The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

Danielle Prescod is done being the “Token Black Girl.” Prescod was one of the only Black students in her prep school in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was captain of the tennis team, attended Tufts University and New York University, and went on to jobs at prestigious and influential fashion and beauty magazines including Elle, InStyle and BET, where she was style director.As Prescod grew older, she began to understand that she was molding herself to fit in a world of white supremacy. She had to be perfect — better than anyone else. That led to undergoing painful hair straightening in elementary school and developing an eating disorder when she hit puberty.The murder of George Floyd was a turning point for Prescod, who is now 34. Following Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police, she posted a searing Instagram video that went viral in which she laid out the many ways that white colleagues and media figures had marginalized and ignored her and other African Americans all while claiming to be anti-racist allies.Prescod has a new memoir, “Token Black Girl.” She has a newly formed consulting agency 2BG (2 Black Girls), which advises fashion and beauty brands and influencers on anti-racism. Prescod writes: “The Token Black Girl is characterized mostly by her proximity to her white peers and her nonthreatening and friendly nature. She is non­threatening because she is almost never the romantic interest, and her primary function is to provide ‘attitude’ and ‘sass,’ either as humor or as an attempt to elevate the sex appeal of the otherwise all-white entity. She is a good student because she has to be. She actually feels like she has to be good at everything. She’s almost always a good dancer, and even if she’s not, it doesn’t matter because everyone will still think she’s a good dancer. She either has or can get the requisite social signifiers of acceptance—everything except white skin, of course. She will be well spoken, well dressed, and well groomed. She likes all the things her friends like, including boys, but they will not like her. She almost never acknowledges her position as the sole Black member of a group because talking about race makes white people uncomfortable. She can never make white people uncomfortable. Her most critical responsibility is providing protection against the ‘racist’ label that might otherwise be hurled at a gaggle of white women devoid of ethnic variety.”“When you are a person of color in these environments, you go into survival mode because you're very convinced that … it's assimilate or die,” Prescod told The Vermont Conversation. “You are not developing into a whole individual because you're so defensive. You're like a caged feral animal. … I don't want kids living like that. It's very stressful.”

Sixty years ago this week, author Rachel Carson published the landmark book, "Silent Spring." Carson argued that pesticides, especially DDT, were poisoning people and the environment. and that the chemical industry was spreading disinformation in order to profit from this disaster. "Silent Spring" inspired the modern environmental movement and led to the banning of DDT in 1972.Today, DDT is back, thanks in part to a new era of industry disinformation.Elena Conis argues the current science denialism movement — led by anti-vaxxers, climate deniers and Covid-19 skeptics — has its roots in efforts by industry and right-wing think tanks to cast doubt on science. Conis is a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of “Vaccine Nation” and a new book, “How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT.”“Way back in the 1950s, the chemical companies had employed these PR firms that essentially began to sketch out what's now known as a playbook on how to defend your product and undermine public faith in evidence that your product might be causing harm,” Conis said on The Vermont Conversation. “This involves things like casting doubt on the scientists who are talking about the hazards of a particular chemical or technology. It involves courting journalists and encouraging them to see your side of the story and to cover your side of the story. It also involves creating scientific debate where there is none or making a debate seem consequential even though scientific consensus falls almost entirely on one particular side of the issue.”The result is the situation today where people say, “I'm only going to trust this, or I'm going to reject that. I'm going to take Ivermectin, or I'm not going to wear a mask or whatever it is. … We've lost sight of the fact that science is a process. It's about experimentation. It's about asking questions about the world we live in, coming up with answers that make sense for the moment and then adjusting those answers when the moment or the situation changes,” she said.“We've shifted from a country that appeared to trust in science and institutions of science to one that has been encouraged to question everything to the point where … you can readily find the evidence or justification you need,” Conis said.

American democracy may rise or fall on whether or not citizens succeed in preserving the right to vote. The battle to save voting rights has reached a critical phase.Following former President Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020, nearly 400 Republican-written bills restricting voting access were introduced in legislatures nationwide. Last year, legislators in every state except Vermont introduced at least one bill restricting voting access, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. By May of this year, 18 states had passed 34 laws restricting voting. These efforts are tied to the false election fraud claims that Trump and his supporters have been spreading since President Joe Biden's electoral victory.The new voting restrictions threaten to roll back the rights that were secured in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was signed into law by then-President Lyndon Johnson. The current tsunami of voter suppression laws was triggered in 2013 when the Supreme Court handed down the decision known as Shelby County v. Holder, which “put a dagger into the heart of the Voting Rights Act,” in the words of the late Rep. John Lewis. Shelby has been used to roll back key rights enshrined in the Voting Rights Act, and the result has been a wave of voter suppression laws targeting communities of color.Greg Moore has been a key participant in the battle for voting rights. He was the executive director of the NAACP National Voter Fund, coordinating national programs promoting voting rights and registering more than a half million voters nationwide throughout his career. He previously served as legislative director and chief of staff for Rep. John Conyers, where he helped steer the final passage of the “Motor Voter Act” of 1993. He is the CEO of the Promise of Democracy Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting democracy, voting rights and civic education. His new book is “Beyond the Voting Rights Act: The Untold Story of the Struggle to Reform America’s Voter Registration Laws.”Moore argues that because of the Voting Rights Act, “voter registration rolls swelled up all over the country … and it led to a massive turnout that elected the first African American president not once, but twice, in 2008 and again in 2012.” That sparked a furious effort by Republicans to suppress Black votes.“The Trump MAGA movement has accelerated that whole process,” Moore told the Vermont Conversation. “The emergence of the Black vote and the youth vote and low income vote created such a powerful force in 2008 and 2012 that it forced the retrenchment from this longstanding law that was 50 years strong.”Moore contends that federal action is essential to defend voting rights. “If you take away the federal government's ability to provide that undergirding support for these rights, then you leave it to states to do whatever they want … It's just like the issue of abortion: There'll be states where you can have it, and states where you can’t, states where you have the right to vote, and states where you don't have the freedom to vote.”“Jim Crow was what happened when there weren't federal guidelines,” Moore added. “If you take away federal guidelines, you return back to that. … Congress needs to put forth a bill that can pass on a bipartisan basis and be enacted in the law.

Katharine Hayhoe is a climate scientist, an evangelical Christian and a Texan. Those three parts of her identity do not always play well together. That’s why she is determined to find effective ways to communicate with people who do not agree with her.Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist who studies climate change. She is a distinguished professor at Texas Tech University and chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy. Her latest book is “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.” She writes regularly for the Washington Post and other publications. Her TED talk, “The Most Important Thing You Can Do About Climate Change: Talk About It,” has received more than 4 million views. Originally from Canada, she is visiting Vermont this month to deliver the keynote address for the 50th anniversary of Vermont Public Interest Research Group.Hayhoe insists that only about 8% of people completely deny the reality of climate change. She calls them “dismissives” — and she does not waste time trying to change their minds. “A key hallmark of someone who's dismissive is they literally will not and cannot listen,” she said. “I don't think it's possible barring a miracle to have a positive, constructive conversation with somebody who won't listen.“With everybody else, there is a secret to a positive conversation. And that secret is to begin with something you agree on, rather than something you disagree on.”Hayhoe suggests shifting the conversation to asking what people are worried about. “That's often where we can find sometimes surprising amounts of agreement, or at least empathy. … What would a solution look like that would actually address that without requiring the misinformation or the denial?” she asked.What most worries a climate scientist today? “It's the way that climate change is loading the weather dice against us,” she replied. “As the world gets warmer, it's like wherever we live, we have a pair of dice and we always have a chance of naturally rolling doubles.” Now, she said, “we're rolling double sixes” all the time.“The headlines around the world this summer have just been off the charts,” Hayhoe said. “Record-breaking heat waves and droughts in Europe and the U.K. followed by record breaking heavy rainfall and floods, record-breaking drought in China, record-breaking floods in Pakistan with over 30 million people affected, the wildfires, and record-breaking heat waves that we're seeing all across the western United States. There's been five 1000-year flood events in the U.S. in five weeks, and we're still getting more of them.”“Why do they matter?” Hayhoe asked. Because extreme climate events “affect us, they affect our homes, our infrastructure, our transportation, our crops, our water supply, the city of Jackson (Mississippi) not having water to support its population. Things that we took for granted — that you turn on the tap and water would come out — you can't take those things for granted anymore. And the costs in terms of human suffering, the cost in terms of the economic impacts, the long-term costs, in terms of the supply chain disruptions and the need to rebuild all of our infrastructure and the burden on our insurance, and just the personal burden of having two people having to rebuild their homes that they've lost to wildfire, flood or even sell their land that because of drought they can't grow their crops anymore. That is very concerning because it is leading to suffering today. And we know that if we don't tackle this problem at scale, it is only getting worse.”

Ralph Nader is America’s most famous consumer rights advocate. He is a relentless critic of corporate corruption and a former presidential candidate.Nader, now 88, achieved early fame in 1965 with the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, his exposé of auto safety problems with Americans cars. He went on to become a key leader in the anti-nuclear power movement. He has run for president several times, most famously in 2000, when critics accuse him of drawing votes from Vice President Al Gore resulting in the election of George W. Bush.Nader’s influence on Vermont can be found in the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this month. VPIRG was born out of a meeting at the University of Vermont in October 1971 with student activists. Don Ross, Nader’s top lieutenant, urged the students to form a campus chapter of the national citizen action movement that Nader was spearheading. Ross promised that the new group “could investigate and bring pressure in such areas as the environment, automobile laws, equal employment opportunities for minorities – any area you’re concerned about.” VPIRG was launched the following year. There are now PIRGs in over 25 states.We spend the hour talking with Ralph Nader about the citizen action movement that he inspired and about his thoughts on politics today. We also speak with Paul Burns, who has been executive director of VPIRG for 22 years.Nader says that his legacy will be measured by “how many oak trees are planted. Meaning oak trees in the forest of democracy. We can't have enough of them. They're far too few, given the corporate supremacist and the corporate control as never before in our country's history. So we can look back with pleasure as to what has been achieved. But we've got to look forward and be very displeased about how much more there has to occur to subordinate corporate power to citizen power, constitutionally, statutorily, and in the minds of the people everywhere.”The preamble to the Constitution, Nader says, did “not [say] We the corporations. It was not We the Congress. It was We the people.”

Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, progressive talk radio host Thom Hartmann introduced a new segment on his radio show on WDEV in Vermont. He invited then-Rep. Bernie Sanders on for a segment he dubbed “Brunch With Bernie.” The program featured Vermonters calling in to pepper Sanders with questions, and the representative took on all comers and all issues. The program was a hit, and Hartmann took “Brunch With Bernie” national when he moved his show to Air America and SiriusXM. These freewheeling national town halls, which aired for 11 years, introduced many people around the country to Sanders. “When people called who were hostile to Bernie, he was like, ‘Please, put them on, I want to talk to those people.’ The only people that we ever didn't put on the air where people were just obviously intoxicated or screaming obscenities — that would happen occasionally,” Hartmann said.“Whatever small role I may have played in not just helping make Bernie a national figure and a serious candidate for the presidency, but also — and I think this is the most important part — I believe that Bernie's candidacy, particularly in 2016, altered the course of American politics as one of the most consequential events of the last two or three decades.”Hartmann has been broadcasting for the past two decades on the radio, TV, online and satellite radio. He hosts a daily radio program and writes a column at The Hartmann Report, where he recently reported on the “nightmare scenario” of how the U.S. Supreme Court could subvert the 2024 election and the business of tracking and lying to pregnant people. Hartmann is a four-time winner of a Project Censored Award and he is the New York Times bestselling author of more than 30 books. His latest books are “The Hidden History of Neoliberalism” and “The Hidden History of Big Brother in America,” which were both published this year.

Becca Balint is on the cusp of making history. On Aug. 9, Balint decisively won the Democratic primary for Vermont’s at-large U.S. House seat, defeating Lt. Gov. Molly Gray by a margin of 24 points. If she wins the general election in November, Balint will become the first woman and the first openly gay person to represent Vermont in the U.S. Congress. Vermont is the only state that has never elected a woman to Congress. Becca Balint was born in a U.S. Army hospital in Germany where her father was stationed and grew up in upstate New York. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Smith College, a master’s in education from Harvard and a master’s in history from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She came to Vermont in the 1990s to be a rock climbing instructor at the Farm and Wilderness Camp in Plymouth, where she met her future wife, attorney Elizabeth Wohl. Balint went on to become a middle school teacher and in 2014 was elected state senator from Windham County. She served as Senate majority leader and is currently the Senate president pro tempore. She, her wife and their two children live in Brattleboro.

In 2010, Debra Meyerson, 53, was a Stanford professor and avid skier, hiker and biker. But after dropping her oldest son off at college on Labor Day weekend, she had a severe stroke. In an instant, her life and her identity transformed. She could not speak and was partly paralyzed.Meyerson is one of 790,000 people annually who have a stroke, a leading cause of death and disability in the U.S.Deb Meyerson has regained her ability to communicate and move, both with difficulty. She wrote a book, “Identity Theft,” and together with her husband, Steve Zuckerman, a nonprofit executive, founded Stroke Onward, an organization that raises awareness and resources for stroke survivors and their supporters.This summer, Meyerson and Zuckerman took on another challenge: bicycling across the U.S. In June, they set off from California on a 4,300-mile journey that will end in Boston on Aug. 27. They were joined by other stroke survivors and people who have had brain injuries and aphasia, a life-altering language disorder that affects about 30% of people who have strokes. The group calls itself Stroke Across America, and they are riding to raise awareness about strokes and aphasia, and to call attention to the importance of emotional recovery after a stroke.Meyerson, Zuckerman and Whitney Hardy, a survivor of a traumatic brain injury, took time out during their 100-day ride to talk about their journey.Life after a stroke “requires an emotional journey,” said Zuckerman (his cousin is former Vermont Lt. Gov. and current candidate for Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman). “A big part of that is identity. It's figuring out who are you. And who do you want to be?”“This metaphor of cycling is an adaptive activity that enables us to continue to live the kind of life we want to live,” Zuckerman concluded.

Liam Madden handily won the Republican primary for Vermont’s lone U.S. House seat, defeating his two opponents by 8 points and 13 points respectively. He now faces Democrat Becca Balint in the November election.There’s just one problem: Madden has renounced the Republican party. The Vermont Republican Party has returned the favor and renounced Madden as its candidate. “The state party would not commit any resources toward (Madden’s) campaign due to his unwillingness to commit to caucusing with Republicans in Congress,” Vermont GOP Chair Paul Dame said.“I've been very upfront the entire election every single chance I get to speak to the public to say I'm an independent running in the Republican primary,” Madden told The Vermont Conversation. “The entire theme of my candidacy is to structurally, culturally and technologically create an alternative to the two party dominance of our political system, which I think is deeply dysfunctional. It's going to take a departure from this divisive, corrupt, oligarch-controlled and ultimately nonrepresentative and nonfunctional system.”Madden is a Marine Corps veteran who was a leader in Iraq Veterans Against the War. Since graduating from Northeastern University he has worked in the renewable energy field.Madden said that if elected, he will not caucus with either party. Asked how he would be effective in Congress, he said, “I would be courted quite strongly, I imagine, from both sides and I will give Vermonters an incredible amount of leverage.”Madden opposes many of the public health measures used to control the spread of covid, including mask mandates, vaccine requirements and lockdowns. “I would also question that these methods of protection that you claim are the gold standard are really as effective as this claim,” he said.Vermont currently limits abortion access. Madden said he is in favor of abortion rights but believes “it's reasonable to have the states make the decisions about what happens after 24 weeks.”Madden described his opponent, Vermont Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, as “an incredibly intelligent and thoughtful, big hearted person. But she is also putting a kind face on a really broken system.”

Zayd Ayers Dohrn was born underground. His parents, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, were leaders of the Weather Underground, the militant group that formed in 1969 to ignite a revolution in the U.S. and fight American imperialism and racism, sometimes violently. The FBI called Bernadine Dohrn "the most dangerous woman in America." The group backed bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and the Department of State to bring attention to their cause. The only fatalities were three members of the Weather Underground who died in 1970 while making bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse.Zayd Ayers Dohrn, 45, spent the first five years of his life on the run while underground with his parents. He tells the story of the Weather Underground in a riveting award-winning 10-part podcast, “Mother Country Radicals.” Dohrn is a playwright and professor at Northwestern University.I asked Dohrn how the Weather Underground differed from the pro-Trump insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “The Weathermen were actually fighting systemic racism and a genocidal war. The Jan. 6 insurrectionists are white nationalists fighting for an authoritarian president who was literally sitting in the White House at that moment,” Dohrn replied. The Jan. 6 insurrectionists “were not a grassroots movement resisting oppressive government. They were literally a sort of a fascist putsch that was trying to keep this authoritarian president in office, contravening a democratic election. So I think it matters that one group was fighting for racism, one group is fighting against racism.”Reflecting on how his parents and the Weather Underground changed the country, Dohrn said: “In a broad sense, the American antiwar movement helped end the war in Vietnam. There are some people who think that there were the good activists — the peaceful people marching in the streets — and then the bad activists who were doing more violent actions. I don't really see it that way. I think the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army were on the extreme edge of a vast and powerful movement that was fighting to end an unjust war in America. And I think all of the activists involved in that, the peace activists and the radical activists, can take some credit for ending that war.”

Emi Nietfeld was like many high school seniors, dutifully filling out college applications. But unlike most other applicants, she was trying to get into an Ivy League school while writing college essays in the front seat of her Toyota Corolla, where she was living.Nietfeld’s family fell apart when her mother, who was a hoarder, could not care for her and put Emi on anti-psychotic medication rather than confront her own mental illness. Nietfeld’s other parent came out as transgender and disappeared from her life. Through a tumultuous childhood that included homelessness, foster care, eating disorders, suicide attempts, abuse and sexual assault, Nietfeld somehow kept her dream alive of attending a top college. She dreamed that it would be her ticket out of misery. She eventually attended Harvard and later worked at Google as a software engineer. She left Google after being sexually harassed by a supervisor, which she wrote about in an op-ed for the New York Times.Nietfeld — now 29, happily married and writing full time — survived against all odds. But she rejects the easy label of an “overcomer.” She wants her story to highlight the plight of others like her: 1 in 10 young adults experience homelessness, and LGBTQ+ youth have twice the risk of being unhoused.Nietfeld has a new book, “Acceptance,” which the New York Times describes as “a remarkable memoir” and “a detailed critique of the American fantasy that poverty, illness or any other adversity can be conquered through sheer grit and bootstrapping ingenuity.”“Instead of making a life that would redeem the past — an impossible feat — I sought out a life that I could live with,” Nietfeld wrote. “For the first time, I felt lucky for the little things: to wake up in the morning in my own bed, to eat breakfast, to do my work. It was no longer so important to me to achieve something great, because I was happy to be alive, which had seemed impossible and tenuous.”

When Michael Colburn was growing up in St. Albans, he dreamed of becoming a euphonium player in a band. He never imagined that the band would be “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band and that he would lead it for a decade, until 2014. As director of the nation’s top military ensemble, Colburn served as music adviser to the White House and regularly conducted the Marine Band and Chamber Orchestra at the Executive Mansion and at the presidential inaugurations of former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.Colburn is now returning to Vermont for a very different musical mission. He is taking the baton of the Me2 Orchestra in Burlington, which describes itself as “the world’s only classical music organization created for individuals with mental illnesses and the people who support them.” The community orchestra was founded in 2011 by conductor Ronald Braunstein, the first American to win the prestigious Karajan International Conducting Competition in Berlin in 1979. Braunstein was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had to abandon his international conducting career, but he and Caroline Whiddon, co-founder and executive director of the orchestra, have created a stigma-free musical home for others with mental illness. Me2 has received extensive media coverage, including being the subject of a PBS documentary, "Orchestrating Change." Me2 now consists of two orchestras: one in Boston that Braunstein still conducts and the original Burlington ensemble now led by Colburn.Colburn has gone from conducting some of the finest musicians in the world to leading a Vermont group “that really welcomes all musicians without fear of being judged.”“Music can be an avenue of healing and a great resource for many who are struggling with mental issues,” he said.

Somewhere in America each week, two more newspapers call it quits. Some 2,500 dailies and weeklies have closed since 2005, and just 6,500 remain. In places where once there was vibrant local coverage, there are now news deserts.The Community News Service at The University of Vermont thinks it has an answer to this growing blight: student journalists. UVM’s Community News Service, or CNS, partners with nearly half of Vermont’s approximately 40 news outlets to provide them with reporting free of charge, including VTDigger.Now the Vermont model is going national. Last month, UVM and the Knight Foundation announced a $400,000 grant to launch the Center for Community News at UVM. The idea is for student reporters and other citizen journalists around the country to fill the local news void.We spoke with Richard Watts, coordinator of the Community News Service at UVM and director of the national Center for Community News; Lisa Scagliotti, founder and editor of Waterbury Roundabout, a new community news outlet; and Dom Minadeo, a UVM senior, assistant editor of The Winooski News and a reporter for CNS.Watts said that 1,300 communities around the country no longer have any local news coverage. “That's bad for democracy,” he said. “If you don't have a local news source, you don't know what's going on in your community, and it's very hard to engage … Research shows that losing local news increases divisions and polarization and undercuts all these important institutions that we believe in.”

“Children of sect seized in Vermont,” blared the headline on the front page of the New York Times on June 23, 1984. The newspaper reported, “About 140 state police officers and social service workers raided 20 homes near (Island Pond, Vermont) early this morning and took into custody 112 children of the Northeast Kingdom Community Church because members had refused to answer complaints about child abuse and neglect.” The case sparked national outrage and was quickly thrown out by a judge.Dean Pineles was legal counsel to former Gov. Richard Snelling at the time of the raid. He insists that the raid at Island Pond was justified. Pineles went on to a distinguished career as a Vermont trial judge and later presided over war crimes tribunals in Kosovo. He says that Kosovo provided a precedent that Russian President Vladimir Putin used to justify his invasion of Ukraine. He reflects on his globetrotting legal career in a new memoir, “A Judge's Odyssey: From Vermont to Russia, Kazakhstan, and Georgia, Then on to War Crimes and Organ Trafficking in Kosovo.”Pineles has traveled the world to issue justice, but he continues to grapple with the issues surrounding the infamous Island Pond case that he confronted as a young attorney in Vermont.“I would sit here with a heavy conscience if we had done nothing and had been faced with a dead child,” Pineles declared shortly after the Island Pond raid.Four decades later, Pineles stands by that decision. “I would rather be here defending what we did,” he said.

“Support our troops” is a familiar slogan heard when American troops are deployed abroad.But are returning soldiers supported when they return home? Nearly half of troops returning from post-9/11 deployments report having reintegration problems, almost double the number reported by earlier veterans. Former President Donald Trump tapped into this vein of discontent and won 60% of the veterans’ vote in 2016. Political radicalization among veterans has been a growing problem, and a shocking number of veterans were among the insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Investigative reporter Jasper Craven has been exploring veterans’ and military issues for publications including the New York Times, Mother Jones, The Atlantic and VTDigger. In a 2018 investigative series for VTDigger, he exposed the toxic culture of the Vermont Air National Guard, leading to Gov. Phil Scott to call for a review of Guard policies. This spring, he wrote an expose for Mother Jones on neglect and abuse at Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, a prestigious school that counts among its alumni Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, architect of the first Gulf War. Craven also writes a newsletter, Battle Borne, about veterans’ issues.Craven, who is originally from Vermont, has a new book, “Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs,” co-written with Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early. The book explores the impact of military service and the challenges that veterans encounter when they return to civilian life. “The full cost of war has rarely been considered, or properly calculated, by architects of the forever warfare that continues today,” Craven and his co-authors concluded.

You never know where you will hear chamber music in Vermont. You could encounter a string quartet performing in a bookstore. In a café. At a bar. Or a retirement community.If it’s July, the musicians are likely to be participants in the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival. Started in 2005, the festival attracts more than 200 young string musicians from high school to graduate school. The program is based at St. Michael’s College for a monthlong intensive of coaching, rehearsing and performing with a faculty of experienced teachers and performers. Then they take their talents on the road and perform classical music at venues all around downtown Burlington in a series they call Classical Encounters.The Vermont Conversation spoke with three of the musicians about their musical journeys and their hopes for the future. Andrés Celis is a 19-year-old cello player from Venezuela whose family fled his home and moved to the U.S. so he and his brother could pursue music. Jalayne Mitchell, 22, took refuge from a tumultuous home life by teaching herself cello. She then landed a scholarship to study at a conservatory in Scotland. Layla Morris, 19, is a cello player who grew up in Hinesburg and is now attending the renowned Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. The Vermont Conversation also spoke with Elizabeth Chang, the artistic director of the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival.For Mitchell, playing cello is about more than just music. “It meant safety to me. It meant … not having to survive,” she said. “A lot of my life I felt unsafe. The cello gives me that sense of safety that I have not experienced anywhere else. I can just explore what I want. … I can see what I’m capable of.”Podcast includes musical excerpts.

As countries around the world, including the U.S., confront rising authoritarianism, one country may offer insight into how democracy can triumph over minority rule.South Africa was supposed to go up in flames when Nelson Mandela became president in 1994. White people feared that the Black majority would take their revenge on those who long oppressed them.Instead, Mandela oversaw a peaceful transition to democracy. A quarter century after that negotiated transfer of power, a multiracial democracy took root and blossomed.I witnessed this remarkable democratic transformation when I reported from South Africa in the late 1990s and wrote a book about the transition from apartheid.Evan Lieberman offers a fresh take on South Africa’s journey to democracy in his new book, “Until We Have Won Our Liberty: South Africa After Apartheid.” Lieberman is a total professor of political science and contemporary Africa at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.“At this time when the idea of democracy is under assault, South Africa shows us that (democracy) is still a really promising and probably our best political solution, particularly in diverse societies,” Lieberman said. South Africa offers “a reminder that we can solve our problems through a combination of elections, good institutions, deliberation and a public spiritedness that is intrinsic to democratic practice.”