.

The broadside, rife with clots of exclamation points, bold-face type, and loaded language, was not a fact sheet. It was an almost-raw appeal to emotion.

And it did its job, turning out a crowd of almost 200 on a dark, rainy evening. Many of them were frightened old folks who likely dreaded coming out on such an evening. But they felt they had no choice.

I was bothered by the broadside, sad to see many neighbors in real distress, especially sad to see those frail, worried old people. But I’m glad the meeting took place. Its tone got edgy at times, but it largely stayed away from shouts and recriminations. The chairman urged orderly discussion and warned away any politicians present from speechifying. (He did cave in himself, though, and gave a big plug to a Town Board candidate.)

I had an advantage over most in that crowd, who knew the draft Town document only through the hyperbole of the broadside. I had read the draft. And so I felt comfortable saying two things. First, it is far from a finished document. Second, in its present form, it would never be voted through.

In retrospect, the town leadership invited explosive misrepresentation by getting the cart classically before the horse.

A revised policy on subdividing properties should have flowed from a completed and approved Comprehensive Plan, since the last-mentioned is supposed to be the basis and touchstone for all related documents. The cart may have preceded the horse, however, because a 12-month moratorium on subdivisions will run out in December, and one part of the Town government is pressing for a new policy in place by that time.

Many of the verbal attacks during the meeting ended with a sure applause line in such a crowd: "Nobody can tell me what to do on my property!" Or another one: "This is the land of the free! This is America!"

Well, indeed it is America_and God bless her, I say, with peace and prosperity. But the challenge of harmonizing what’s mine with what’s ours is older than our Union; it’s as old, I suppose, as is our race.

As soon as we humans began clustering in communities for hunting or for greater safety, we began to feel the pinch. Some degree of individual freedom got traded away for the common good. But from the get-go, I guess, we showed ourselves unable to strike the required compromises on the basis of good will alone. And so were born laws, and penalties for breaking them.

When we Americans look at our major early documents, we see that the founding fathers were out to throw off British rule, but not the rule of law. That rule, they knew, must exist in human communities. The trick of the matter, the art, really, is to make laws strike a point of balance between individual rights and what the Constitution’s Preamble calls "the general Welfare."

These days general welfare is often called the common good_the good we share in common, beyond our individual rights of "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" as stated in the Declaration of Independence. (The Declaration was written to justify our break from Britain. The Constitution came later, "to form a more perfect union.")

We all know what’s good about our shared life in Town of Otsego: the peace, the rural setting, the awesome beauty of fields and woods, lakes and hills. We all are stewards when it comes to preserving these shared values, but unquestionably the burden of stewardship bears heavier on those who have large holdings of land.

And there’s the rub. On the one hand, such landowners have the right to profit by their land, even in dividing it and selling it off. On the other hand, thoughtless subdivision can destroy precious values that enrich the lives of all living here, and of future generations. Uncontrolled subdividing will easily lead to the suburbanization of our town, to fields and woods replaced by hundreds of smallholdings.

The ideal land-use law would strike the point of balance, honoring the rights of individual landowners but also legislating in ways that retain our shared treasure, our common good. My strong counsel, friends, is this:

Don’t demonize fellow citizens who, out of idealism and without pay, are working to strike just that point of balance in law. If you’re dissatisfied with what they’ve done to date, then tell them so, of course.

But enter into the process as a participant. By all means, attend the Oct. 16 discussion session. (I hope we form a crowd as large as the one of last week.) But let’s join the discussion ready to analyze the problem, ready to contribute.

Name-calling and mindless nay-saying don’t "promote the general Welfare." They aren’t the way of American democracy. Cooperation is, and so is compromise. By all parties.