Mud Season in Vermont
I lived in Vermont almost 20 years ago – in the good old days when there was a Republican governor (who always rebated tax money because the government hardly spent any revenue), a Republican Senator and the only Congressman was a Republican. It was said there were more cows in Vermont than Vermonters, and that might have been true. When I went to get my driver license in the town where I lived, they told me that if I wanted my photo on my license, I’d have to go to the State capitol in Montpelier because Vermont DMV only had one camera.
State legislators only made about $6000/year because they were only a part-time legislature. Most had other jobs in their home districts that they needed while they nearly voluntarily served as legislators.
Burlington, the most populous city in Vermont was run by a whacky Socialist named Bernie Sanders that no one paid much attention. The local joke was “The nicest thing about Burlington is that it’s so close to Vermont” meaning that Burlington couldn’t really be called a Vermont city because it was populated by college students (in one of the five colleges in the Burlington area) and flatlanders from New York (like Bernie Sanders and Howard Dean).
Well, the joke is on Vermont now. The one Republican Senator they had twenty years ago, Jim Jeffords became a turncoat, Bernie Sanders is now their Senator, they haven’t had a Republican governor (or a tax rebate) since 1990. Flatlanders are running the state.
There was a tiny faction of people in Vermont who used to, once every year, make the papers by pushing Vermont secession. Everyone chuckled, and agreed “Yeah, we should”. But now, ABC reported the other day;
In 2005, about 300 people turned out for a secession convention in the Statehouse, and plans for a second one are in the works. A poll this year by the University of Vermont’s Center for Rural Studies found that 13 percent of those surveyed support secession, up from 8 percent a year before.
“The argument for secession is that the U.S. has become an empire that is essentially ungovernable it’s too big, it’s too corrupt and it no longer serves the needs of its citizens,” said Rob Williams, editor of Vermont Commons, a quarterly newspaper dedicated to secession.
“We have electoral fraud, rampant corporate corruption, a culture of militarism and war,” Williams said. “If you care about democracy and self-governance and any kind of representative system, the only constitutional way to preserve what’s left of the Republic is to peaceably take apart the empire.”
Doesn’t sound like a bunch of dairy farmers to me – sounds like flatlanders hijacking an entire state. Newbusters’ Ken Shepard did a longer more complete piece on the Vermont Secession movement on Monday, if you’re interested in a hearty laugh.
James Taranto did a bit on Vermont secession yesterday – I usually don’t pilfer Taranto’s stuff, but it’s so good;
Some people “want Vermont to secede from the United States,” the Associated Press reports from Montpelier:
Disillusioned by what they call an empire about to fall, a small cadre of writers and academics is plotting political strategy and planting the seeds of separatism.
They’ve published a “Green Mountain Manifesto” subtitled “Why and How Tiny Vermont Might Help Save America From Itself by Seceding from the Union.” They hope to put the question before citizens at Town Meeting Day next March.
Among those urging secession, as blogger Charles Johnson points out, is one Thomas Naylor, who in March issued a list of 20 tenets titled “Radical Nonviolence and the Power of Powerlessness.”
Anyway, we think Vermont secession is a good idea, if for no other reason than that it’d be a nice morale boost for the U.S., which is weary of the long struggle in Iraq. Vermont has only a few thousand people, and most of them are hippies. It should be easier to pacify than Grenada.
After all, as Naylor’s second tenet has it, “Violence begets more violence, not the other way around.”
I also tripped over this article from the Burlington Free Press that the State is looking to end “racial profiling” – regardless of the fact that there are hardly any other races but white people there;
Close to 50 people crowded into a small conference room at Burlington College on Wednesday evening to begin a dialogue on racial profiling in Burlington.The meeting was called by Chittenden County State’s Attorney T.J. Donovan, who described racial issues in Burlington and Vermont — one of the country’s two whitest state — as “complex, emotional and sensitive. I don’t have all the answers,” he said. “I have to listen and learn.”The exchanges Wednesday, though sometimes angry, resembled a conversation more than a typical public meeting, and a central frustration emerged early and often: Few data exist in the city or state about how often blacks are stopped by the police, let alone whether those stops are justified.Â
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Well I checked on the racial make up of Vermont;
Whites; 96.9%
Blacks 0.6%
That’s out of a population of 623,000 (that’s about a 20% increase over the population when I lived there) – that means there are 3743 blacks (about the same as when I lived there, give or take a coupla hundred) in the entire state. How big of a problem can racial profiling be?
And alot of people think that Vermonters are racist just because there are so few minorities in Vermont – that’s not the case at all. When I was teaching at UVM, there was a national search for Black professors to teach there. They were paying huge signing bonuses and big benefit packages to attract them – but nary a bite.
Vermont is cold in the winter – one December morning I got up to drive to work and it was minus-30 degrees. And from November thru March, there was only one thing to do in Vermont – ski. Or go to hockey games. Not to be racist or anything, but there are probably very few Blacks who ski or enjoy hockey, or have any tolerance for cold weather.
The first thing our new Black clerk from rural Virginia asked after his first weekend in Vermont was “Where are the jazz stations on the radio dial? I can’t find any”. Cuz jazz wasn’t very popular in Vermont – that may have changed like everything else, but I doubt it.
The point is; Vermont is not a racist community, but the climate and culture just aren’t what most Blacks are looking for.
The real problem is that Vermont now has a full-time legislature and legislators make about $30,000/year these days. Now they’ve got plenty of time to sit around and make stupid rules and support stupid secession movements.
