News of the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Sept. 19 brought more than 50 residents to the Common Saturday night for a candlelight vigil to mourn her passing.
The gathering was organized by Katy Covino and Liz Ruark, who had announced their plans just hours before on the social media site Nextdoor. The vigil began at 8 p.m. and dispersed promptly at 8:30 p.m. Attendees formed a circle and stood in silence, holding flashlights and battery-powered candles. Some brought signs. One held by Covino read, “You should just be happy women want equality, not revenge.”
It was a chilly night. Participants wore jackets to keep out the cold and masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The silence was broken occasionally by loud music from a passing car or the roar of a souped-up engine. Across the way a few diners lingered under the lights of the General Store’s outdoor patio.
“Katy was the driving force behind the vigil,” Ruark wrote the Press in an email. “I never would have thought of it on my own.”
“There were a couple of things that really galvanized me about this evening,” said Covino following the vigil. The first, she said, was “the hypocrisy of the Republican Party” in moving to replace Justice Ginsburg just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, after refusing to consider President Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia in 2015, 10 months before the 2016 election.
“But deeper than that,” Covino said, “I have a real respect for RBG. I think a lot of women of my generation do, particularly the way that she really fostered dynamic tension. She could be with [and engage with] people she didn’t agree with. I don’t feel like we have a lot of models like that right now, particularly at the federal level. Embracing dynamic tension is something I teach in all of my college classes,” said Covino, a professor of English at Fitchburg State University. “She’s a real example … a real model for that.”
Ruark wrote that the “vigil was in part a vigil for a time when being a smart, tenacious woman was honored instead of vilified. It was a vigil for intelligence and education and honesty.”
