Townships and Other Stuff

I don't think that cities are usually divided into townships. Cheboygan County only contains one city, and it is about the size of a township, so I think a township is where you live when you don't live in the city limits. I read somewhere that some states have abolished their township governments, but nobody in Michigan seems interested in doing that. The idea of townships originated when they first surveyed the land. Each township was supposed to be 36 square miles, a square that was six miles to the side. Each square mile is called a section and contains 640 acres more or less. The reason for the "more or less" is that the surveyors' maps are flat, but the Earth is not, so they have to shave a little off of some parcels to get them to fit into the plan. These are called "fractional 40s", and there is at least one in each section. When the townships started filling up with settlers, they didn't always organize themselves along the surveyed township lines because things like rivers and lakes got in the way, so the political townships are not always congruent with the surveyed townships. The political townships have names, but the surveyed townships have numbers instead.

Each township has a supervisor, a clerk, a treasurer, a constable, and several trustees. This group is called the township board and meets once a month to discuss township business. The meetings are open to the public, but nobody goes there unless they have some concern they want the board to address. A few or our townships have their own zoning codes, but most of them let the county handle that. Each township is responsible for their own fire protection. If a township is too sparsely populated to support a fire department, they contract with another township to provide that service. All the township fire departments cooperate with each other and will respond to fires in support of another township if needed. The townships are also responsible for garbage disposal, but they don't pick it up for you. They used to have open pit dumps where people could bring their garbage, but now they have dumpsters that are hauled away by a private contractor when they are full. Many people contract with these same companies to pick up their garbage in front of their house, but the dumpster option remains open for people who don't want to do that.

It sounds like you were working for the Democratic Party rather than your city or township. If that's true, I'm surprised that they didn't require you to be a card carrying member. If you were working for a government agency, it seems you would need some kind of ID card but, like I said, maybe they do it differently in Illinois.

The marines are kind of like the army on steroids. If I didn't like the army, I don't think I would have liked the marines any better. My problem was not that the army wasn't military enough, it was that it operated by the rule of men instead of the rule of law. Of course there was the rule of law on paper but, in practice, it was all about the cult of the personality. Later in life I discovered that much of the rest of the world is like that too, and I didn't approve of that either.

Another mass shooting! I hate to admit it, but I'm starting to get desensitized to that stuff. Maybe it's the new normal. I don't know what the answer is, but I'm pretty sure that it's not disarming the general population. If anything we need more gun toting citizens out there to take these lunatics out when they start shooting up the place.