Kris Pavek, a 71-year-old retired midwife and photographer, has often stayed in Brattleboro in summer months, in the van she calls her home, since 2021. This post originally appeared on her Substack site, where it was "written in the dark, in bed, at a Love's Truck Stop in Nevada."...
Details about the event appear in a news story this issue. BRATTLEBORO-On June 14, Flag Day, Brattleboro and our surrounding communities will come together to make the collective statement: Let freedom fly! Our community has been amazing in the months since we have understood the threat to our lives...
BENNINGTON, VERMONT / ZIKHRON YAAKOV, ISRAEL-The Shalom Alliance is working to advance the cause of peace and justice and combat the very intolerance that Richard Evers displays. Evers' letter is filled with absurdly spiteful suppositions and mendaciously venomous rhetoric from start to finish. The fact that he is a...
BRATTLEBORO-The Commons has recently published a number of commentaries and letters to the editor regarding the sad situation for Palestinians in Gaza. The general tenor of these articles is that Israel and the Israeli Defense Forces are responsible for death and starvation in Gaza and as an apartheid state in the Middle East. This is an outright lie and misconception of historical facts! It comes on the heels of the brutal murder of a beautiful couple, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah...
ATHENS-It is fair to say that Richard Evers' rhetorical attack on "a group of local Jews who call themselves the Shalom Alliance" - whose plea for civility somehow offended him - did not age well. Less than one day after tarring these Jews as "self-involved" fearmongers focused on their own "chose-ness," one of Mr. Evers' comrades in the "Free Palestine" movement used the same rhetoric as he, and a firearm, went to murder two innocent Jews on the streets of...
PUTNEY-Richard Evers, in his irate letter, doesn't understand why Jews in America feel unsafe. Well, a young Jewish couple was recently murdered in public in Washington by someone who felt that these two should die because of what Israel is doing in Gaza. The irony is that these particular people (as well as a large number of those killed on Oct. 7, 2023) were trying to find ways that Palestinians and Israelis might live together in peace. Many, many Jews,
BRATTLEBORO-I try to temper my outrage at the Trump regime for my own well-being. But then the latest filters through. The latest travel ban aimed at Haiti and several African and Islamic majority countries smacks of overt racism. The obliteration of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) is a celebration of straight-white-male (fake) Christian supremacy. The Gestapo. Secret police of ICE rounding up our sisters and brothers is sickening. The rewriting of history to exclude the Harvey Milks, Cesar Chavezes, and...
Taryn Heon is a clinical social worker, social justice/peer advocate, and writer. GUILFORD-As a graduate student in clinical social work, my training included analysis of social welfare policies, writing policy briefs, thinking about issues on a range of levels from national policy to community organizing to my own clinical training. But we weren't given diplomas just to do therapy. We were change agents, in a field that is ambiguous, ever-changing, and - as of right now - in peril. In...