The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman VTDigger

In August 2000, 23-year-old Tamara Mathieu and her husband left good jobs, gave up everything, and joined a cult. For 14 years, they were members of Twelve Tribes, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “a Christian fundamentalist cult” that has been accused of child abuse, child labor, racism and misogyny. The Twelve Tribes made national news in 1984 when their Island Pond community, which was then known as the Northeast Kingdom Community Church, was raided by Vermont State Police and 112 children were detained in response to allegations of child abuse. A judge later dismissed the cases, ruling that the raid was unconstitutional.The Twelve Tribes “sees persecution as proof that they're God's people,” said Mathieu.Mathieu, her husband and four children left the Twelve Tribes in 2014. She now works for Northwestern Counseling and Support Services in St. Albans as a facilitator of day programs for adults with developmental disabilities. She has just written a book, “All Who Believed: A Memoir of Life in the Twelve Tribes.”The Twelve Tribes attracted “people who don't want to fit into the 9-to-5 rat race of society, and they want this life of love and caring for each other and community,” explained Mathieu. “Suddenly, you're surrounded by this group of people who are just enamored by you who are giving you all this praise and encouragement.”Leaving the cult “was terrifying,” said Mathieu. “We had lived in this bubble and raised our children in this bubble. And then to come out, it's like you are bombarded with stimuli that haven't been a part of your life. I felt like a new parent. All I had done all those years was just spank my children for everything they ever did wrong. And I knew that we didn't want to continue on that practice, but what do you do? Like, a timeout?”Mathieu hopes that people who read her book see it as a cautionary tale. “Your personal freedom and your ability to make decisions for you and your family is really a priceless thing. I wouldn't give that up for anything anymore.”She also noted that cults are everywhere. “People might not really even realize what's going on right next door.”

In 1990, when Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison, hopes were high that apartheid was in its dying days. Father Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest and a chaplain to the African National Congress, had been living in exile in Zimbabwe. He thought he might soon return to South Africa to begin building a new post-apartheid nation. But apartheid’s henchman would not go quietly. Three months after Mandela’s release Lapsley received a letter bomb that blew off his hands and an eye and nearly killed him.Lapsley has gone on to transform his tragedy into a global message for healing and social justice. He founded the Institute for Healing of Memories (https://healing-memories.org/) in South Africa and worked alongside the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help victims of apartheid. He is now the president of the Healing of Memories Global Network (https://healing-memories.lu/?page_id=2743&lang=en) and has run workshops for genocide survivors in Rwanda, indigenous people in Australia, and combat veterans in the U.S. He has received numerous international awards and wrote a memoir, “Redeeming the Past: My Journey from Freedom Fighter to Healer.” (https://orbisbooks.com/products/redeeming-the-past)I met Father Michael, as he is known, in 1984 in Zimbabwe, where I was a young reporter covering the South African liberation struggle. He was the hip activist priest who everyone sought out to get information and contacts. He taught me about South African history and politics from the perspective of someone who was shaping it.I spoke with Lapsley this week while he was in Iowa where he was speaking, teaching and leading a church service.“I'd quite like to meet the person who sent me the bomb and say, ‘Thank you very much, you sent me a letter bomb,’” Lapsley reflected. “Of course it was an act of evil. But thanks to you, I now have a worldwide ministry, I've been able to set up an organization that has a small footprint across the world, for which I am very grateful. I've been able to create spaces where healing happens, where people are able to have their pain heard and acknowledged. So thank you, sir. What about you?”Lapsley said of his own journey, “I realized that if I was filled with hatred and bitterness, they would have failed to kill the body (but) they would have killed the soul, and I would remain their permanent prisoner. And I wasn't interested in being anybody's prisoner.”Lapsley said that soldiers are “all damaged by war.” The workshops that he runs encourage them to share their stories with one another.  “That helps them to recover their own humanity. Because one of the terrible things about war is the way you see two totally dehumanize the other.”Trauma and recovery are part of the human condition. “Healing is difficult, but it's possible,” said Lapsley.

Even if you don't know Jules Rabin, there’s a good chance that you have seen him protesting or read one of his many letters to the editor or commentaries (https://vtdigger.org/?s=jules%20rabin&post_tag=jules-rabin) in local publications. Rabin is Vermont’s most tenacious and dedicated peace activist. He celebrated his 100th birthday on April 6 by asking friends to join him in downtown Montpelier to protest Israel's war on Gaza.Rabin grew up in Boston, the youngest of five children. His father worked in a junkyard sorting metal and the family struggled to get by. His experience living in poverty in a working class community during the Depression made him a lifelong crusader for social justice.  Rabin attended the Boston Latin School, then went on to get a bachelor’s degree at Harvard and studied anthropology in graduate school at Columbia University. He lived in Greenwich Village where he met his wife Helen. In 1968, he moved to Vermont to teach anthropology at Goddard College, where he taught for nine years. After Goddard downsized and he lost his teaching job, Jules and Helen started Upland Bakers, baking sourdough bread for 35 years in a wood-fired oven that they built. Their bread earned such a loyal following that a local store posted a sign to customers: “To prevent RIOTS and acts of TERRORISM, we ask you to please limit your purchase of Upland French Bread to no more than three loaves.”Jules Rabin attended his first protest at the age of 8, and has protested wars in every generation. From 1960 to 1961, he participated in a 7,000-mile march from San Francisco to Moscow to promote nonviolence and nuclear disarmament. He spent years protesting against the Vietnam War, and in the early 2000s, just as the Iraq War was starting, he could be found in a weekly peace vigil in front of the Montpelier Federal Building in a protest that continued uninterrupted for nine years. Rabin, who is Jewish, has long protested Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians.“How could the Nazi genocide of Jews 1933-45 be followed by the Israeli genocide of Palestinians today?” asked Rabin. He held a sign with a similar message at a recent protest. “I feel so strongly that what Israel is doing today to Palestinians so much resembles what Germans did to Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and everywhere else in Europe and World War II. It's kind of a pitiless wrecking of human flesh.”Jules and Helen Rabin have lived in Marshfield in the same house for 56 years, where they raised their two daughters, Hannah and Nessa. They have three grandchildren.I asked Rabin what keeps him protesting. “It's not that I'm a morbid person always looking for the darkest corner of the room to squat in and be miserable in,” he replied. But he added, “One can't look the other way when something dreadful is going on.”

Jan Reynolds just wanted to be “one of the guys.” Growing up as one of seven children on a dairy farm in Middlebury, Reynolds thought nothing of a tough physical challenge. This propelled her to record setting high-altitude adventures in the company of some of the world’s top mountaineers, often as the only woman on expeditions on the highest summits.Reynolds attended the University of Vermont, where she was a top cross-country ski racer and was part of a team that won an NCAA championship. In 1980, Reynolds set the world high altitude skiing record for women when she skied off the summit of 24,757-foot Mustagata Peak in western China. She soared in a hot air balloon at 29,000 feet over Everest (and then crashed) and led the first U.S. women’s biathlon team. Esquire named her its Athlete of the Decade in the 1980s, Ultrasport dubbed her “Indiana Jan,” and she appeared everywhere from the cover of Outside Magazine to the “Today” show to National Geographic.Reynolds (https://www.janreynolds.com/) chronicled her adventures in her book “The Glass Summit: One Woman's Epic Journey Breaking Through.” She writes about her exploits as well as the power and importance of women throughout the world. She has also written and photographed over 20 books mainly documenting vanishing cultures.“All the women in the Amazon territory survive and do everything men do, right? So why do we think a woman cannot live in a triple canopy jungle or at high altitude — the Sherpas and Tibetan women are there — or the Inuit, they have babies in igloos. Think about that: they do everything men do in a frozen environment and they have babies.”Women “can do everything men do. We just have different skills and different approaches.”Reynolds was inducted into the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame (https://skihall.com/hall-of-famers/jan-reynolds/) in 2021 and was inducted into the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 2008. These days she travels the world photographing and writing about indigenous people for her award-winning children's book series, "Vanishing Cultures." Earlier this winter I skied with Reynolds at Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, where she still teaches cross-country ski lessons. She showed me a trailside bench with a plaque that honors her and her two sons and led me on a high speed adventure on and off groomed trails through her favorite mountains.“Adventure is where you wish you weren't when you are, and you wish you were when you aren't,” said Reynolds. 

Some people make films to entertain or inform. Bess O’Brien makes films to change the world."I'm very committed as a documentary filmmaker to not only make the movie but to try to use the film to create change," the award-winning Vermont filmmaker said. O’Brien's work has raised awareness about vulnerable people and social justice. Her 2013 documentary, “The Hungry Heart,” about the prescription drug crisis in Vermont, sparked a soul-searching conversation about opioids. The following year, Gov. Peter Shumlin dedicated his entire State of the State address to the topic, which received national attention.“Every state in the Union should be so lucky to have Bess O’Brien working for them in support of children and families,” Shumlin said. O’Brein’s 2016 documentary, “All of Me,” focused on the lives of women, girls and boys who have eating disorders. Like many of her films, they were shown in schools and communities throughout the state. Her other films include “Coming Home,” about five people returning to their Vermont communities from prison. And she produced “The Listen Up Project,” an original musical based on the lives of Vermont teens. O’Brien’s is now touring with her latest film, “Just Getting By,” which is about Vermonters struggling with food and housing insecurity. O’Brien has once again put a human face on an issue that is now at the top of the political agenda in Vermont and the country.Bess O’Brien is the founder of Kingdom County Productions with her husband, filmmaker Jay Craven.O’Brien said that she learned from spending time with people in poverty that “it's not only about the scarcity of money and not having enough money or availability of food or housing. It's also just the constant uncertainty of living your life. Am I going to have enough food to feed my family? Can I get to the food shelf? … Am I going to get that apartment that I applied for? This is the fifth apartment I've applied for and all the other ones fell through. Constantly living in that space is really intense and it takes a toll.”O’Brien shines a light on issues that are hiding in plain sight. “Food insecurity is not just about people who are desperately hungry and starving,” she said. Often it’s invisible, including “the parents don't eat breakfast or dinner because they don't have enough food and they give it to their kids instead,” she said. “That is food insecurity. And poverty is not necessarily living in a tent. It can be living in a hotel and not having a place to live because … even if you look for a place there is nowhere to go.”O’Brien’s latest film “is about the scrappiness, the courage, the ingenuity, the incredible forthrightness to get up every day and get through your day and make it work for your family when you have very little.”

This Vermont Conversation originally broadcast in April 2015.Tom Hayden was a leader of the student, civil rights, peace and environmental movements of the 1960s. He went on to serve 18 years in the California legislature. He was a founder of Students for a Democratic Society and was described by the NY Times as “the single greatest figure of the 1960s student movement.” Hayden died in October 2016 at the age of 76.During the Vietnam War, Hayden made controversial trips to Hanoi with his former wife, actress Jane Fonda, to promote peace talks and facilitate the release of American POWs. He helped lead street demonstrations against the war at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, where he was beaten, gassed and arrested twice. Hayden was indicted in 1969 with seven others on conspiracy and incitement charges in what eventually became the Chicago Seven trial, considered one of the leading political trials of the last century (the trial began as the Chicago Eight but became the Chicago Seven when the case against codefendent Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, was severed from the others). The trial was the subject of the 2020 Hollywood movie, “The Trial of the Chicago Seven,” in which Hayden was played by actor Eddie Redmayne.Hayden was Director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Culver City, California, and advised former California Gov. Jerry Brown on renewable energy. He was the author and editor of 20 books.I spoke with Hayden in March 2015 at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where Hayden spoke at the 50th anniversary of the first Vietnam War teach in held on a US college campus.I asked Hayden what he was proudest of in his long career of activism. "Living this long and being able to have children and grandchildren, and to observe the spread of participatory democracy and to see — despite all the failures of the left and the lack of organization, the infighting, the sectarianism, the feuds — that wave after wave of young people keep coming," he replied."I'm proudest of the fact that there's some instinct in being human that aspires to greater things than your parents had, a better world than the one that you were born into."