Section:
Re-Inventing Vermont:
A New Year, An Open Invitation…
Dawn comes a bit earlier now that January is here in central Vermont's Mad River Valley, and our cozy communities bustle with visitors sneaking in one more ski before heading home, kids returning to school after the holidays, and the warmth and hum of local commerce. We are surrounded by what sometimes feels like timeless beauty here: the understated majesty of the snow-blanketed Green Mountains just to our west; the Mad River's morning mist snaking lazily across the frozen belts of ice-crusted meadow and through the naked trees; the ski and snowmobile trails crisscrossing the Valley floor, beckoning for just a few minutes of our precious time.
Though this is a scene that fellow Vermonter Norman Rockwell would love, we know, too, of the realities a Vermont winter brings. Keeping our homes warm, our families fed, and our farms, schools, businesses, civic networks, and houses of worship alive in the dead of winter requires hard work and constant vigilance. And we all have neighbors struggling to survive in the face of rising energy costs and dwindling federal support for society's most vulnerable – “to heat or to eat” becomes a real and difficult choice for many. Our beautiful yet precarious Green Mountain existence is thrown into even sharper relief when considered against a national backdrop much less inviting than our snow-covered landscape: spiking fossil fuel prices, mounting national debt, titanic military expenditures, unbridled corporate power, and a sense that world events are beyond our control.
As we enter our second year publishing “Vermont Commons” and I officially step into the editor's chair, I feel obliged to acknowledge these realities, and explain our newspaper's core operating assumptions. The articulate and occasionally maddening writer/columnist George Will is fond of pointing out that the United States emerged, not out of the primordial mists, but out of a particular historical moment – the collective 1776 decision by a small number of English colonists to assent to certain agreed-upon basic truths. From this famous “revolutionary” moment, Will asserts, a small group of middling and well-to-do merchants invented a new republic with the Constitution's 1788 ratification, as well as creating a national creed revolving around those famous and much-debated words from Jefferson's Declaration. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are cornerstones of U.S. mythology. Our national doctrine. Our creed. One to which all of us in the United States, regardless of where we are from, assent.
We at “Vermont Commons” are hammering out our own creed, built, like Jefferson's “Declaration,” on three fundamental beliefs. The first of these is that this collective project called the United States - once a near-universally admired republic and now the richest and most powerful Empire on the planet - is simply too big and too unsustainable to continue existing in its current form. We assert this, as Frank Bryan reminds us in these pages, not lightly or with any anger, glee, or malice, but with a deep sense of melancholy and no small measure of regret. We are patriots first and foremost. We are proud to be Americans. We are in love with this continent's stunning landscapes, its marvelous cities and quaint towns, and its generous people. If given the choice, most all of us would live nowhere else but here.
But “here” in these United States - our country, and, more importantly, our national government - is no longer our own. Rampant militarism, endless war, election fraud, debt-for-growth spending, hyper-corporate commercialism, Peak Oil, and a host of other pressing problems loom large. We are, by virtue of being citizens of the richest and most powerful Empire in world history, implicated in these daunting realities. For those who believe that the federal government is simply incompetent, we have suggested that the truth may be far more sinister. For others who assert that the U.S. Empire, decades in the making, can somehow be reformed simply by electing the right millionaire/presidential candidate to office, or by passing the right piece of legislation, we believe otherwise.
Our ultimate goal is “re-invention.”
We assent to a second belief here at “Vermont Commons.” Namely, that secession – the state of Vermont's peaceable and voluntary withdrawal from the United States Empire - is not merely a viable policy option supported by both the U.S. Constitution and our own history. Secession ultimately represents the best practical response to the series of crises now confronting all of us as American citizens living amidst Empire. Secession is not “running away” from the problems facing us, as some critics have asserted, but confronting those problems square on, unflinchingly and honestly, and encouraging our fellow Americans across this great land to do the same. To save what is best about our beloved United States, in other words, we must peaceably dismantle it, reclaiming our land, our resources, our rights, and our responsibilities to one another from those who rob us of the same, while they energetically wave the flag and speak of “freedom,” “liberty,” and “democracy.”
Our ultimate goal is “re-invention.”
For those who live within Vermont's boundaries, our third core belief is really directed towards you. We at “Vermont Commons” believe that we Vermonters, working independently and in concert with the entire world, can better feed, power, clothe, transport, educate, entertain and sustain ourselves as an independent republic than we can as one of fifty states in an Empire that is crumbling (and very much in denial about this fact). This will not be easy, of course, and we may fail. But, as I travel throughout our remarkable state, I see promising signs everywhere: the family farms, front yard gardens, and local businesses dotting our hills and valleys; our annual town meeting and the ongoing work of our local governing bodies; myriad Green Mountain organizations tackling what will be some of the 21st century's toughest problems: re-inventing our energy paradigm for a post-carbon age, for example, or figuring out how to revitalize our local and state economies as global corporations abandon us for more exploitable labor and cheaper resources elsewhere.
All of these ongoing projects, profoundly local in nature, but directly connected to the wider world in so many ways, offer us more than hope. These gardens and grassroots organizations are signposts, pointing the way towards a future we are only now beginning to imagine.
Our ultimate goal is “re-invention.”
This year and this month marks the first annual “Vermont Independence Day,” a calendar day celebrating Vermont's first declaration of independence as an independent republic in January 1777. That independent republic governed, fed, powered, and supported its citizens for fourteen years prior to admission into the Union.
And now, the reality of global Peak Oil is setting in. The federal government, a project now primarily run by and for the world's wealthiest corporations, is busy off-shoring taxable wealth, raiding the U.S. Treasury on the sly, borrowing money at unprecedented rates, manipulating electoral returns, attacking its own citizens as part of a so-called “war on terror,” and shelling out a weekly $1 billion to fund a sequential global war for the world's last fossil fuel energy reserves.
We can do better.
We must do better.
The time has come, once again, for us to consider independence. Decentralization. Devolution. Smaller scale organization.
Not just here, but globally.
For us, and for our children. And our children's children.
And Vermont can lead the way.
We at “Vermont Commons” champion, within these pages, a good hard look towards our common future together, and seek common ground wherever, whenever, and with whomever is interested in rolling up our collective sleeves and sharing the work (and the rewards) re-invention will bring. We've got some exciting challenges ahead.
Long live the (dis)United States and the second Vermont Republic.
A Republic that, one day soon, will be.
Rob Williams
Editor