BRATTLEBORO-I feel unsafe when I see a white man with a gun.
I do not lobby for gun control. I don't want to take away my neighbors' guns, no matter their gender or race. I do not pester the Selectboard to ban guns in town. I think that would be pretty rude of me.
But I do feel unsafe when I see a white man with a gun! The sight scares me. My heart rate goes up, and I have a bad day. Worse still if they're wearing camo. Can't help it. I just have too many bad memories of wannabe cowboys in my hometown who'd rather run over antiwar protesters in their pickup trucks, or brandish a gun at a kid on their lawn, than actually talk to anybody.
I also feel pretty unsafe when I see a person in a police uniform. Can't help it. They also activate my stresses from an older time, when I was a young person in the big city and some of the NYPD had nothing better to do than hurt my friends for being gay and angry.
On Jan. 3, the Selectboard voted to hold Annual Representative Town Meeting as a strictly in-person event for the first time since 2019. The vote took place during the first board meeting of the year, and those of us with family obligations during the holiday could not attend. The...
First: Kevin O'Connor says the Selectboard has yet to approve any cameras, but board member Tim Wessel posted on Facebook that they approved replacing the parking garage's outdated camera system. Did Kevin not check the minutes before submitting his article? Or did Tim make a rare mistake in his...
Kevin O'Connor has been writing on Rescue Inc. all year, and every time he positions Rescue as the poor beleaguered service providers, so virtuous and innocent, assassinated by a rogue Town Manager from outside Vermont. Horrors! His front-page article is yet another op-ed disguised as journalism. The Selectboard was extremely transparent at the time of conflict: they released the threatening letter Drew Hazelton, chief of operations of Rescue, sent them, and Ian Goodnow and Liz McLoughlin, Selectboard chair and past...
Around the time I transitioned, I started a business. It sells to transgender customers, mostly - people like me. We've shipped to every state in this country, now, and we send more to small towns than big cities by far. People send us letters and emails, saying: Hey, I didn't think anyone cared about what I needed, but this is what I needed. Or: I'm all alone out here in my small town, but I'm trying to get up the...
The Write Action group sure seems to produce some very entitled writers with scant regard for public safety. Between Helen Neswald's “I got an unfair speeding ticket for going 19 over” [“Herd behavior on the highway,” Essay, Sept. 14] and Charlene Wakefield's “I was unjustly kicked out of Strolling of the Heifers for trespassing across a well-marked no-go zone” [“A shortcut leads to a writer's banishment,” Essay, July 6], I'd love to hear how they'll justify their unsafe actions when...