Imagine…Free Vermont
When I imagine Free Vermont I think of a small European like country, the majestic beauty of its Green Mountains and Lake Champlain, as well as its classic red barns, covered bridges, and picturesque patchwork pattern of small farms, black-and-white Holsteins, tiny villages, little rivers, ridges, hollows, and dirt roads.
I also think of small, sustainable, socially responsible, environmentally friendly farms, towns, businesses, schools, and health centers free of government interference. The Free Vermont which I envision will have its own custom designed, decentralized, compassionate, human scale health care, social security, social welfare, and law enforcement systems. It will support a voluntary citizens’ brigade to reduce tension and restore order in the event of civil unrest and to provide assistance when natural disasters occur.
Free Vermont will have an efficient network of railroad passenger trains connecting Bennington, Rutland, Burlington, and St. Albans with Montpelier, White River Junction, and Brattleboro with links to Boston, New York and Montreal.
I envisage a politics of human scale epitomized by the Vermont village green where people meet to chat, have a coffee, a glass of wine, or a bite to eat; read a newspaper; listen to music; smell the flowers; and pass the time away. As always, the village green will remain neat, clean, democratic, nonviolent, noncommercial, egalitarian, and humane. A mirror image of the way America once was, but no longer knows how to be.
And then there is my beloved Northeast Kingdom, the real Vermont. The Kingdom provides a communitarian alternative to the dehumanized, mass-production, mass-consumption, overregulated, narcissistic lifestyle which pervades most of America – an alternative to the politics of money, power, speed, greed, and fear of terrorism. The Kingdom is rural, radical, and green, just like I hope Free Vermont will be.
Dennis Steele
Campaign photo by