The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman VTDigger

A political tsunami rolled ashore on Sunday, July 21, in the form of President Joe Biden’s announcement that he was withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. This move, about 100 days...

Ethan Allen is lionized as the founding father of Vermont. But filmmaker Jay Craven has reimagined the story of the Revolutionary War figure and leader of the Green Mountain Boys to tell a fuller story of patriotism laced with greed and ambition. In Craven’s latest epic film, “Lost Nation,” Ethan Allen meets Lucy Terry Prince, a formerly enslaved woman in Guilford who scholars believe was the nation’s first African American poet. The improbable duo have a shared conviction to protect their land and people. Their fictionalized connection lies at the heart of Craven’s saga.“Lost Nation” opens with a quote from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker, who wrote, “All history is current.”“One of the questions we pose in the film is whether the promise of the American Revolution would be fulfilled,” said Craven. “There was a belief and a hope that slavery would be abolished as a result of the American Revolution. Of course, that did not happen. And some of the racial tensions of that time, unfortunately, have persisted … And today we're facing the problem of even banning African American history.”“Maybe this film itself would be banned, frankly, because it tells some African American history about struggle,” he mused.Jay Craven is one of Vermont’s cultural visionaries. He is a founder of Catamount Arts, co-founder of Circus Smirkus, and co-founder of Kingdom County Productions, which he runs with his wife, documentary filmmaker Bess O’Brien. Craven has directed 10 films, including “Where the Rivers Flow North” (1993), “Disappearances” (2006) and “Northern Borders” (2013). Craven is also artistic director of the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival and a former professor of film studies at Marlboro College. Craven attended Boston University, where he was student body president and led protests against the Vietnam War. He formed a lifelong friendship with radical historian Howard Zinn and traveled with a student peace delegation to North Vietnam.Filmmaking is an extension of Craven's lifelong social justice mission. Some 45 students from 10 colleges were involved in making “Lost Nation,” part of his commitment to empowering a new generation of filmmakers through Semester Cinema.Making films “gave me voice, it gave me agency and also instilled in me a certain activism that became a guiding force when I moved to Vermont in wanting to work within the arts to connect communities and to work with this idea of community and culture,” Craven said. “Making movies based on stories from where I lived, as an alternative to the Hollywood narrative, was part of that activism.”

When flood waters tore through parts of Vermont last July, countless lives were upended. Barre, the Granite City, was especially hard hit. Parts of downtown were buried in thick mud, and the city public works department spent days sending snowplows through the streets to clear them.This week, virtually everyone I talked with in Barre expressed anxiety about heavy rains and potential flash flooding expected on Wednesday and Thursday. I stopped by Dente’s Market, Barre’s last corner grocery. The store dates back to 1907. Last year when I visited, the sodden contents of the store were heaped on the sidewalk. I found its owner, Rick Dente, standing on the porch of a house that he owns just behind the market. Locals affectionately call him the Mayor of North Barre. When I met Dente last year, he told me of his harrowing near-death experience during the flood. He was in water up to his neck, pinned to a door in the back of his market, his legs about to give out. Just when Dente thought it was over, three tenants who lived above his store came down, ropes around their waists. They banged open the door and rescued the exhausted shopkeeper.“Someone was watching over me,” Dente told me last year inside his mud filled market. Today, collectible glass milk containers and old Coke bottles once again sparkled on the shelves, and coolers offered an assortment of food and drink. Rick Dente was behind the counter in his usual post where he has been greeting his Barre neighbors for decades.Dente said that he has had health impacts related to the 2023 flood. “I've had some physical issues that I'm told can be the result of your body experiencing some serious, serious stress.”“Hopefully I can stay in good health and keep going for at least a few more years,” he said of his 117 year old family business. “Time will tell.”When I visited Vermont Bicycle Shop, I discovered that it had moved from its location on Main Street. The new store opened this week a few blocks away at a location that did not flood.“I always describe last year as both the best and worst thing that's ever happened to me,” said bike store owner Darren Ohl, whose basement stocked with over $100,000 in inventory was under 8 feet of water last year. Community members created a GoFundMe for the bike shop that raised over $26,000.“The flood was terrible to go through," said Ohl. But it "was wonderful was seeing how much our community came out. We had over 25 volunteers with over 20 volunteers for almost 30 days straight. So many people would just come to the shop and just write us a check and donate money. That was astounding to experience as a business owner. And without that we would have folded. We would have gone out of business.”“That community response is one of the things that holds neighborhoods and communities together,” said Pam Wilson, a founder of Barre Up, a group working on long term recovery. “That's how you survive an unpredictable climate future. It's based in community care.”

Democrats, stop freaking out.That is the message — or plea — of veteran campaign consultant Stuart Stevens following President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week. Numerous pundits on cable news, some Democratic donors and the editorial board of the New York Times have called for Biden to drop out and let a younger candidate take on Trump.Stevens thinks that dumping Biden is “insane.” "Is Joe Biden up to being president? I find it sort of an absurd question because he is president,” Stevens said. “And he's probably the most successful first term president since World War Two.”Stevens is among the most experienced and successful campaign consultants in the country. He was a top adviser on five Republican presidential campaigns, including for Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and John McCain, and he has been a consultant on dozens of GOP campaigns for governor, Congress and the U.S. Senate.Stuart Stevens has now abandoned the Republican Party, contending that it has become an authoritarian movement. He was one of the most prominent Republicans to come out against Donald Trump in 2016. Stevens has written several bestselling books about his political conversion, including his latest, “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party is Driving Our Democracy To Autocracy.”Stuart Stevens is now a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, which is working to defeat Trump in the 2024 election. He grew up in Mississippi but has lived for many years in Stowe.Stevens says the talk of changing candidates is “fantasy.” Replacing Biden and sidelining Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to hold the position, would "shatter the Democratic Party for at least a generation, maybe permanently," he argued, adding that it was "extraordinarily sexist and racist and offensive.”Stevens said that Democrats have a history of doubting and undermining their candidates, which he believes has cost them winnable elections in the past. "This sense of doubt, of timidity, of not being willing to rally around your candidate... has been disastrous," Stevens observed.Stevens noted that presidential debates have historically made no difference in the outcome of a race. He pointed out that "Hillary Clinton won every debate and lost" the 2016 election.The presidential race is “going to be about the future of democracy and about stability and about what kind of country do we think we are. And I think Trump loses all those,” argued Stevens.He said the campaign’s outcome will be determined in its final weeks, not in July. He ventured that Biden would win and “the race isn't going to be particularly close.”Stevens summarized his advice to Democrats in a recent New York Times op-ed, “Suck it up and fight. It’s not supposed to be easy.”

This Vermont Conversation with Jackson Beecham originally aired in July 2022.When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade on June 24, it left each state to decide its own abortion laws. Many Republican-led states are reverting to the anti-abortion laws that were on the books before 1973 when Roe legalized abortion.Vermont legalized abortion a year before Roe. In 1972, the Vermont Supreme Court overturned a 122 year-old law that made it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion, though it was not against the law for someone to have one. In practice, this meant that someone could legally self-abort at their own peril, but a doctor who performed an abortion could be arrested and imprisoned for up to 20 years.The case that legalized abortion in Vermont featured “Jacqueline R.,” an unmarried server who wanted to end her pregnancy, and an OB/GYN resident at the University of Vermont named Jackson Beecham. After New York legalized abortion in 1970, Beecham, a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, joined a small group of women’s health advocates in Burlington who were exploring ways to legalize abortion in the Green Mountain State. Attorney Willis “Woody” Higgins, a lawyer for IBM who volunteered to argue the case, advised the group that they needed two plaintiffs: a pregnant person who wanted an abortion and “a courageous doctor.” The prosecutor they faced was a young state's attorney, Patrick Leahy, and the landmark case that legalized abortion in Vermont was known as Beecham vs. Leahy.“I didn’t even think about winning or losing,” Beecham said of the case. He just felt “this is the right thing to do.” When the Vermont Supreme Court ruled for Beecham in January 1972, Beecham said, “I was floored.” Within a few months, legal abortions were being performed in Vermont.Beecham went on to a distinguished medical career as a gynecologic oncologist and cancer surgeon. He founded two gynecologic oncology programs at the cancer centers of the University of Rochester and at Dartmouth College, and he was a longtime associate professor at Dartmouth Medical School. Beecham, who is now 80 and lives in Shelburne, retired from practicing medicine in 2008. He continues to be a champion of reproductive rights and is a strong advocate for Proposal 5, which would make Vermont the first state in the country to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution if it is approved by voters in November.Beecham reflected on his role in legalizing abortion in Vermont.“I was honored to spend four decades in women’s health as a cancer surgeon. But I think … getting this law changed is the single most important thing I ever did. I’m still moved by it. I’m very, very grateful that I could be part of helping others,” he said.He said that he is “just horrified” that the U.S. Supreme Court has returned the country to where it was before Roe vs. Wade. “I’ll be on the sidelines, fighting like everyone else that feels in support of women,” Beecham said.

Is our car-centric society ready to ditch automobiles for bicycles?It is already happening in a number of cities, and it may be part of the solution to the climate crisis. This is the case made by Daniel Piatkowski in his new book, Bicycle City: Riding the Bike Boom to a Brighter Future. Piatkowski, a former New York City bike messenger, is now a professor of land use and transportation planning at Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway.Piatkowski says that e-bikes have revolutionized the way we think about bicycles. Increasing numbers of people commute on e-bikes, especially when cities provide incentives to reduce auto congestion. Cargo e-bikes are even replacing SUVs and delivery vehicles.Piatkowski argues that what was once viewed as recreation is now the future of transportation.“The bicycle is a bridge to help reduce that immediate reliance on a car every day,” asserted Piatkowksi. “Making places more bike friendly makes them more people friendly.It makes them more transport friendly. “I look at bikes as the necessary first step, but certainly not the last step in that transition that we need to get away from not only driving our cars all the time, but building cities that have to accommodate cars,” Piatkowksi said.Bikes “are the starting point to …revolutionary changes in how our cities can function.”