The Wisdom of John Sagl

I first met John Sagl twenty years ago when he and his wife Jackie brought their three-year-old, firstborn child to My School, the long-ago bankrupted cooperative nursery school in town, where my three-year-old, firstborn child was also a student.

Warm, funny, and smart, I immediately liked John.

In 2012, when the Board of Selectmen (as it was then called) had been engaging in closed-door meetings about bringing a casino to Littleton, John formed a Facebook Group to bring awareness to that one issue. Thanks in part to John’s advocacy in late 2012, Littleton doesn’t have a casino in town.

In January 2013, John launched the Facebook group “Residents for a Better Littleton,” and a majority of the anti-casino group members migrated to this new page.

Here’s John’s announcement about RfaBL:

With this as John’s stated objective for this nascent group, I added progressive, good-hearted, and open-minded to the list of descriptors about him.

RfaBL took off. Eleven years later, it has close to two thousand members.

When the moderators introduced themselves to the group members in the summer of 2013, John shared this:

(Note: That is not a picture of John, though it is, in my opinion, emblematic of his terrific sense of humor.)

Sometimes, I think, when people use humor, they are considered unserious. “Unserious” is not a word I’d use to describe John, especially when he sees something that he finds unjust.

By way of example, last May, when the Select Board (as it is now called) was preparing to come before the townspeople at Town Meeting with some options about how to deal with the largely ruined town-owned orchard, John had this to say:

I agree with every word of this and find this sentence particularly wise: “Not understanding the mistakes made only ensures the same mistakes will be made again and again.”

John’s is a modern interpretation of philosopher George Santayana’s thoughts in 1905:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The Littleton Select Board continues to repeat the mistakes of the past relative to the orchard because it has failed to “remember,” i.e., understand and discuss the board’s past mistakes and take ownership for them—as John suggested a year ago.

I echo John’s sentiment: Disgusting.

* * * * *

My name will appear on the ballot for a seat on Littleton’s Select Board.

Election Day is May 10, 2025.

My fourth policy objective: Conduct a post-mortem assessment of the death of the orchard before making any policy recommendations about how to proceed.