Afleveringen
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In 1990, when Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison, hopes were high that apartheid was in its dying days. Father Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest and a chaplain to the African National Congress, had been living in exile in Zimbabwe. He thought he might soon return to South Africa to begin building a new post-apartheid nation. But apartheid’s henchman would not go quietly. Three months after Mandela’s release Lapsley received a letter bomb that blew off his hands and an eye and nearly killed him.
Lapsley has gone on to transform his tragedy into a global message for healing and social justice. He founded the Institute for Healing of Memories in South Africa and worked alongside the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help victims of apartheid. He is now the president of the Healing of Memories Global Network and has run workshops for genocide survivors in Rwanda, indigenous people in Australia, and combat veterans in the U.S. He has received numerous international awards and wrote a memoir, “Redeeming the Past: My Journey from Freedom Fighter to Healer.”
I met Father Michael, as he is known, in 1984 in Zimbabwe, where I was a young reporter covering the South African liberation struggle. He was the hip activist priest who everyone sought out to get information and contacts. He taught me about South African history and politics from the perspective of someone who was shaping it.
I spoke with Lapsley this week while he was in Iowa where he was speaking, teaching and leading a church service.
“I'd quite like to meet the person who sent me the bomb and say, ‘Thank you very much, you sent me a letter bomb,’” Lapsley reflected. “Of course it was an act of evil. But thanks to you, I now have a worldwide ministry, I've been able to set up an organization that has a small footprint across the world, for which I am very grateful. I've been able to create spaces where healing happens, where people are able to have their pain heard and acknowledged. So thank you, sir. What about you?”
Lapsley said of his own journey, “I realized that if I was filled with hatred and bitterness, they would have failed to kill the body (but) they would have killed the soul, and I would remain their permanent prisoner. And I wasn't interested in being anybody's prisoner.”
Lapsley said that soldiers are “all damaged by war.” The workshops that he runs encourage them to share their stories with one another. “That helps them to recover their own humanity. Because one of the terrible things about war is the way you see two totally dehumanize the other.”
Trauma and recovery are part of the human condition. “Healing is difficult, but it's possible,” said Lapsley. “We don't have to be prisoners of the past.”
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Even if you don't know Jules Rabin, there’s a good chance that you have seen him protesting or read one of his many letters to the editor or commentaries in local publications. Rabin is Vermont’s most tenacious and dedicated peace activist. He celebrated his 100th birthday on April 6 by asking friends to join him in downtown Montpelier to protest Israel's war on Gaza.
Rabin grew up in Boston, the youngest of five children. His father worked in a junkyard sorting metal and the family struggled to get by. His experience living in poverty in a working class community during the Depression made him a lifelong crusader for social justice.
Rabin attended the Boston Latin School, then went on to get a bachelor’s degree at Harvard and studied anthropology in graduate school at Columbia University. He lived in Greenwich Village where he met his wife Helen. In 1968, he moved to Vermont to teach anthropology at Goddard College, where he taught for nine years. After Goddard downsized and he lost his teaching job, Jules and Helen started Upland Bakers, baking sourdough bread for 35 years in a wood-fired oven that they built. Their bread earned such a loyal following that a local store posted a sign to customers: “To prevent RIOTS and acts of TERRORISM, we ask you to please limit your purchase of Upland French Bread to no more than three loaves.”
Jules Rabin attended his first protest at the age of 8, and has protested wars in every generation. From 1960 to 1961, he participated in a 7,000-mile march from San Francisco to Moscow to promote nonviolence and nuclear disarmament. He spent years protesting against the Vietnam War, and in the early 2000s, just as the Iraq War was starting, he could be found in a weekly peace vigil in front of the Montpelier Federal Building in a protest that continued uninterrupted for nine years. Rabin, who is Jewish, has long protested Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians.
“How could the Nazi genocide of Jews 1933-45 be followed by the Israeli genocide of Palestinians today?” asked Rabin. He held a sign with a similar message at a recent protest. “I feel so strongly that what Israel is doing today to Palestinians so much resembles what Germans did to Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and everywhere else in Europe and World War II. It's kind of a pitiless wrecking of human flesh.”
Jules and Helen Rabin have lived in Marshfield in the same house for 56 years, where they raised their two daughters, Hannah and Nessa. They have three grandchildren.
I asked Rabin what keeps him protesting. “It's not that I'm a morbid person always looking for the darkest corner of the room to squat in and be miserable in,” he replied. But he added, “One can't look the other way when something dreadful is going on.”
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Jan Reynolds just wanted to be “one of the guys.” Growing up as one of seven children on a dairy farm in Middlebury, Reynolds thought nothing of a tough physical challenge. This propelled her to record setting high-altitude adventures in the company of some of the world’s top mountaineers, often as the only woman on expeditions on the highest summits.
Reynolds attended the University of Vermont, where she was a top cross-country ski racer and was part of a team that won an NCAA championship. In 1980, Reynolds set the world high altitude skiing record for women when she skied off the summit of 24,757-foot Mustagata Peak in western China. She soared in a hot air balloon at 29,000 feet over Everest (and then crashed) and led the first U.S. women’s biathlon team. Esquire named her its Athlete of the Decade in the 1980s, Ultrasport dubbed her “Indiana Jan,” and she appeared everywhere from the cover of Outside Magazine to the “Today” show to National Geographic.
Reynolds chronicled her adventures in her book “The Glass Summit: One Woman's Epic Journey Breaking Through.” She writes about her exploits as well as the power and importance of women throughout the world. She has also written and photographed over 20 books mainly documenting vanishing cultures.
“All the women in the Amazon territory survive and do everything men do, right? So why do we think a woman cannot live in a triple canopy jungle or at high altitude — the Sherpas and Tibetan women are there — or the Inuit, they have babies in igloos. Think about that: they do everything men do in a frozen environment and they have babies.”
Women “can do everything men do. We just have different skills and different approaches.”
Reynolds was inducted into the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame in 2021 and was inducted into the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 2008. These days she travels the world photographing and writing about indigenous people for her award-winning children's book series, "Vanishing Cultures."
Earlier this winter I skied with Reynolds at Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, where she still teaches cross-country ski lessons. She showed me a trailside bench with a plaque that honors her and her two sons and led me on a high speed adventure on and off groomed trails through her favorite mountains.
“Adventure is where you wish you weren't when you are, and you wish you were when you aren't,” said Reynolds.
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Some people make films to entertain or inform. Bess O’Brien makes films to change the world.
"I'm very committed as a documentary filmmaker to not only make the movie but to try to use the film to create change," the award-winning Vermont filmmaker said.
O’Brien's work has raised awareness about vulnerable people and social justice. Her 2013 documentary, “The Hungry Heart,” about the prescription drug crisis in Vermont, sparked a soul-searching conversation about opioids.
The following year, Gov. Peter Shumlin dedicated his entire State of the State address to the topic, which received national attention.
“Every state in the Union should be so lucky to have Bess O’Brien working for them in support of children and families,” Shumlin said.
O’Brein’s 2016 documentary, “All of Me,” focused on the lives of women, girls and boys who have eating disorders. Like many of her films, they were shown in schools and communities throughout the state.
Her other films include “Coming Home,” about five people returning to their Vermont communities from prison. And she produced “The Listen Up Project,” an original musical based on the lives of Vermont teens.
O’Brien’s is now touring with her latest film, “Just Getting By,” which is about Vermonters struggling with food and housing insecurity. O’Brien has once again put a human face on an issue that is now at the top of the political agenda in Vermont and the country.
Bess O’Brien is the founder of Kingdom County Productions with her husband, filmmaker Jay Craven.
O’Brien said that she learned from spending time with people in poverty that “it's not only about the scarcity of money and not having enough money or availability of food or housing. It's also just the constant uncertainty of living your life. Am I going to have enough food to feed my family? Can I get to the food shelf? … Am I going to get that apartment that I applied for? This is the fifth apartment I've applied for and all the other ones fell through. Constantly living in that space is really intense and it takes a toll.”
O’Brien shines a light on issues that are hiding in plain sight.
“Food insecurity is not just about people who are desperately hungry and starving,” she said.
Often it’s invisible, including “the parents don't eat breakfast or dinner because they don't have enough food and they give it to their kids instead,” she said. “That is food insecurity. And poverty is not necessarily living in a tent. It can be living in a hotel and not having a place to live because … even if you look for a place there is nowhere to go.”
O’Brien’s latest film “is about the scrappiness, the courage, the ingenuity, the incredible forthrightness to get up every day and get through your day and make it work for your family when you have very little.”
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This Vermont Conversation originally broadcast in April 2015.
Tom Hayden was a leader of the student, civil rights, peace and environmental movements of the 1960s. He went on to serve 18 years in the California legislature. He was a founder of Students for a Democratic Society and was described by the NY Times as “the single greatest figure of the 1960s student movement.” Hayden died in October 2016 at the age of 76.
During the Vietnam War, Hayden made controversial trips to Hanoi with his former wife, actress Jane Fonda, to promote peace talks and facilitate the release of American POWs. He helped lead street demonstrations against the war at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, where he was beaten, gassed and arrested twice. Hayden was indicted in 1969 with seven others on conspiracy and incitement charges in what eventually became the Chicago Seven trial, considered one of the leading political trials of the last century (the trial began as the Chicago Eight but became the Chicago Seven when the case against codefendent Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, was severed from the others).
The trial was the subject of the 2020 Hollywood movie, “The Trial of the Chicago Seven,” in which Hayden was played by actor Eddie Redmayne.
Hayden was Director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Culver City, California, and advised former California Gov. Jerry Brown on renewable energy. He was the author and editor of 20 books.
I spoke with Hayden in March 2015 at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where Hayden spoke at the 50th anniversary of the first Vietnam War teach in held on a US college campus.
I asked Hayden what he was proudest of in his long career of activism. "Living this long and being able to have children and grandchildren, and to observe the spread of participatory democracy and to see — despite all the failures of the left and the lack of organization, the infighting, the sectarianism, the feuds — that wave after wave of young people keep coming," he replied.
"I'm proudest of the fact that there's some instinct in being human that aspires to greater things than your parents had, a better world than the one that you were born into."
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Laura Waterman has been described as “mountain royalty.” With her late husband, Guy Waterman, she has written numerous articles and books on the outdoors, including the definitive 900-page classic, “Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains.” The Watermans were pioneering philosophers of wilderness ethics and are often credited as the inspiration for the modern Leave No Trace movement of low-impact camping and hiking.
Laura Waterman may seem like an improbable crusader and chronicler of wilderness. She grew up on the campus of the Lawrenceville School, an elite prep school in New Jersey where her father taught English and was a renowned scholar of Emily Dickinson. In the early 1960s, Laura got a job in publishing in New York City, where she met her future husband, Guy, who had been a speechwriter for Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford and for General Electric. In 1973, the young couple left the big city and became homesteaders on a 27-acre plot of land in East Corinth. Together, they wrote books and were stewards of the Franconia Ridge, home to a spectacular and popular skyline trail in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
In 2000, Laura’s life changed forever when Guy died by suicide. He was 67. Five years later, Laura wrote a memoir, “Losing the Garden: A Story of a Marriage,” in which she tried to make sense of it. But it has taken more than one book for her to understand what happened to Guy, and to her. Now at the age of 84, Laura Waterman has a new book, “Calling Wild Places Home: A Memoir in Essays.”
I recently visited Laura Waterman in her log house in East Corinth to talk about her books and her life. Her home is full of pictures of her and Guy in the mountains and living their off-grid Vermont homestead, which they called Barra. It is obvious as we walk around the house that Guy continues to have a strong presence in her life.
"I needed to write the second memoir to understand better my role in Guy's suicide," Waterman explains. "I needed that 20 years to live with that and basically grow into the person that I needed to become."
Midway through her ninth decade, Laura Waterman is still summiting mountains. "I just feel so fortunate. I'm fortunate to be able to climb mountains, smaller ones. I'm very fortunate to be writing what I'm writing."
A note for our listeners and readers: This Vermont Conversation discusses suicide. If you are in crisis or need help for someone else, dial 988 for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (formerly known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline) or text 741741 for the Crisis Text Line.
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On Tuesday, Burlington voters elected Emma Mulvaney-Stanak to be the Queen City’s next mayor. The 43-year-old Progressive/Democrat who grew up in Barre City succeeds Democrat Miro Weinberger, who has been mayor since 2012 and did not run for reelection.
Mulvaney-Stanak will be the first woman and the first openly queer person to serve as Burlington’s mayor when she is sworn in on April 1. She is also a state representative from Burlington and has served on the Burlington City Council. She has directed the Vermont Livable Wage Campaign, been an organizer with Vermont-NEA and was chair of the Vermont Progressive Party. She runs a social change strategy consulting business whose clients include labor unions, nonprofits, municipalities and school districts. She lives with her wife and two children in Burlington’s Old North End.
Growing up in Vermont, Mulvaney-Stanak said, “I did not see leaders who held identities that I hold. And that really matters because there was a subconscious level where you don't think that's possibly something you can do.”
“The historic nature of this race — the fact that after 159 years, we finally have a woman mayor, after 159 years, we finally have an out LGBTQ+ mayor — that really matters,” she said. “And I'm pretty darn sure that I am the first queer mayor in the entire state of Vermont.”
"The fact that I am a mom of two small kids, the fact that I am a woman, the fact that I am a queer person, it brings a very different perspective to the decision making table and also the leadership role in the city,” Mulvaney-Stanak said.
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Twenty years ago, Gov. Howard Dean ended his run for president. His campaign concluded with a scream – the fabled Dean Scream – but not before it changed the face of modern campaigning.
The Deaniacs, as his legions of young followers came to be known, proved that small dollar internet fundraising and organizing could help vault the governor of a small state who was little known outside of New England into a powerful insurgent candidate. When Dean split from his fellow Democratic candidates and denounced the Iraq War in the fall of 2003, he became a populist hero and frontrunner in many polls for the Democratic nomination. He poured everything into winning the Iowa caucus, only to come in third behind John Kerry and John Edwards, who would end up as the Democrat’s 2004 presidential ticket that would lose to incumbent President George W. Bush.
The Dean Scream was a viral clip of Dean shouting hoarsely to thousands of followers to rally them to keep fighting as they left Iowa and traveled to New Hampshire. The clip was used by his opponents to portray him as hot headed and angry. It has been described as the first viral political meme.
Dean, a physician and Vermont’s longest serving governor, would go on to be elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2005 where he championed the 50 State Strategy. Rather than focusing only on swing states, Dean insisted that Democrats contest every single district in the country. The strategy proved itself in 2006 when Democrats won control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Dean also launched Democracy for America, a progressive political action committee, which folded in 2022.
Dean has been a consultant focusing on health care and grassroots organizing and teaches foreign policy and public affairs at Yale, his alma mater. He is a frequent political commentator on MSNBC and other networks.
On The Vermont Conversation, Gov. Dean had plenty to say about every issue (edited for length):
On lessons learned from his 2004 presidential run: I wish I had put together a campaign operation that was better organized (and) that I wasn't so outspoken. But actually, that's what made the campaign. I'm incredibly glad I did it. It was an unbelievable experience.
On the Israel-Hamas War: Israel has a right to exist. There needs to be a Jewish state. But the leadership in Israel has been a disaster. I've met Netanyahu. And I can assure you that he is just Trump with brains. All he cares about is Netanyahu, and he doesn't give a damn about anything else or anybody else. I think that includes the State of Israel.
How President Biden should deal with Israel and Hamas: What Hamas did was a horror show. They had no right to do that. I mean, they tortured people. But what's going on in Gaza now is also a horror show. And nobody has the right to do that and murder 30,000 individuals or civilians, mostly women and children. So there's no right on either side. Both sides need to be pushed. We need to be even handed: we need to be tough on Hamas, but we need to be tough on Netanyahu as well. …And I'd cut off arms sales to Israel if we have to.
On conservatives: The conservatives have lost their mind. They're really not conservatives at all anymore. They're just lunatics.
Why Republicans win: Clausewitz said that politics is war by another means. Republicans understand that. They're ruthless. They govern from the top down, they're incredibly well organized. They can't govern as a result, because this is a democracy, which is no doubt why they want to get rid of democracy. Democrats are intellectuals. We think that the argument is going to win the day. We don't pack the Supreme Court, we don't have corrupt justices in the Supreme Court. We play nice because we believe in democracy, which the Republicans basically don't, unless they can get votes from it. We are lousy at winning elections because we want to play nice. So we don't want to do anything that's going to offend anybody. I don't want to be as offensive as the Republicans are, but I think we’ve got to be a lot tougher and a lot better organized.
On reproductive rights: The right wing basically hates the idea that women are equal to men. (Aborition) is one right you can take away from women and have them less equal. That's what this is about. All these men, these Secretaries of State and these Supreme Court (justices) in Alabama, they would like to go back to the old days where women are in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. Not anymore, it's too late. You let them out. And we ain't going back in.
On the future of the Republican Party in Vermont: I do think there's a future of the Republican Party. It'll be the Phil Scott Republican Party. It certainly isn't going to be the Donald Trump (party). Donald Trump is just mean. And there are not a lot of mean people in this state.
What concerns you most right now: I think what Trump's legacy will be is the same as Orban's legacy in Hungary, or the PIS (Law and Justice Party) legacy in Poland. It'll be very hard to reverse. The damage to higher education (and) to the economy will be huge. Trump talks all about these people who are aggrieved — they're going to be the first ones that get screwed if he wins, because all he cares about is rich people and his own balance sheet. So I think the country's in deep, serious trouble. It'll be the end of America as the major world power. We may not be perfect about human rights, but we do the best job of any of the major countries and the major powers.
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Hisham Awartani didn’t expect to become the focus of international news when he went for a walk before dinner at his grandmother’s house in Burlington on Nov. 25. Awartani was with his friends Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Aliahmad, who are all of Palestinian descent and attend colleges in the U.S. They were speaking a mix of English and Arabic and two were wearing kufiyahs, the traditional Palestinian scarf, as they often did.
Without provocation, Jason Eaton, a man they did not know, allegedly stepped off his porch and shot the three 20-year old men at point blank range. Eaton was charged with three counts of second degree attempted murder, and the state is still deciding whether to add a hate crime charge. The trial will likely be in 2025.
Awartani, a student at Brown University, was the most gravely wounded of the three friends, who were classmates at the Ramallah Friends School, a Quaker high school in the Israeli Occupied West Bank. A bullet lodged in Hisham’s spine and he is now paralyzed below the abdomen. He has spent the last two months at a rehab hospital in Boston. He recently fulfilled his goal of returning to study at Brown, where he is an archaeology and mathematics double major.
Elizabeth Price, the mother of Hisham Awartani, confessed that she “didn't think that would be possible” that her son would return to college for the second semester.
“He's resolute and he's steadfast,” Price told The Vermont Conversation. An international development consultant, Price said that Hisham exemplifies the Palestinian philosophy of samud, “just getting on with it, just continuing to do what you can do, despite what the world throws at you.”
A gofundme established to raise money to support Hisham's recovery has so far raised $1.7 million.
Price said that her son’s assailant is less important than his motivation. “He chose to shoot because of a larger cultural political mindset that is still endangering Palestinians in America.”
“He was motivated by hateful, dehumanizing speech by elected representatives and media. And since he shot them, it's become much worse. The actions of the U.S. government, both the Biden administration and elected officials in Congress, have shown over and over again, that Palestinian life is not valued.”
The toll of Israel’s war on Gaza has been staggering. Some 30,000 Palestinians have been killed according to the Gaza Health Ministry. “I think Israel is committing genocide. It's committing a domicide, which is a total destruction of a city. It's committing culturicide — they have destroyed the intelligentsia and the professional classes. They have bombed all universities, they devastated schools, all the National Archives, archaeological sites, museums — it's all gone.
“The extermination in Gaza is being done with American weapons with our taxpayers money.”
Hisham returned to Brown as 17 students were participating in a hunger strike to pressure the university to divest from companies “associated with human rights abuses in Palestine.”
Price said that such protests are “an incredible boost, an incredible gift to the Palestinians. Seeing the Jewish groups who are against the war occupying Grand Central Station, that was incredibly moving. And I think so many Palestinians were touched by that. …[It] means that Palestinians feel like they are not being forgotten.”
Hisham "is going to be an amazing person in this world," said his mother. "I'm just really glad that he still is in this world because ultimately that's the gift that we never stop being thankful for, that he didn't die that night."
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When Mia Schultz became president of the Rutland branch of the NAACP in December 2020, she became one of Vermont’s most visible and important racial justice advocates. The NAACP was founded in 1909 and is the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the U.S. with more than 2,200 branches.
Schultz hails from Arizona and moved to Bennington in 2016. She is the first Black woman to chair the Bennington Democratic Party and serves as one of three commissioners on Vermont’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Among the issues that Schultz and the NAACP are tackling is overpolicing.
“Vermont is not exempt from this culture,” she wrote in an op-ed for the Bennington Banner. “Black adults enter Vermont correctional facilities at more than seven times the rate of white adults. Compared to white drivers, Black and Latinx drivers are four times more likely to be pulled over, and nearly three times more likely to be searched. By contrast, they are half as likely to be found with contraband, which means the over-stopping and over-searching is simply because of their skin color.”
"What is happening to really ensure that black lives matter?" Schultz asked. "Are you changing laws and policies that will actually affect black lives when it comes to policing? What are you doing to really affect the lives of marginalized people in our laws and systems and legal avenues to ensure that they're protected?"
Schultz told The Vermont Conversation that she is given hope by the “people who are now out there starting community conversations and their own initiatives in their towns, gathering people, having those difficult conversations.”
“Having an interpersonal relationship with people and being able to move them into action, that means other people are moved. That is the most profound thing,” she said.
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VTDigger is re-releasing some of our favorite interviews of the past decade to mark the 10th anniversary of The Vermont Conversation. This episode with Matthew Desmond was originally published in April 2023.
Why does the U.S. — the richest country in the world — have the most poverty of any advanced democracy? Why are homeless encampments popping up from Seattle to Burlington?
The answer is that, knowingly or unknowingly, many of us benefit from keeping poor people poor.
That is the argument made by Matthew Desmond in his bestselling new book, “Poverty, by America.” Desmond won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 book, “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," which was named by Book Riot as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the last century. He is a professor of sociology at Princeton University, a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, and was named by Politico in 2016 as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”
He argues that regulations ranging from zoning to environmental laws are being used to block affordable housing, a key factor that is driving the homeless crisis. He says that this problem is often especially acute in communities known for their otherwise progressive politics. Low wages are kept low for the benefit of the more affluent.
“In most residential land in America, it's illegal to build anything except a single detached family home,” Desmond told The Vermont Conversation. “That little regulation buried inside of our zoning codes really means that the only place poor families can live are neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, concentrated poverty, and that creates a level of disadvantage of a whole other order. I think that we need to think about our role and our complicity in maintaining those walls around our communities.”
Desmond intends his work to be “a call to action. It means that we need to get our tails down to that zoning board meeting on a Thursday night at eight o'clock and stand up and say, Look, I refuse to be a segregationist. I refuse to deny other kids opportunities my kids receive living here. Let's build [affordable housing].”
Matthew Desmond’s work is grounded in his own experience growing up in poverty. He started studying housing, poverty, and eviction in 2008, when he lived among poor tenants and their landlords in Milwaukee. He now directs the Eviction Lab at Princeton, and is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, where “Poverty, By America” was recently excerpted.
Desmond wants to inspire a new abolitionist movement. “Poverty abolitionists view poverty not as a minor social issue or an inevitability, but as an abomination,” he said. “It shares with other abolitionist movements — the movement to abolish slavery [and] prisons, for example — the recognition, the conviction, that if my gain comes at someone else's loss, that's corrupting in a way."
"A poverty abolitionist divests from exploitation even if it benefits us. We try to shop and invest in solidarity with poor workers," he said. "We want a government that has a balanced and sensible welfare state, a government that does much more to fight poverty than to alleviate the tax burdens of the affluent. And we are for integrated communities and open, inclusive neighborhoods.”
Poverty abolitionism “is a political mission,” said Desmond, “but it's also a per
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On a cold winter day in 1984, three skiers pushed off from the Massachusetts border with an audacious plan to ski the length of Vermont. They named the 300-mile route the Catamount Trail. It is now the longest ski trail in North America.
On Feb. 8, those same three skiers, Ben Rose, Paul Jarris, and Steve Bushey, who are each now in their 60s, will set off to once again ski the length of Vermont to mark the 40th anniversary of the Catamount Trail. They plan to ski all 31 sections of the trail in five weeks.
The Catamount Trail was originally conceived by Steve Bushey, a geography major at the University of Vermont, and his high school friend Ben Rose, who had just graduated from Yale. They had recently biked across the country together and were searching for their next big adventure. Jarris, who had been Bushey’s UVM classmate and regular outdoor partner, was a fourth-year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. Bushey mapped out the ski trail as his masters geography thesis at Carleton University in Ottawa. Skiing it would provide proof of concept and be a grand adventure. But the trail was also about connecting people and building communities.
After skiing the Catamount Trail in 1984, the three friends have gone on to have rewarding careers. Rose served as the first executive director of the nonprofit Catamount Trail Association, later went on to lead the Green Mountain Club, and is now the recovery and mitigation chief at the Vermont Department of Emergency Management. Jarris was a family doctor for 20 years and also served as Vermont’s Commissioner of Health under Gov. Jim Douglas, then played a national role in public health. Bushey and his wife founded and run Map Adventures, which makes popular recreational maps and guides.
Today, thousands of skiers use the Catamount Trail each winter, including Vermont school children who are introduced to skiing through the association’s youth programs. “It’s a trail for everybody,” said Matt Williams, executive director of the Catamount Trail Association.
“This is a 40-year movement … to build backcountry trails and access throughout the length of Vermont to bring people into the state to enjoy that resource,” reflected Jarris.
Climate change poses a threat to the future of the Catamount Trail. A study sponsored by the climate action group Protect Our Winters projects that the average number of days with snow cover in New England will decline by 50 to 75 percent in the coming decades, depending on greenhouse gas emissions.
Rose said that the Catamount Trail and its association have “an important role to play as a canary in the coal mine, and as a group of people who refuse to give up on the value of winter, the possibility of winter, the future of winter.”
Skiing the length of Vermont and seeing how the Catamount Trail has grown "made me an optimist for life," said Rose.
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Driving around rural areas of the Northeast, it’s not uncommon to see an occasional home or vehicle displaying a Confederate battle flag. Look closer, and you might find symbols of far right groups like the Proud Boys or the Three Percenters, both classified as hate groups.
Reporters Emily Russell and Zach Hirsch decided to dig further. They spent months investigating the reach of the far right movement in rural upstate New York. They found law enforcement officers who are members of the extremist “constitutional sheriffs” movement who vow that they will not enforce state laws with which they disagree. These include laws relating to gun rights and public health. And they found a man who went to prison for participating in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and anticipates a military takeover during the 2024 election and a third world war.
Russell and Hirsch also crisscrossed the district represented by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-NY. Stefanik has amplified far right views, such as the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory and the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Stefanik is frequently mentioned as a potential vice presidential running mate for Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
This investigation into the far right extremist movement in upstate New York is the subject of a remarkable five-part podcast from North Country Public Radio called “If All Else Fails,” which is hosted by Russell and Hirsch.
This Vermont Conversation includes the first episode of If All Else Fails, broadcast by permission of North Country Public Radio, followed by a conversation with reporters Emily Russell and Zach Hirsch.
“As we saw on Jan. 6, it only took a couple thousand people to suspend our democratic process for hours and force an evacuation from the Capitol,” Russell told the Vermont Conversation.
“Even if folks who have gone down these rabbit holes may be a minority in this country, if you get enough of them riled up, they can do a tremendous amount of damage to our democracy in the U.S.,” Russell said.
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Katherine Paterson is one of America’s most celebrated writers for children. The author of more than 40 books, she is one of just six writers who have twice won the prestigious Newbery Medal, for “Bridge to Terabithia” in 1978 and “Jacob Have I Loved” in 1981. She has also won the National Book Award twice. In 2000, Paterson was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.
Paterson frequently writes about children confronting difficult issues. At 89 years old, the Vermont author shows little sign of slowing down. She recently published a new book, “Birdie’s Bargain,” about a child with a parent heading off to fight in Iraq.
Paterson’s books are among the most beloved in children’s literature. They are also among the most banned. Book banning has lately been enjoying a revival, as books are being pulled from library shelves in “unprecedented” numbers, according to the American Library Association.
Among the latest crop of books to be yanked from library shelves are “Maus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman; “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison; and “The 1619 Project,” a bestselling history of slavery in the U.S. that grew out of a special issue of The New York Times Magazine.
“Bridge to Terabithia” rose to No. 8 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books for the 1990s. Her book “The Great Gilly Hopkins” was No. 20 on that list. Only a handful of authors had their books banned more often in the 1990s, including Maya Angelou, Mark Twain and John Steinbeck.
“If you write a book that has any power in it, it has the power to offend,” Paterson said. “I don’t want to write a book that has no power in it, so I have to run the risk of offending.”
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This January marks the 51st anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade that established a constitutional right to abortion. But 18 months ago, the Supreme Court took away that right in its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
In the aftermath of Dobbs, the landscape of reproductive rights around the country has sharply fractured. Fourteen states have enacted total bans on abortion, and seven more severely restrict access, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which describes the status of abortion rights in many states as “dismal.” One in five abortion patients now travel out of state for care.
Vermont is one of seven states that have protected the right to abortion since Dobbs.
Felicia Kornbluh has chronicled the rise and fall of reproductive rights in essays for the Washington Post, Time and other publications. Kornbluh is professor of history with appointments in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Vermont. She is also vice president of the board of the Planned Parenthood of Vermont Action Fund and was a signatory to a “friend of the court” brief in the Dobbs case on behalf of the American Society for Legal History.
Her latest book is “A Woman’s Life is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice,” which was released in paperback this month.
Kornbluh is critical of the state-by-state approach to protecting abortion rights. In Ohio, where voters approved an abortion rights amendment in November, advocates for and against abortion spent a combined $70 million.
“That's crazy,” said Kornbluh. “Thinking about political strategy, I just can't imagine how we can keep going. …We need a national solution.”
Kornbluh said that the Women's Health Protection Act, which would expand abortion rights, could be that solution. It was originally proposed in Congress in 2013 and was reintroduced following the Dobbs decision. It passed the House in 2021 and narrowly lost in the Senate in 2022.
“If we were able to have robust Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, then we would be able to pass that and we would be able to protect people's rights on the national level and do something different with that millions and millions of dollars…. to get us back to some kind of humane baseline in terms of abortion rights.”
Medication abortions now account for more than half of abortions, and many states, including Vermont, are making plans to stockpile the medication in the event of a national ban.
Kornbluh asserted that "what will continue to happen on the ground is far outpacing the effort of anti-abortion people and crotchety conservative judges who were trying to control it."
She conceded, however, "They can still do damage."
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On a drizzly day in late October, a strange looking truck pulled over on a dirt road in Hinesburg. The truck had electronic billboards attached to three sides that displayed the smiling face of a young woman. The neighbors knew the face well — it was Eva Frazier, whose family lived on the road. Eva was a top student at nearby Champlain Valley Union High School, from which she graduated in 2022. Eva has long been passionate about social justice issues and was involved in CVU’s chapter of Amnesty International. She is also a competitive swimmer. Eva is now a sophomore at Harvard.
The truck with the illuminated billboards had a different description of Eva, who is 19. It showed her face under the banner, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemite.” The truck, which was paid for by the right-wing group Accuracy in Media, had traveled from Cambridge, Ma., where it had spent several weeks circling Harvard Yard displaying the faces of numerous Harvard students beneath the same banner. This was an effort to dox students and faculty who were allegedly sympathetic to Palestinians or who had expressed any opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. "Doxxing" is publicizing personal information about someone without their permission.
This doxxing effort is part of a national campaign to suppress pro-Palestinian speech that is led by Canary Mission, a shadowy group linked to Israel. Canary Mission now lists Frazier on a website of people that it claims “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews.” This campaign against students and faculty has received national media attention but its work in Vermont has not been documented until now.
The pressure campaign against universities may have claimed its biggest prize with the resignation on Jan. 2 of Harvard President Claudine Gay. She stepped down after a monthlong backlash following her testimony in Congress about antisemitism on campus, and allegations advanced by right-wing activists that some of her scholarly work had been plagiarized, which Harvard’s governing body refuted.
Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik celebrated Gay’s resignation, calling the former Harvard president “morally bankrupt” and vowing “this is just the beginning.”
Gay’s defenders included Boston University professor and bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi, who wrote on X that Gay was a target of “racist mobs.”
Harvard Professor Albert Guzetti said of the campaign against Gay, “This recalls the worst days of McCarthyism.”
Eva Frazier refuses to be silenced. On this Vermont Conversation, Eva talked about her experience getting doxxed and speaking out for Palestinian rights.
Frazier said that the doxxing campaign’s “larger goal is to silence all students, and especially people who are thinking about being vocal or visible about support for Palestine.”
The attacks on her and her friends have had the opposite effect. “It is even more important to continue to advocate for justice in Palestine especially as genocide in Gaza continues,” she told The Vermont Conversation.
James Bamford, an award winning investigative journalist, recently wrote an expose for The Nation, “Who is Funding Canary Mission? Inside the Doxxing Operation Targeting Anti-Zionist Students and Professors.” He explained that Canary Mission “is a very well organized, well financed operation run by a foreign country to intimidate Americans.”
Frazier believes that Gay was forced to resign by “far-right activists and leaders… [who want] to suppress free speech, hurt higher ed and really wage a war against DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and affirmative action.”
Frazier said that the attacks on free speech serve a larger purpose. They are “a distraction from the tens of thousands of civilian lives that have been lost in Gaza.”
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VTDigger is re-releasing some of our favorite interviews of the past decade to mark the 10th anniversary of The Vermont Conversation.
John Irving, widely hailed as one of America’s greatest novelists, is back, and he has a lot to say.
Irving, 81, is the author of 15 novels, including the international bestsellers “The World According to Garp,” “The Cider House Rules” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” which is his top-selling book. Irving’s latest novel, “The Last Chairlift,” was released Oct. 17. It has been seven years in the making and at 900 pages, it is his longest work. He says that “The Last Chairlift” will be his last long novel.
John Irving wrote his first novel at age 26. He competed as a wrestler for 20 years and coached wrestling until he was 47. He was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. Irving has won a National Book Award, an Oscar and a Lambda Literary Award, among numerous other recognitions. His books have been translated into more than 35 languages.
John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. He lived for many years in Vermont, first in Putney and later in Dorset. He sold his Vermont home in 2014 and now lives in Toronto. He is a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S.
Irving has long tackled controversial issues in his novels. “The World According to Garp” (1978) has a transgender character, “The Cider House Rules” (1985) deals with abortion and “A Prayer for Owen Meany” (1989) confronts the fallout from the Vietnam War. His books have periodically been banned.
“What are they banning? They’re banning books about abortion and they’re banning books on LGBTQ subjects,” he told The Vermont Conversation. “What they're saying to young, gay, lesbian, trans kids, they want them to feel even more alone and isolated than they already feel. They don't want those kids to have access to material that will let them know they're not alone. They already feel alone. There's a cruelty to that that is unspeakable.”
Irving is a sharp critic of American politics today. Speaking about the recent Supreme Court decision striking down abortion rights, he said, “What they did is more in step with the Vatican than it is with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”
Irving’s advice to young writers: “You can't let outside factors get under your skin. You have to stick to your purpose and be a kind of horse with blinders on. … You also can't get down on yourself after somebody's just kicked your tail. You've got to do it again and get better.”
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Naomi Klein realized that she had an alter ego, or doppelganger, during the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. She was in a public bathroom and overheard people talking about her. The author of numerous international bestsellers including “No Logo,” “The Shock Doctrine,” and “This Changes Everything,” Klein realized that she was being confused with Naomi Wolf, the liberal feminist author of the 1991 bestseller, “The Beauty Myth.” A decade ago, both authors were writing about the danger of unchecked corporate power and rising authoritarianism.
But in recent years, Wolf has become an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, a leading purveyor of Covid-19 misinformation, and a regular guest of right-wing provocateurs Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. Klein was horrified and intrigued about why “Other Naomi” had disappeared down a conspiratorial rabbit hole. She decided to follow her down the rabbit hole and report back.
In her latest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” Klein dives deep into the alternate reality of conspiracy theorists and the far right to understand why and how societies have become polarized and democracy has been pushed to the brink. “Doppelganger” has been named one of the year’s best books by the New York Times, Time, Slate and The Guardian. New York Magazine’s Vulture has named it the No. 1 book of the year.
Klein is Professor of Climate Justice and co-director of the Center for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia and is Honorary Professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers. She is a columnist for The Guardian.
“Doppelgangers in art and literature stand in for the way societies can kind of flip into evil twin versions of themselves,” Klein told The Vermont Conversation. “This is what happens when fascism rises: a previously open society suddenly tips into something much uglier. And that that can happen. We're not immune to it.”
Klein explained that “right-wing conspiracy culture often gets the facts wrong, but the feelings right. They're often tapping into a feeling that the game is rigged, that these elites are getting away with murder, there's a whole different set of rules that applies to them."
"All of that is true — it is a rigged game,” she said. “That game is called capitalism.”
Klein said that the notion of doppelgangers helps explain what is happening in Israel’s war on Gaza.
“If you have Israeli politicians openly saying that they want as many people in Gaza as possible to become refugees, then that is a genocidal logic. Some people say that's antisemitic, because how could a Jewish state commit genocide when Israel is itself conceived of as reparations for genocide? Well, victims can become perpetrators. This is where it comes back to doppelgangers.”
Klein said that there is a way out of the mirror world. “If you want to be able to break out of those partitioned narratives, you have to be able to see each other. You don't have to agree, but you actually have to believe that each other are real, that your stories exist. If all you do is just retell and retraumatize and cling to your parallel stories and don't even acknowledge that the other stories exist, we will never ever, ever get out.”
“Maybe,” said Klein, “we'll get to a wiser place out of this extreme trauma.”
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VTDigger is re-releasing some of our favorite interviews of the past decade to mark the 10th anniversary of The Vermont Conversation.
This Vermont Conversation with Alison Bechdel was originally published in May 2021.
Alison Bechdel is obsessed. Her passion is exercise — karate, cycling, running, skiing in all its forms, to name a few of her pursuits. This obsession is the focus of Bechdel’s new graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength. A New York Times book review declares, “This is a true delight of graphic literature, and nobody does it better. You feel as if you’re peering through a plexiglass panel right into Bechdel’s marvelous brain. … [It is] a nearly perfect book.”
Bechdel has been cartoonist laureate of Vermont and a recipient of a MacArthur genius award. She garnered a cult following with her early comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Her best-selling graphic memoir, Fun Home, was adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical. Fun Home tells the story of growing up in a family that ran a funeral home, and how after Bechdel came out as a lesbian, her closeted gay father died in a presumed suicide. The cartoonist is also known for the Bechdel Test, which rates movies on whether they include at least one scene in which two women talk to each other about something other than men.
Bechdel runs, skis and bikes from her home in West Bolton, which she shares with her partner Holly Rae Taylor, who is the colorist for her new book.
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Are we alone?
The question of whether human beings on Earth are the only intelligent life forms has long inspired scientists and philosophers. It has also animated generations of conspiracy theorists who believe that the U.S. government has been engaged in a decadeslong coverup about extraterrestrial intelligence and unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.
Bestselling Vermont author and historian Garrett Graff has a new book that attempts to settle long swirling questions and conspiracies. "UFO: TheInside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here — and Out There," traces the origins of UFO conspiracy theories and takes a serious look at what scientists and the government does — and does not — know.
Graff, a Burlington resident, has spent nearly two decades covering politics, technology and national security. He’s the former editor of Politico and a contributor to Wired and CNN. Graff’s previous books include “Watergate: A New History,” which was a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist, “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11,” and “Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die.”
“The story of the hunt for ‘them’ is mostly actually a story about us,” Graff writes about the search for extraterrestrial life in "UFO."
Graff conceded that some UFO conspiracies have a basis in fact. “The landscape of UFO history is littered with actual government cover-ups,” he told The Vermont Conversation. “Some cloak of this secrecy is just the government's own projects” such as drones and new aircraft.
“I don't really see any meaningful evidence that the government is knowingly covering up that type of conspiracy” about aliens and other life. “The government is actually covering up its own ignorance, that it doesn't know what these UFOs and UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomenon) actually are.”
Graff connected the vibrant UFO conspiracy movement with current politics. “UFO conspiracies in the ‘80s and ‘90s ended up inspiring the first arrival of the deep state in our political discourse. And from there, there is a much more direct line to our modern politics than I think most people realize. I don't think you get January 6 without the foundation of these dark UFO conspiracies in the 1990s.”
Graff said that “the rise of the corrupting influence of myths and disinformation” spread by figures such as Alex Jones and Donald Trump is an ominous portent.
“My concern about Donald Trump is that he is really bad for the longevity of human civilization … His reelection is not just a grave threat to American democracy and system of a functioning constitution and three branches of government as we know it." Graff is concerned about "what he would do to the larger civilizational challenges that we have to confront right now, from climate change, to misinformation, to disinformation, to the rise of AI.”
“We have a lot of questions that we as a species and as a country need to get right right now,” Graff concluded. “And Donald Trump is the wrong answer to all of them.”
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