2021 marks my nineteenth year living in this little village in Vermont (excluding three years when I lived about six miles south of the village). Eight years ago, my wife and I bought a house here, and for the last eight years, we’ve been raising our daughter here. My wife works for the local public school, while I work for the local private school.
In short, this little village is our home.
For the past few months, I’ve had a pretty big itch about wanting to contribute more to the community, and about a week ago, I found a way to scratch it.
There’s a great little company in Vermont (and parts of New York) called The Front Porch Forum. They try to help neighbors connect with one another through an email-based forum, and last week, one of my friends and neighbors posted a job opening for a part-time Website Content Manager for the Poultney Historical Society.
I emailed my friend, met her to discuss the position over a cup of coffee, and yesterday, I spent about two hours in the historical schoolhouse the Society calls home.
The East Poultney Schoolhouse (1896) Photo courtesy of Poultney Historical Society
I was all alone with the collection, and I couldn’t have been happier.
While there are a lot of tasks to help the Society get the website where they want it to be, I decided to spend my first day just going through some of the archives, trying to find an interesting story to share.
I look forward to spending many more hours combing through the Historical Society’s archives, trying to find ways to bring the history of our little village to life.
I’m currently reading a book titled Liquid Reign. While terribly written on a sentence-by-sentence level (c’mon, man! stick with a consistent tense!), its non-dystopian/non-utopian vision of a future run on liquid democracy and the blockchain is one of the most inspiring books I’ve read. The intelligence, humor, and cultural preferences of the author shine through the text, as does his clear-eyed, evidence-based understanding of the negative impacts of his vision. I also love how at the end of each chapter he links the reader to whatever inspired the concepts he introduces or explores. Finally, I love that the author published the novel using a Creative Commons license, living up to the novel’s obvious ethic.
In case you’ve never heard of it (as I hadn’t just a few weeks ago), liquid democracy is the radical idea that you should be in charge of your vote.
In the most idealistic version of American democracy, every two years, you are allowed to select from among your neighbors an individual to travel to Washington D.C. to represent your and/or your community’s interests. On every question that comes before the American people for the next two years, you delegate your vote to this representative.
Additionally, every four years, you have the opportunity to influence the selection of the nation’s chief executive. Your influence is minimal though not insignificant (depending on which state you live in), and it allows you to breathe at least some of your preferences into the spirit of our nation’s laws.
Finally, every six years, your entire state receives the opportunity to delegate its vote on every question to one individual who lives in your state but whom you’ve probably never met and who almost certainly will never know your name.
When you’ve delegated your vote on every question to three individuals, two of whom you’ve probably never met and the last of whom you probably barely know, why would you believe you live in a democracy?
To be fair, direct democracy is difficult in small societies and untenable in large ones. We cannot expect every voter to be legitimately informed on every question (of course, when the United States Congress is passing 5,000+ page bills less than 24 hours after they’ve been released, we obviously don’t expect our well-paid, professional representatives to be legitimately informed either).
But a liquid democracy provides voters with the opportunity to vote directly (and participate directly) on every question that sparks their interest or to delegate their vote to whomever they like on any topic or question for which they don’t have the time, knowledge, expertise, or interest.
A quick example. While I care a lot about the corruptive effects of money on our democracy, I don’t have enough understanding of the nuances involved to vote on the low-level regulations necessary to counteract it. However, I’ve listened to enough speeches and read enough articles by Lawrence Lessig to know I trust him on the issue. Instead of directly participating in any of the many decisions necessary to enact meaningful anticorruption laws, I could delegate all my votes on the topic to him.
If, in turn, Mr. Lessig knew someone he trusted more than himself on the issue, he could delegate my vote and his vote and any other vote he controls on the issue to that more trustworthy person. I would be notified of the change and would be able to decide whether to keep my vote with that new person or take it back for myself.
And I could do something similar on virtually every decision that needs to be made in our democracy.
Additionally, because I can retract my vote from my delegates at any time, there is no more election cycle. Delegates must continue to prove their worthiness to carry my vote, and the minute they lose my faith or someone else impresses me more, I can change who represents me.
The idea is so powerfully simple that it seems like a no-brainer, with the only questions being ones of implementation. How private is a person’s vote? How does the system stay informed as to who is delegated by whom and on what range of issues? How does a voter know when their delegate has cast their vote? What issues are available to vote on? Etc.
The book answers most of its implementation questions with “the blockchain,” but not in a way that means “magic.” When it comes to blockchain technology and its potential over the next several decades, the author seems to know what he’s talking about, and he’s nerdy enough to include most of it in his plot, characterization, and dialogue.
I, however, cannot distinguish this sufficiently advanced technology from magic, and so were you to ask me, I’d simply say, “the blockchain.”
One thing that excites me about the book is the level of research and insight it demonstrates. It must have been so fun for the author to look deeply into a wide variety of technological possibilities and threats (not just blockchain, but virtual reality, artificial intelligence, green transportation, resilient communities, and so much more), combine them with a deep knowledge of alternative political and economical models (such as anarchism, socialism, liquid democracy, the military-industrial complex, etc.) and a fun sense of oracality for cultural and social movements to provide a deeply realistic vision of the future, one where the worst of us still lives and thrives among the best of us.
I’d like to do something similar, but concentrate my efforts on my local community. I’ve written an experimental novel that attempts to imagine an alternative future for my state, but it was (and was intended to be) wholly divorced from reality. In its second chapter, it introduces an eight-year-old girl with “a third eye in the middle of her forehead, [a] persimmon-irised, ebony-eyeballed third eye in the middle of the child’s pale, white forehead.” From that moment on, everything I wrote in the book said “Fuck it” to reality (or in the language of the novel, “skrinkle lee”).
I’d like to try again — not to write another novel on the secession of Vermont, but to envision a non-fantasy-based, evidence-riven, activist-driven, hopeful future for my community.
In 2005, our local environmental guru, Bill McKibben, penned a book entitled, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks. The book is based on a long, multi-day walk that McKibben takes from his home in the heart of the Green Mountains to another home he owns in the heart of the Adirondacks. Along the way, he visits with and tells the story of a number of entrepreneurs and activists who call the valley between them home, and he uses what he learns to suggest a reality-based vision of what’s possible.
Meanwhile, for the past 10 years, I’ve been actively working with young people who live at the southern end of McKibben’s same valley, people whose daily lives are filled with trauma and struggle and who can hardly lift their head high enough to hope for something better.
I want to help these people connect with the resources they need to participate in the hopeful future McKibben so beautifully writes about. I want to research the wide variety of ways our local entrepreneurs, educators, and activists can help individuals who are struggling cross the gap between what is and what can be, and like the author of Liquid Reign, I want to use my skills for research and writing to do it.
Nearly two weeks on, the first Presidential debate feels like it was a real moment in this country’s history. I recently assigned one of my students to read and analyze the persuasive techniques used by Charles M. Blow in one of his Op-Eds in The New York Times. While the students focused on the mechanics of the essay, the content called for the end of presidential debates because “they are too much theater, too little substance.”
But Blow wrote his article the day before the debate, and while his critique wasn’t disproved (there was precious little substance in all that chaos), the debate gave Americans ninety uninterrupted and unvarnished minutes of the car crash that is President Trump.
I know some of the President’s most hardcore supporters loved what they saw, but anyone who still had a shred of an open mind and open eyes and open ears (including some of his supporters) found themselves disgusted by his vileness, rudeness, and mean-spiritedness (not to mention his support of white supremacists).
After the debate, my wife kissed me goodnight and headed up to bed. I tried to muster the ability to put on something less horrendous, but instead, I sat on the edge of my couch and cried for my country.
The Puppy Blues
Then we got a puppy. Her name is Pepper. She was just over eight weeks old when we picked her up from a friend’s veterinary clinic on the Canadian border. Like all puppies, she’s just about the cutest thing in the world. She’s a confirmed Shih Tzu, beagle, blue heeler mix, and we suspect she has some kind of terrier in her as well.
I didn’t grow up with pets (if you don’t count fish, which you shouldn’t, since fish are basically houseplants that move a little bit). In fact, I grew up with a complete phobia of dogs. I didn’t go inside most of my friends’ homes because they owned dogs. Some of those dogs were big; others were small. Some were nice; others, not so nice. It didn’t matter. They all scared the shit out of me.
But then I fell in love with a young woman who owned a Lhasa Apso, and if I wanted to spend time in her home, I needed to get over my irrational fears. Thankfully, her dog was well behaved (if a bit stubborn), and over time, he was able to teach me how to be around him, and by extension, other dogs.
With our daughter being an only child, my wife and I decided that a dog would be the next best thing to a sibling that we could give her. We searched for the perfect puppy throughout the summer, but the puppy rush that followed in the wake of the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders made it difficult to find the dog for us. When our friend let us know she had a little cutie for us, we jumped at the chance.
Here’s what I didn’t understand: how fucking hard it is to have a puppy at home. Don’t get me wrong: I totally get it. She’s a baby with nipping teeth and four fast legs. Like all babies, she has needs and impulses she cannot control, and it’s our job to keep her safe, make her feel secure and loved, and teach her how to behave. I understand and understood all of that.
But there’s a difference between knowing how hard something will be and then going through it. With the new family member, the whole dynamic of our household has changed.
By day three, my daughter confessed that she “both love[s] and don’t love[s]” Pepper, mostly because she’s anxious to be alone with the puppy because of the nipping (we’re working on it). Later in the week, her jealousy at the attention her parents and friends were giving to Pepper caused her to stomp up the stairs and slam the door to her bedroom because “No one appreciates me!”
By day five, after little Pepper took what felt to be a spiteful shit on the rug in front of me, I was exhausted. But the next morning, I heard a ding on my phone and looked down to find an email notification from Reddit, linking me to articles about the puppy blues.
As I sat on the edge of my bed reading the threads of that discussion, I began to tear up. All of those people sharing their stories reminded me that I wasn’t alone in having conflicting feelings about my puppy and that it gets better.
Saying Goodbye
Later that night, I attended a memorial service for the late father of two of my former students. It was a private affair arranged by my school, with our staff members and the members of the grieving family being the only ones in attendance. We hosted it at the cabin he built for our school, a project that saw him teaching several of our students (including his son) how to build an incredible, beautiful, and large structure out of wood. The ceremony included the christening of the cabin with a beautiful, hand-made plaque carved into a piece of local slate, naming it forever after the man who built it.
We gathered in a circle in front of the cabin, and his widow read the eulogy that she shared at the family service earlier in the week, but she followed her written statement with some extemporaneous words about the difficulties she and her late husband had, difficulties we knew about as a school because schools generally know what happens behind everyone’s closed doors thanks to the effects on the children.
The upshot of my friend’s words was found in the request she made to all of us: “Forgive someone.” She and her late husband were able to forgive each other during the last few months of his life, and they lived those months in joy with each other. While cancer ate away at the last of his body, his heart and his soul helped his family to heal.
After she finished, we all stood awkwardly silent in the circle, most of us with tears in our eyes or knots in our throat. I looked across the circle at one of my best friends, my brother from another mother, and I watched as he quietly poured a bit of his drink onto the ground in a sacred act of farewell.
I’ve stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon. I’ve watched powerful avalanches tear down Little Cottonwood Canyon in Utah. I’ve seen the Mediterranean Sea from the coast of France. I’ve driven through the majestic mountains of Alaska. And yet this one act, this one moment, may have been the most beautiful thing I’ve seen.
I followed his lead, and the tears poured down my face.
Thank You, Kate McKinnon
Last night, I watched this weekend’s episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Bill Burr. From the monologue to the powerful performances by Jack White’s trio, the show reflected the anxiousness that seemed to overwhelm this country since the first Presidential debate.
During the show, one of the head writers for SNL, Colin Jost, remarked several times how dark the jokes were. As an example, Michael Che compared President Trump surviving his COVID-19 infection to “when there’s a car crash and the only survivor is the drunk driver.”
With each sketch and each joke, my anxiety about the state of our country, my puppy blues, and my grief for my friend and my students lessened, and then came the moment I needed more than almost anything: Kate McKinnon, breaking down in the middle of a bit and speaking for all of us whose state of mind is reaching its limit:
It’s all a lot right now. But we can do ‘dis. And we know ‘dis.
Yesterday was my mother-in-law’s birthday. As I type this, her husband is preparing a pandemic-style, blow-out, surprise birthday party for her at their home in suburban Chicago, to take place later this evening.
My mother-in-law has three daughters. One (my wife) lives here in Vermont. Another (the youngest) lives high in the Adirondacks with her partner. The other (the oldest) lives with her husband, daughters, and stepchildren about 400 yards (as the crow flies) from my mother-in-law’s house.
This pandemic surprise party will involve a three-plus-hour Zoom call that will bring in guests from the northeastern and southwestern United States. The daughter who lives nearby, plus her family, plus my mother-in-law’s two stepchildren and their partners, plus some old friends who live in the area — all will attend the party in person.
My stepfather-in-law has been working hard to pull the party together. He’s hired a DJ to set up in their home. He’s coordinated to get my mother-in-law out of the house. He’s attempted to get President Barack Obama to make a cameo appearance (his aunt is a member of the Illinois delegation to United States House of Representatives), and while I doubt he’ll be successful, I wouldn’t put it past him to hire a look-a-like or someone just as surprising and as interesting. He’s been texting with his stepdaughters and their partners, plus his son and daughter for weeks now, trying to make sure everyone understands how important this party is to his wife.
Three days ago, my sister-in-law who lives in the Adirondacks informed all of us via text that something had come up at her work and she wouldn’t be able to attend the surprise party. She asked if my stepfather-in-law could change the date.
He agreed: “Plug in next Friday at 7 and wait for us. The rest of us will be partying this Saturday.”
She replied, “Ok well sorry I can’t be there / Yup really really sorry…”
Meanwhile, my sister-in-law texted her two sisters that she was just fucking with him; she would, in fact, be on the Zoom call. After keeping up the charade for two days, she received this suggestion from my stepfather-in-law: “how about getting dizzy and collapsing at work or cutting off a finger and having to go home around 7:30ish?”
Instead of doing either of those, she admitted to the prank.
He responded with, “I wasn’t kidding about cuttIng off a finger. Looove ya.”
Yesterday, my daughter received an early birthday present from my mother-in-law and her husband: a 24-volt Razor Pocket Mod Electric Scooter, an adorable, electric-powered moped that reaches a top speed of 15 miles per hour and is perfectly sized for an eight-year-old girl.
I unboxed it while she was at a friend’s house, installed the front wheel and handlebars on it, plugged it into a charger on the front porch, then called her home. My wife called my mother-in-law on FaceTime so she could watch my daughter discover the present.
My daughter came onto the porch, saw the electric scooter, and fell to her knees with tears in her eyes, crying to herself, “I’m so happy. I’m so happy. I’m so happy.”
My mother-in-law made that happen, and my stepfather-in-law busts his ass at work to help her make that happen.
Tonight, my beloved Celtics will be playing in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals, the most important game this team has faced all year, and yet instead of cheering them on, I will gladly sit in front of our laptop for a three-hour Zoom call that celebrates the love we hold for my mother-in-law.
I love her and her husband with all my heart, and I respect the hell out of both of them. I make fun of them (only to their face), call them “Boomers” (only to their face), and bitch about being their tech support (only to their face), but I don’t want to imagine calling a different mother- and stepfather-in-law family.
To: Mr. Raj Bhakta Re: Your Recent Purchase of Green Mountain College
My name is Kyle Callahan, and I am a homeowner in the village of Poultney.
I am also a 2006 alum and former writing adjunct with Green Mountain College. I met my wife on the campus, and after we graduated, she spent two years there as an AmeriCorps volunteer, helping the college connect with students and teachers in the local public schools.
Later, after we married under the tree where we met on campus, my wife took a position that allowed her to work with students in both our town’s public schools. I took a position at LiHigh School, the progressive independent-school about a quarter-mile east on Main Street from where you recently invested over $5 million.
We settled in Poultney not just because of the professional opportunities that opened up to us, but because we love this community. We love knowing the people who grow our food. We love the community engagement that gave rise to the Slate Valley Trails bike system, the local chapter of the Vermont Association of Snowmobile Trails, and the new REclaimED Maker Space. We love the community involvement on display at Chili Fest, Maple Fest, and our town-wide yard sales. We love the teachers and students we work with every day. We love sitting on our lawn chairs and watching our daughter run through our neighbors’ backyards with her friends.
This month marks our eighteenth year in Rutland County (fifteen of which were spent in Poultney) and our eighth year as homeowners in the village. My wife is now an English teacher in the middle school. Along with still teaching, I’m now the Operations Manager at LiHigh. Our young daughter is now a student in our public elementary school.
Vermont Public Radio reported that you “hope..to resurrect [on the GMC campus] a new kind of school that will benefit students and the local community.”
You’re quoted as saying, “It’ll probably be a work college.” The article continues, reporting that for you, “it can’t just be hands-on farm or tradecraft that’s taught[;] entrepreneurial skills [will be] equally crucial.”
According to the article, you admit your full vision for the campus is not quite clear: “the students of the college are part of the producing of the products that are growing from [Bhakta Farms], that we’re selling that they’re also learning how to sell. In turn…we’re…paying for their school.”
In other words, an apprenticeship type of school where the students graduate as skilled professionals without any debt.
The question, I guess, lies in what kinds of apprenticeships your new school will offer.
Clearly, you are a capitalist. Your vision seems to involve generating and selling agricultural products and using the profit to cover the cost of the free labor the students will provide in your agricultural fields and/or your sales and marketing division.
You’ll have to house the labor, educate and train the labor (ideally with skills that will carry over after they graduate), and cover the health and nutrition of the labor. But if the labor works as well as envisioned, your investment will pay off and each laborer will depart after however many years with the skills and credentials you promised, free at last, free at least, and ready to finally earn an income for their labor (assuming, of course, you don’t utilize financial incentives to increase the student’s output during their educational servitude).
As a graduate of Green Mountain College in the years of its environmental mission, my guiding economic theories lean more towards the democratic-socialism side of the spectrum, but I’ve worked for capitalists my entire life, and I can appreciate the need to make your nut and still have some money to enjoy the finer things in life. From the photographs on your Bhakta Farms website and your interviews on YouTube, you seem well acquainted with the finer things in life (your current “not even a double-wide” trailer/office not included).
A significant portion of Poultney residents, on the other hand, are not used to such things. According to the 2018-2019 Annual Statistical Report on Child Nutrition Programs from the Vermont Agency of Education (the latest year for which I could find data), over 46% of our elementary-school students and nearly 40% of our high-school students come from low-income families. Our median income, according to the U.S. Census, is $45,500 — which, for a family of four, qualifies them for reduced lunches at the school. This monthly income does not provide enough for food, rent/mortgage, electricity, oil, gas, auto repairs, medical bills, dental bills, clothing, Internet, etc., let alone a $250 bottle of fifty-year-old brandy.
Rutland County, as I’m sure you know, has also been devastated by the opioid epidemic, and we have reached that point in American history where the children of some of those addicts are in our school systems, not to mention the children of our county’s alcoholics, domestic abusers, and child abusers (emotional, verbal, physical, and sexual).
According to the 2017 Study Of Vermont State Funding For Special Education, the “increased demand and limited capacity for community-based mental health and social services has shifted responsibility for providing these services to schools. In the face of their own capacity limitations, schools have responded by either contracting with private providers or paying for students to attend special schools or programs outside the district.”
LiHigh, the school I labor for, is one of those special schools, so I have firsthand knowledge of how limited our community-based mental health and social services have become.
As you consider your vision for the former campus of Green Mountain College, I urge you to explore the “community school” model of education. Endorsed by the NEA and (therefore) a major element in Vice-President Biden’s education plan and (therefore, should V.P. Biden win the national election) a potential major recipient of future federal grant moneys, the model puts the campus at the center of the community. Academics, health and social services, community development, and community engagement all occur on campus.
A trade-school education results in a skilled profession, with graduates often becoming plumbers, electricians, carpenters, farmers, auto mechanics, etc., but a trade-school education can also result in graduates becoming childcare providers, family counselors, addiction counselors, nurses, elementary and secondary educators, and community artists and artisans. The very people most needed by the families in our community.
These professions are not traditionally considered “entrepreneurial,” but a talented entrepreneur such as yourself can teach students to navigate either the nonprofit system or Vermont’s benefit-corporation laws in such a way as to enjoy the finer things in life while also improving the community in which both our families have now invested so much.
Again, as you create what you called “a think tank of experts in education and in other fields,” I urge you to consider the community-school model for whatever you hope to build.
Thank you for your time, and best of luck with the still-developing vision that will, someday soon, dominate my town.
On May 13th, 1998, Steve Jobs took the stage at at the Flint Center in Cupertino, California, and introduced to the crowd of mostly Apple employees the world’s first iMac computer.
Ten months earlier, Jobs had triumphantly returned to the company he co-founded after being fired in the mid-eighties. Since his departure, Apple’s value as a company had plummeted. According to the Newsweek article linked above, one of Apple’s board members, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, described the situation like this: “Apple is like a child who has a drug problem—Steve has come back to straighten her out.”
Like tens of thousands of hopeful Apple users across the world, I thrilled at the return of Jobs and delighted at the introduction of the iMac.
I was twenty years old at the time, living with my parents, and making slightly more than minimum wage working in an Irish-run pizza shop. What little money I had went to supporting my addiction to my girlfriend (lots of movies and dinners), to keeping my Suzuki Samurai running, and to paying my “rent” (my parents’ electricity bill).
I didn’t have any money saved, and working an hourly job, I lived (comfortably, thanks to my parents) paycheck to paycheck.
My father, however, was a jet engineer for GE and had been gainfully employed in their aviation division for my entire life (and then some). We never talked finances in my family, but we lived comfortably in a wealthy suburb of Boston, so I know (and knew) he had some money to play with.
After watching the introduction of the iMac, I told my dad not only was it time to upgrade our 1993-ish Macintosh Performa, but if he was smart, he’d buy stock in Apple Computers. With Steve Jobs back in charge of the company he founded, an exciting new all-in-one flagship computer, and an assurance from Microsoft that they would continue to invest in Office for Mac for at least five years, Apple was primed for success.
If only my father had followed my advice in 1998 and purchased a $1,000 stake in Apple Computers!
Apple’s stock has split three times since 1998: twice for a 2:1 split, and once for a 7:1 split. I’m not a stock-market guy, but I think that means the following…
$1,000 of Apple stock in 1998 would have netted my father roughly 37 shares. Two years later, the stock split, which would have given my dad 74 shares. Five years later, it split again, which would have given him 148 shares. Nine years after that, it split seven ways, which would mean that, as of this writing, he would have had 1,036 shares of Apple stock.
As I mentioned, today’s price is roughly $467 per share. If my father followed my my investment advice, his shares would be worth roughly $483,000.
My grandfather bought a camp in Maine back in 1960. He passed away last Fall at the age of 100, and now the camp belongs to my father and his sister. With my grandfather’s house sold to a developer, the camp became, in a real way, the central hub of my extended family on my father’s side.
Except for my wife, my daughter, and me (who live in Vermont), every living member on my father’s side of my family lives within six miles of each other on the north shore of Boston: my parents, my brothers and their families, my aunt and uncle, my cousins and their families.
As of this past Monday (July 17th), their county in Massachusetts had a COVID-19 infection rate of 778 Active Cases Per Million. According to Vermont’s interstate travel guidelines, we can travel to see our extended family members in that county, but we have to quarantine for fourteen days when we return. If the Active Cases Per Million were 400 or lower, it would be safe for us to travel and return without having to quarantine.
The county in Maine where our camp is located has a current infection rate of 348 per Million, but I’m not dumb enough to think that because I visit my Massachusetts family in Maine, I won’t have to quarantine; the virus won’t magically disappear when they drive through the New Hampshire tolls.
But then I found out that my parents, my oldest brother, and his family were vacationing at the camp for over a week, partially quarantining their hypothetical Massachusetts germs. Eight days isn’t the science-recommended fourteen days, but I figured it was better than nothing. If they all still felt healthy at the end of the week, then maybe we could drive over to see them.
The camp has enough beds for about 15 snoring and farting people, but us Vermonters would stay in a tent in the yard. We’d venture inside to use the bathroom (wearing a mask the whole time), but that would be it. We’d play, eat, and sleep outside.
We’d also practice social distancing, paying special attention to my seven-year old, and do our best to help her maintain that distance even when playing with her cousins in the lake.
We’d wash our own dishes, cook our own food, etc.
It’d be a pain in the ass for two nights, but it’d be worth it to see my family again.
The problem, really, was what could happen on the other side of our visit, despite our absolute best intentions.
The pandemic of COVID-19 does not help people, such as myself, who have been diagnosed with a general anxiety disorder. Coping strategies work, but having a general anxiety disorder can mean that sometimes, just sometimes, you overthink it.
But when the scientific community sounds an alarm as loudly as they’re still sounding this one, a wise person takes notice.
Like all of us, I have people I worry about in this pandemic: my parents in their seventies, friends and family members who are immunocompromised, students who are unable to take care of themselves, friends who live on the edges of poverty and homelessness, my wife and daughter who are…my wife and daughter.
I cannot imagine the guilt I would feel if my inability to follow my state’s guidelines caused one of them harm.
The chances of doing so by visiting the camp are low, especially given that our Vermont county has an infection rate of 132 per Million and my town has had less than six infections since the pandemic began, but there’s a reason why Vermont set the number of Active Cases Per Million to 400.
The state admits that the number isn’t based on any “scientific evidence or scientific literature that we could rely on” because Vermont was “really the first state in the country…pretty much the first jurisdiction in the world that contemplated this, and it’s the first time we’ve had a pandemic of this level in 100 years.”
According to Vermont’s state epidemiologist, “The 400 threshold was determined based on a comparison of Vermont’s active case count compared to that of counties in the Northeast.” The Department of Financial Regulation Commissioner who announced the number added, “400 was a relatively safe number in terms of the low transmissibility. It looked similar to Vermont’s disease prevalence.”
In other words, if it was relatively safe to travel from one county to another in Vermont, then it had to be relatively safe to travel to other counties in the Northeast, provided their prevalance looked like Vermont’s.
Any honest estimate must acknowledge that the science backing the 400 threshold is less than stellar.
Any honest estimate must acknowledge that the science backing the 400 threshold is less than stellar (even before you take into account the weaknesses of the underlying data, which is mostly related to how margins of error in the raw data get exacerbated when converted to Active Cases Per Million), but 400 is the number the people I’m trusting to look out for my community say is optimum, so that’s the number I’m going with.
If I trust scientists when they talk about climate change, I need to trust scientists when they talk about the pandemic.
In the end, the main reason my wife and I decided not to visit our Massachusetts family at the camp in Maine was because of the quarantine we’d have to do when we returned. While there’s no state enforcement of that quaratine, I (again) can’t imagine the guilt I would feel if we brought COVID from the camp to one of my friends, neighbors, colleagues, students, or students’ family members.
Like so many of us (but not enough), my wife, daughter, and I work hard to do our part in putting an end to this pandemic. We wear and wash our masks, and we limit our social circles to what seems our emotional minimum.
Even here in Vermont, where the infection rate is among the lowest in the country and where, according to data for my county, cases are actively decreasing and we’re on track to contain COVID-19…even here, we’re still wearing and washing our masks, still limiting our social circles, and still following our state’s guidelines.
Even when it sucks.
Fourteen days with just the three of us, stuck on our quarter-acre property, unable to visit with neighbors or play with friends, unable to restock at the grocery store (without depending on someone else), with a seven year old whose energy levels cause her to dance and cartwheel whenever she talks, and the anxieties and pressures of two still-working teachers and parents…fourteen days locked in quarantine…
That shit just sounds bad…like, lasting-damage bad.
Especially when you consider that, almost immediately following those fourteen days of quarantine, all of three of our schools would be back in session, adding to our already considerable stresses.
I love my Massachusetts family with all my heart, and I hate that I cannot yet visit them in Maine without going into quarantine, but according to everything that seems to be true, that has to be the decision for us.
