On our most recent walk, my wife and I passed by the house of one of our neighbors, whom we have known for about seven years. We have gotten to know them fairly well over the years, we have met their grown children, and we have had pleasant conversations and interactions.
This time our walk was different. Outside their house was a MAGA flag.
In all our years knowing them, there may have been a hint of their political leanings, but I didn't notice. They always seemed like rational, good-natured people.
My wife and I were both left speechless at first. We looked at each other and, for the rest of the walk, we reviewed our experience with this couple to see if we had missed something that would have indicated either their recent conversion to or longstanding allegiance with the unhinged politics of the current White House resident.
Transitions • Dan Johnson was recently appointed Chief Financial Officer at Chroma Technology in Bellows Falls. Johnson will also serve as a financial and strategic advisor to the Chief Executive Officer and broader leadership team at Chroma and its subsidiaries, including 89 North, an illumination systems manufacturer in Williston.
The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) presents an online talk by photographer Rachel Portesi, via Zoom and Facebook Live, on Wednesday, Nov. 18, at 7 p.m. The talk is presented in connection with the exhibit “Rachel Portesi: Hair Portraits,” a series of tintype photographs on view at BMAC...
Project Feed the Thousands, this region's largest community food drive, kicked off its 27th annual campaign against hunger in the community on Nov. 6, with local organizers acknowledging that this campaign will be different from any other because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In their effort to support nine area food shelves, the food drive seeks to raise $85,000 in cash, as well as to collect enough non-perishable food items for 250,000 meals. “Hunger is an epidemic. And more often than...
USDA food box program to run through Dec. 31 BRATTLEBORO - The U.S. Department of Agriculture has extended the Farmers to Families food box program through the end of the year, with food boxes available at multiple daily food distributions throughout Vermont starting Monday, Nov. 16. Regionally, the first distribution dates are Tuesday, Nov. 17 in Bennington; Friday, Nov. 20 in Springfield; and Monday, Nov. 23 in Brattleboro. To keep wait times to a minimum, registration will be required at...
The proposed municipal budget for fiscal year 2022 shows less of an increase than staff initially expected, Town Manager Peter Elwell told the Selectboard last week. Elwell presented the recommended FY22 budget at the Selectboard's Nov. 3 meeting. The proposed budget reflects his staff's “best efforts” to estimate the cost of municipal operations and services, he said. As proposed, the property tax increase will be 2 percent, bringing the tax rate to $26.90 per $100,000 of assessed property value. Elwell...
The two heavyweights of Division IV boys' soccer, the Proctor Phantoms and the Twin Valley Wildcats, took the field on Nov. 7 in Manchester with a state title on the line. The two teams slugged it out through 80 minutes of regulation time to end up tied, 1-1. Two 15-minute overtimes didn't settle things either. It took a penalty kick shootout to decide who would be the state champion. Twin Valley's McHale, Luke Rizio, Aaron Soskin, Izaak Park, and Finn...
Byron Stookey suggests that murals, demonstrations, and slogans are “counterproductive” to social movements. I am grateful for the thought-provoking piece. I agree that statements can be abused. In particular, “Black Lives Matter” is often used by well-meaning non-Black people who wish to express solidarity to an experience of oppression they do not share. It can become a comfortable display for a predominantly white community to preserve its politically “progressive” front without putting real effort into making a place safer for...
The United States is in a crisis of two nations. Economic calamity, racial reckoning, a widening pandemic, and rising authoritarianism divide Americans by a gulf not experienced since the Civil War. Our future may well be charted by how we conceptualize democracy itself. Understanding, expanding, and sustaining democracy can perhaps lead to a bridging of this grand canyon of national divide. Writing in the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America observed that only the “surface...
Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic has changed how many households gather and celebrate. As the holiday season approaches, and with the state's new re-tightening of rules forbidding nonessential travel into the state, more households will scale down their traditional gatherings to help slow the spread of the coronavirus. This year's Brattleboro Annual Community Thanksgiving will change accordingly, with the cancellation of this year's sit-down congregate meal. Instead, the Brattleboro-based Everyone Eats! site for free drive-through meals will distribute Thanksgiving meals...
I, for one, am sick of being shown everything in either red and blue. It's time for us to find our common ground so we can move forward in a way that is peaceful and community building. No matter how we voted, we are still each other's neighbors. We teach each other's children and put out each other's fires. We are the plumbers and doctors and nurses and mail carriers. We all need each other, and it's time to find...
Just in time for annual harvest celebrations, the Windham World Affairs Council will present on Sunday, Nov. 15, from 4 to 5:30 p.m., a Zoom talk by Dr. Tamara Stenn, “Indigenous sustainability, regeneration, and hope: Harvesting Bolivia's Royal quinoa.” The presentation addresses the Fulbright work of Stenn, a Landmark College professor who has been a resident of Brattleboro for over 20 years. She travels frequently to Bolivia, which she considers her second home. Stenn will take participants for a journey...
I am writing to express my gratitude for the voters, supporters, and volunteers who have shown their confidence in me and helped me win my re-election bid for the Windham-1 seat in the Vermont House of Representatives. I ran because I care deeply about the future of our rural communities and I love the work, so it is a real honor to earn this privilege. In the days, weeks, and months ahead, we will need to come together and work...
Wow. Goldman, 2,182. Partridge, 2,032. Coyne, 1,295. I am very honored that the voters of Windham-3 have elected me to represent them in the Vermont House of Representatives. The learning curve will be steep, but I will do my best to represent constituent voices and communicate back to our district what is happening in Montpelier. First, of course, we need to get through the presidential and Senate elections and see where we stand. It is unclear what action may be...
The results are in! Thank you. I am so honored to have the opportunity to keep working with this community and in this nation, so we can someday say that government is truly for us and by us. In Brattleboro (and across the country), we saw record voter turnout for this crucial election. This is in part due to our passion and our fear - we have a renewed understanding of how much our vote and our voice matter. But...
We thank the voters of the Windham-4 district for their votes in the 2020 election. Every day, as we face the triple pandemic of COVID-19, climate change, and racial/social justice, we see Vermonters working hard to stay safe, put food on their tables, and to build a Vermont that works for everyone. Together, we promise to work hard, work smart, and work together to address these and other issues to get us through these challenging times. Serving is an honor...
Pandemic or not - the creative sector matters. In Vermont, it supports 41,000 jobs and contributes $1 billion to the state's economy. “Creatives account for about 9 percent of the Vermont workforce, and it is important their significant impact is understood amongst themselves as well as recognized by other economic sectors,” Robert McBride, coordinator for the Southern Vermont Zone of the Vermont Creative Network, said in a news release. The Southern Vermont Zone includes Bennington and Windham counties. Its leadership...
Stephanie Bonin and Zach Hebert are part of organizations from throughout Windham County that have met throughout the year to work on Everyone Eats! The good news, said Bonin, is that funding for the statewide Vermont Everyone Eats! program has been extended until Dec. 31. Previously, funding was set to end a few weeks earlier. Yet, the federal emergency COVID-19 funding will end, it seems, long before the pandemic or its economic impacts. Hebert said the momentum around increasing access...
SOLOs - a video montage of monologues and poetry by eight local actors filmed by Brattleboro Community Television - premieres simultaneously on BCTV and YouTube on Friday, Nov. 13, at 7:30 p.m. The show is coordinated with a participative online session where audience members will have a chance to meet the cast, directors, producers, and technical staff in a virtual after-party at 8:15 p.m. Each episode of SOLOs is a co-production of the Rock River Players and the Hooker-Dunham Theater,
These words brought tears to my eyes. “They are not European immigrants celebrated at Ellis Island, but they are our continent's immigrants, here, now. I don't have a lamp, and there is no golden door, but I lift my eyes to meet them, to see them, and to say, Welcome.” They were uttered by Steve Crofter, founder of the Community Asylum Seekers Project (CASP), and they speak volumes about the mission of a volunteer-driven organization begun four years ago to...
The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) invites children in kindergarten through grade six to dream up, draw, and submit imaginary creatures for the 10th anniversary edition of Glasstastic, the museum's annual celebration of youthful imagination and creativity. Submissions are due by Tuesday, Dec. 8. Guidelines and entry forms can be found at brattleboromuseum.org. Glasstastic has grown from 250 submissions in 2011, its first year, to more than 1,200 in 2018. Approximately 20 glass artists from around New England will...
Issues like climate change, the economy, and the COVID-19 pandemic unite us. They are not about politics. Fires in the west and floods in the south do not have political parties. The pandemic is an equal opportunity employer. People are dying who should not have to die. That is real. These problems are essential and even existential, but for me they do not run as deep as the way in which racism shapes and warps our politics. In the past...
The work of artist Simi Berman will be on exhibit at the West Village Meeting House (All Souls Church), 29 South St., through December. Berman says that over the past few months, she has grown interested “in working on a small scale in watercolor, gouache, and oil pastel.” The paintings are “non-figurative,” she says, allowing individual viewers to make their own “ever-changing discoveries.” A reception at the meeting house takes place on Saturday, Nov. 14, from 2 to 4 p.m.
A question was posed recently, publicly, from a concerned individual. To paraphrase: Would there be support for a decolonizing initiative - by this person - to change the name of Brattleboro (and its accompanying official seal) to Wantastegok? This type of situation comes up not infrequently. It seems appropriate to make a public reply in kind, by way of making clear the principles of our responses. At the time, Elnu Chief Roger Longtoe Sheehan and citizen Melody Walker offered a...
One day after one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history - an election that wouldn't yield a clear winner for days to come - about 100 people gathered for a candlelight vigil and march to, in the words of organizers, “demand that all the votes are counted and for the peaceful transition of power.” While there was no final result on Nov. 4, when the vigil took place - and despite wide-ranging Republican efforts to insist without...