After a long pause — our most recent issue was last October — Vermont
Commons is back. We return as a bimonthly, and subsequent issues will
appear according to Vermont’s unique transformative seasons, six in
all. Our first issue is our “Winter/Town Meeting” issue, to be closely
followed, in month’s time, by our second, the “Mud Season/Spring
Planting” issue (due out in early March).

For the first time since our founding in early 2004, we will not only
be distributed in every corner of the state – up to 200 locations from
Brattleboro to the Northeast Kingdom, St. Albans to Bennington – but we
also will no longer depend on another paper to carry us in its pocket.
We now have our own distributor.

If you haven’t checked out our constantly updated and upgraded website,
please do. We have close to one dozen blog streams underway now, as
described in our current “Free Vermont Media” column, and we plan to
expand the number of bloggers who make regular contributions to the
online dialogue about a vigorous independence movement here in one and
future republic.

In 2008 we expect the movement for Vermont independence to grow, and to
deepen its roots in many a Vermonter’s heart and mind. We believe that
political independence and economic sustainability are indissolubly
linked. True, many Vermonters active in one or another of the many
sectors of Vermont’s economy – sectors that will eventually be
transformed and add up to a whole sustainable economy – still don’t see
political independence as either necessary or of overriding importance.
Indeed, we have learned that for some eternal unionists the mere idea
of secession is a philosophical and moral anathema.

What social movement does not engender hostility in some citizens,
especially those who do not welcome change? We know that the Vermont
independence movement will take time to develop, as many of us will
continue to chase after the vanishing chimera of a lost dream, of a
now-defunct United States republic, a dream that no longer helps us to
change, but on the contrary hinders the vital process of our adaptation
to a new reality — to living in a whole new landscape.

These are momentous times. The “world order” based on the principal of
what Chalmers Johnson calls “military Keynesianism,” crafted more than
50 years ago, is coming unhinged. The question many of us — admittedly
not our Republican or Democratic presidential candidates, but many of
the rest of us marooned in the Empire that is now the United States of
America — are asking, is “Why?” And, why now?

There is no short answer to these two questions. But there are some
essential and striking facts, acknowledged by few. The Comptroller
General of the United States has told his fellow citizens that their
“federal government’s fiscal exposures totaled approximately $53
trillion as of September 30, 2007.” Not the $9 trillion of national
debt currently bandied about: $53 trillion worth of obligations that
cannot be met. Ever. That sum “translates into a current burden of
about $175,000 per American or approximately $455,000 per American
household.” In the words of Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz: “There is
something bizarre and troubling about the richest country in the world
not being able to live even remotely within its means.”

Indeed. Very troubling. And very, very bizarre.

According to "Long Emergency" author James Howard Kunstler, the current
state of global finance can only be understood in relationship to peak
oil (and “peak” natural gas as well). Finance, meanwhile, once a
necessary and useful tool of economic growth, has mutated into a kind
of Frankenstein monster, bullying and distorting a once-productive U.S.
economy purely for its own growth and gain. We are in the middle of a
reckoning that will leave none of us untouched, a panic orgy of greed
and manipulation that in the end will reveal the depths of our
collective denial of the truth: our way of life must change, and change
radically, whether we want it to or not.

This is indeed bitter medicine for the “leaders” who drove their
bankrupt nation pell-mell into Afghanistan and then Iraq, their eyes
fervently fixed on Iran (and Syria), their bankers’ printing presses
ceaselessly humming, 24-7. In their determination they have laid waste
to entire nation states and peoples, wrecked beyond repair thousands
upon thousands of American lives, and spent immense sums of money
neither they nor their citizens ever really had, much less will ever
have, all to wage their self-proclaimed “perpetual war” to preserve
“The American Way of Life.” They are leaders who cannot be stopped,
either by “the Democrats” or by “our allies,” as we have seen. Only the
reality that is bearing down on all of us can bring an end to the
desecrations done in our names.

And so, the time has come to talk about divorce. Dissolution.

Decentralization.

Secession.

On December 17, 2007, members from the Lakota took steps to secede from
the United States, sending four representatives to Washington, D.C.
Phyllis Young, one of their spokespersons, succinctly declared that
“the actions of the Lakota are not intended to embarrass the United
States but simply to save the lives of our people.” Their formal
withdrawal was hand-delivered to the appropriate official of the U.S.
State Department and it “irrevocably ends all agreements between the
Lakota Sioux Nation of Indians and the United States Government
outlined in the 1851 and 1868 Treaties [signed] at Fort Laramie,
Wyoming” (see www.lakotafreedom.com). A map showing the future
five-state area of the legally constituted Lakota Sioux Nation of
Indians is shown above.

Let us, like the Sioux, remember who we are and remember we too are a
hopeful people nestled in a very specific place: the hills and valleys
of Vermont. Greg Strong writes a feature piece about hope: read about
the more-than 60 individuals, organizations, businesses, initiatives,
and projects already launched with the goal of making Vermont a
sustainable-energy polis. In another feature, Frank Bryan reminds us
that we have not yet lost our democracy here in Vermont, though we have
much to do to fully reclaim it, taking back power ceded over decades to
Washington, D.C. “We have to learn to be happy living small,” Bryan
reminds us, as monstrosity is the enemy of democracy.

"Vermont Commons" is a journal of ideas, and we believe ideas are what
in the end make us who we are. We are neuro-linguistically motivated
beings, creatures propelled by words, or rather the constructs we make
of words. According to the writer Rebecca Solnit, “to write, to make
art or film, to work as a journalist or an educator can be a radical
act, one that blurs the lines between action and contemplation by
employing ideas as tools to make the world as well as understand it.”

We are engaged in “the battle of the story.” The story that will guide who we will be.

That is our business at Vermont Commons, “mere” words and ideas. At
this particular moment in time it is a business crucial to our survival
as a sustainable and diverse community.