As a result, Medford became the third municipality in the country – after Dearborn, Michigan and Portland, Maine – and the first in Massachusetts to bar investing public funds in companies that contribute to or are complicit in “severe violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.”
“Our community requested this and it is really bold. It would be the first time that a city in Massachusetts did it,” City Councilor Emily Lazzaro said at the meeting. “In this case, to ignore the requests of our community and our own morality, to me, it’s not an acceptable path. I think this is a perfect moment for us to be bold.”
Medford resident Claire Sheridan who attended Tuesday’s meeting said she supports the ordinance and urged the council to “stand up for humanity here and abroad.”
“At 83 years of age, I am sick and tired of my tax money going to these immoral companies and manufacturers who aid and abet not only the killing of innocent citizens in faraway lands, but who compromise the lives of the Medford citizens,” she said.
I like this, and even more, I like that an older person spoke up about this. Usually, the way things look in Medford is that people under 60-ish are progressive and quieter and those 60-ish and over are really loud and conservative (though not modern MAGA conservative). Obviously, there's no way those blocs are uniform, but to what degree is unknown. But it's nice to know that there are definitively older people active at the local level that care about things other than their own property values. Which makes sense because the people that show up and the anti-Trump protests out here are overwhelmingly old. (That's a problem, but we'll discuss that
later.)