The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman

What does a performer do when she can’t perform?For Karen Kevra, she becomes a storyteller.Kevra is a Grammy-nominated flutist and founder and artistic director of Capital City Concerts in Montpelier. When Covid-19 shuttered performance venues last year, she searched for a new way to connect with her audience. Kevra has performed throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe, including performances at Carnegie Hall and the French Embassy in Washington, D.C. Last year, she launched a podcast, Muse Mentors, a series of beautifully crafted interviews with artists, activists and thinkers in which she explores the transformative role that mentors have played in their lives.Kevra credits her own mentor with changing the course of her life. As an adult, Kevra sought out a teacher, Louis Moyse, a renowned flutist, composer and co-founder of the Marlboro Music Festival. Their musical relationship blossomed into a lifelong friendship until Moyse’s death in 2007 at the age of 94."There’s a difference between a teacher and a mentor," says Kevra. "A mentor is someone who helps to shape you, who becomes a part of your life and really shows you how to live life."

Vermont has committed to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2030, and to meeting 90 percent of its energy needs with renewable sources by 2050. Are these energy goals a pipe dream, or are they within reach?The answer depends on where you live. The city of Burlington now gets all of its power from renewable generation. And as President Biden struggles to get a national clean energy infrastructure plan passed, Burlington residents will soon vote on an energy bond that is aimed at making Burlington the first city in the country to be netzero in energy use.The Vermont Conversation is joined by Darren Springer, general manager of Burlington Electric Department, and Peter Sterling, interim executive director of Renewable Energy Vermont, to get a snapshot of where Vermont is now on its green energy quest.“Burlington is on the leading edge in the country,” says Springer of Burlington’s energy future. “We’re taking an all-in approach to try to reach a reduction and eventual elimination of fossil fuel use in the [heating and ground transportation] sectors.”

When Bernie Sanders decided to pursue national politics, one obstacle stood in his way: He had to defeat Vermont’s Republican congressman, Rep. Peter Smith. In 1988, Sanders first ran for Congress against Smith and lost in a three-way race. Two years later, Smith was completing his first term when the former mayor of Burlington challenged him again. This time, the maverick socialist won handily.Peter Smith occupies a unique place in Vermont’s political history. He is the one-term Republican congressman who in defeat launched Sanders’ three-decade long national political career. And Smith is Vermont’s last Republican congressman.Smith cites a saying that “if you wanna surf, you gotta get ahead of the wave. In politics, the wave broke right on top of me. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”Smith has left the Republican Party and signed a letter in 2016 with other former Republican Congressmen denouncing Donald Trump as “manifestly unqualified to be president.”Smith says he still occasionally participates in programs in which former members of Congress speak to students and citizen groups. He identifies himself as “R-Vermont in the 101st Congress.”  He says with a soft laugh that it is “a little confusing to some people because I’m generally to the left of whoever the Democrat is that I’m traveling with. The truth of matter is when I was in the Congress, I voted to the left of something like 55% of the Democratic Caucus.”Peter Smith founded and led the Community College of Vermont in the 1970s and went on to serve as a state senator and Lieutenant Governor. After losing to Bernie Sanders in 1990, Smith left politics and Vermont to pursue a career in education. He was the founding president of California State University at Monterey Bay, was dean of the Graduate School of Education at George Washington University, Assistant Director of UNESCO, and is now a professor at the University of Maryland Global Campus. He has written a new book about people who did not attend college but who bring deep experiential knowledge to their work, Stories from the Educational Underground: The New Frontier for Learning and Work.Smith says, “I couldn’t see it in 1991, but…I think I am doing what I was meant to do. I frankly think Bernie has been doing what he was meant to do. He’s had a major impact on the party and the country.”

As the Covid pandemic grabs headlines, another deadly epidemic is quietly ravaging communities: addiction has led to a record spike in overdoses. Nationally, there was a 29% increase in overdose deaths last year. In Vermont, opioid deaths rose by 38% in 2020, with 157 people who died by overdose.For town librarian Brett Ann Stanciu, these statistics had a name and a face. In 2016, a local man who broke into her library in Woodbury, Vt., died by suicide after encountering a library trustee. This led Stanciu on a quest to understand opioid addiction in her community and in Vermont. It also led her to reckon with her own addiction. This quest is the subject of her new book, Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal.Stanciu, a graduate of Marlboro College and formerly the librarian in Woodbury, says that her book “looks at our society and how it’s frayed apart, what the ways [are] that we can put our society back together.”In our second half, we talk with Maia Szalavitz, a New York Times bestselling author of Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction. Szalavitz. When she was in her 20s, Szalavitz struggled with an addiction to heroin and cocaine. She says programs promoting abstinence from drugs have resulted in broken families, mass incarceration and the spread of disease. Szalavitz says a more effective -- but politically controversial -- approach is harm reduction. Examples of this include needle exchange programs and using methadone and buprenorphine to treat addiction.Szalavitz says that harm reduction is now gaining acceptance—but for dubious reasons. “Our drug laws are racist. The only reason the drugs that are legal are legal and the drugs that are illegal are illegal is racism and anti-immigrant panic. …Now when we see the victims of the opioid problem as being white, suddenly being nicer to them is OK, so harm reduction gets massively adopted all over the place.”Szalavitz advocates ending the failed war on drugs and de-stigmatizing substance abuse. “When you take away the elusiveness and the cops and robbers, it doesn’t actually make people want to stay addicted forever. It gives them space to make some change…. Overall the picture is extraordinarily positive.”

This week, the U.S. government narrowly averted shutting down. Now, a debt default crisis looms on the horizon. This brinksmanship has been driven by Senate Republicans, who threatened a shutdown and are blocking raising the debt limit as part of a strategy to undermine President Biden’s economic agenda. Unless an agreement is reached by Oct. 18, the U.S. will default on its debts for the first time in its history.How did government become the enemy? The simple answer is that Ronald Reagan successfully ran for the presidency in 1980 by declaring, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” President Reagan ultimately presided over three government shutdowns, the first time that shuttering the government was used as a political weapon. President Trump took this scorched earth political warfare to a new level, presiding over the longest government shutdown in history – 35 days — which occurred in January 2019 over disputes with Congress about funding his border wall. Trump’s shutdown cost American taxpayers about $5 billion.According to Yale historian Paul Sabin, the anti-government movement that Reagan rode to victory was actually inspired by citizen activists of the 1960s, such as Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson. He describes this improbable connection between 1960s liberal activism and the current anti-government movement in his new book, Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. Sabin is a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program.Sabin is deeply concerned by the authoritarian bent of the current anti-government movement. “We need to actively defend the government and its purposes and the public goods and the role of public institutions.”“My dream would be we could find a way to… combine active government with the idea of continuous reform and improvement and we could come to terms with complicated, flawed institutions.”“We’re never going to have a perfect government,” Sabin concludes.

It is the greatest fraud in Vermont’s history.The EB-5 scandal has the elements of a true crime novel: A shady grifter. Secret meetings. Duped investors. Complicit regulators. A panicked whistleblower. A tenacious journalist. Whispers of blackmail. Millions of dollars lost. A dramatic raid by Federal agents that brings it all crashing down.In 2012, when VTDigger founder and editor Anne Galloway attended a glitzy press conference announcing plans for massive investments and thousands of jobs in the financially depressed Northeast Kingdom, she smelled a rat. The latest revelations in the unfolding saga include a state attorney who alleged that top government officials knowingly “aided and abetted” the fraud.In this Vermont Conversation, Galloway offers a primer on the EB-5 scandal, starting from the program’s beginnings in 2006 to the most recent developments. In 2017, Galloway was a finalist for the Ancil Payne Award for Ethics, the Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award and the Investigative Reporters and Editors FOIA Award for her EB-5 investigation.Galloway says that the EB-5 scandal is a cautionary tale in the small Green Mountain state. “We have a situation in Vermont in which we’re not very good about holding people accountable,” she says. “There are companies and entities that operate in this state with impunity because people in power aren’t willing to be subjected to the kind of scrutiny that would make their work more accountable to the public.”

Where will homeless Vermonters live?That question has come to the forefront as more than 540 households were slated to lose their rooms in motels this week. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, Vermont’s general assistance housing program has utilized vacant motel rooms for Vermonters who would otherwise be homeless. VTDigger has reported that some 700 people were forced out of the program July 1, while people with children, or with disabilities, or who were fleeing dangerous or life-threatening conditions were allowed to remain. Vermont’s emergency motel stays were slated to end on September 23 – despite the fact that federal funds are available to cover the motel housing until the end of the year.Vulnerable Vermonters have received a last-minute reprieve. On September 21, Gov. Phil Scott announced a “30-day pause” in the effort to close the motel housing program. His announcement came following criticism from legislators and advocates.One such advocate is Addie Lentzner, a senior at Arlington High School. She helped organize a letter signed by dozens of owners of emergency hotels around the state that declared: “We as motel owners call on Governor Scott to use the federal money to reinstate the GA Motel Program through December, and ensure that there is safe and consistent housing available when the time comes to transition out. At this point, every available motel room should be used for shelter. Now is the time to act before almost 600 people are kicked out.” The letter pushes back on arguments by state officials that motel owners want voucher recipients gone to free up rooms for leaf-peeping tourists. On this Vermont Conversation, we hear from people who are directly affected by the motel housing program, including Laila Lakshmair and her son, Raj Singh, who operate the Bradford Motel; Olive, a resident of a motel in Morrisville, who asked to be identified by her first name only to protect her privacy; Kim Anetsberger, executive director of Lamoille Community House, a seasonal homeless shelter; and advocate Addie Lentzner. In the second half of the Vermont Conversation, we talk with longtime advocate for the homeless Rita Markley. For over two decades, Markley has led the Committee on Temporary Shelter (COTS), one of Vermont’s oldest shelters for people experiencing homelessness. Markley discusses how the homelessness crisis has deepened over the past 30 years as a result of policy choices and the closures of mental health facilities, and how policies must change for homelessness to be eradicated.

John Killacky has had a front row seat in America’s culture wars. As a gay man and a dancer in the 1980s, he lost over 100 friends to AIDS. As an arts administrator in the 1990s and 2000s, he confronted police who threatened to shut down artists who they deemed to be obscene. And as the former director of the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vt., he agreed to allow a visit by presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016 – and broke down in tears after a night filled with rage, vitriol and protest.The Trump campaign overbooked the theater, causing overflow crowds to spill onto the streets and confront anti-Trump protesters. As protesters inside the Flynn disrupted his speech, Trump demanded of police, “Get ’em out. Confiscate his coat. It’s about 10 degrees below zero outside. … Tell him we’ll send it to him in a couple of weeks.”Today Killacky is a Vermont State Representative representing South Burlington and is one of a handful of openly LGBTQ legislators. He has a new book of essays, Because Art.Killacky was targeted by protesters for giving a platform to Trump in 2016. He remains unsettled by what he saw that night.“I felt like I experienced fascism from the stage,” he says. He talks about whether he would make the same decision again.

The issue of resettling refugees has been a flashpoint in Rutland. Five years ago, then-Alderman David Allaire fiercely opposed the settlement of 100 Syrian refugees in the city, declaring that the program should be “slowed down, if not stopped.” His opposition to resettling refugees was a central issue in his campaign against Mayor Chris Louras. Six weeks after Donald Trump was inaugurated, Allaire soundly defeated Louras in March 2017 in a vote that was widely viewed as a referendum on refugee resettlement. The refugee controversy and Louras' defeat made national news.Last week, something remarkable happened at a meeting of the Rutland Board of Aldermen. Now-Mayor David Allaire stood up to speak to the issue of a plan to resettle Afghan refugees in Rutland. Allaire declared, “I want to make clear to everyone that I am supportive of this...” Gov. Phil Scott has also expressed support for bringing refugees to Vermont.Rutland Alderman Devon Neary noted the results of a recent census. “We lost 688 folks, so honestly, this couldn’t come at a better time,” he told Amila Merdzanovic, director of Vermont’s chapter of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. He encouraged Merdzanovic to look at Rutland as a “big partner, not just as a little partner.”“For the Love of Rutland” is a new film by award-winning documentary filmmaker Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, who grew up in Rutland and is now an associate professor in Film and Digital Media and director of Graduate Studies in the Social Documentation MFA program at University of California at Santa Cruz. The film follows a Rutland woman who is struggling with overcoming poverty and addiction. The film also follows former Mayor Chris Louras during the bitter debate over refugees in 2016, and his electoral defeat.

Bill McKibben has a new target for his climate activism: his fellow Baby Boomers.McKibben, the founder of the global climate action group 350.org and a bestselling author, announced last week that he will end his weekly “Climate Crisis” column in The New Yorker and instead launch his own Substack newsletter, The Crucial Years, and a new organization, ThirdAct.org. He tweeted: “We're going to try and organize 'experienced Americans' — i.e., people over 60 like me — around issues of climate justice, racial justice, economic justice.”“Our generations have done their share of damage,” he writes. “We're on the verge of leaving the world a worse place than we found it. But we also have the skills and resources to help make change.”McKibben also reflects on the perilous state of democracy and on the prospects for his beloved but snakebitten Boston Red Sox.

A Texas law that effectively bans abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy went into effect on September 1. The law signed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, known as SB8, bans abortion before many people know they are pregnant. It took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court, flush with three Trump appointees, refused to grant an emergency request to block it. SB8 has a novel provision that essentially deputizes ordinary citizens to enforce the law and claim a $10,000 bounty on anyone that they think has violated it. The Texas abortion ban is now expected to be replicated in many other Republican-led states.“It is an all-out attack on the people who need abortions by intimidating and terrifying every person around them who might help them,” asserts Lynn Paltrow, the founder and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a human rights and civil rights organization focused on pregnant and parenting women.Paltrow, who is an attorney, tells The Vermont Conversation that the Texas law is “about much bigger issues: white supremacy and male supremacy. It isn’t just criminalizing abortion. It is labeling and surveilling everybody who has the capacity for pregnancy.”The anti-abortion law took effect the same week that Gov. Abbott signed laws restricting voter access and loosened gun restrictions. Paltrow says all these laws are part of a “strategy of undermining democracy and undermining constitutional review by the Supreme Court.”Stopping the Texas law is a critical test, she says. “It’s not only a fight for abortion rights. It’s a fight for a true democracy.”

Is Vermont squandering its hard won gains keeping Covid-19 in check? That’s the argument of Anne Sosin, a public health specialist and Policy Fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College. She recently wrote an essay for Time Magazine titled, “Vermont Offered the U.S. a Textbook for Reopening Schools Safely. Why Is It Throwing Out the Lesson Plan?” “We see a departure from the evidence-based approach that’s been so critical to Vermont’s success in earlier phases of the pandemic,” Sosin tells The Vermont Conversation. “Right now, we need to be prioritizing the health and education of our children. That means aligning what we’re doing with the best evidence, local epidemiology and the guidance coming out. And I’m concerned that we have shifted very far away from that in the last several weeks.” The U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends universal indoor masking in schools regardless of vaccination status. Gov. Phil Scott said masks are "a good idea," but he has declined to mandate them in schools or elsewhere. The Delta variant is now surging in places that were recently hailed as Covid-19 success stories, such as Iceland, Israel and Hawaii. These places are a cautionary tale for Vermont, Sosin said. “All of these places have very high vaccination rates like Vermont, yet this variant has led to very rapid increases in transmission and has had significant impacts on health systems, schools and businesses,” she said. “We need to learn and be really humble in our approach as we respond to it.” Vaccines are not enough, she said. “Employing other tools right now helps us to safeguard the gains that we’ve made as a state. It doesn’t diminish our success,” Sosin said.

Less than a week into the school year, cases of Covid-19-positive students are popping up in schools all around the state. Gov. Phil Scott so far has declined to mandate face masks in schools, but he recommends that students and educators wear masks. It has been left to each school district to decide whether or not to mask. “We’re going to always do whatever it takes. We’re going to keep kids as safe as we humanly can,” said Brigid Nease, superintendent of the Harwood Unified Union School District, which includes Waterbury, Duxbury, Waitsfield, Moretown, Warren and Fayston. On Sunday, Nease was notified that a student at Crossett Brook Middle School had tested positive for Covid-19. By Monday, 23 middle school students were in quarantine. Nease said she is concerned by the minimal guidance that schools have received from the state. “Each superintendent is really feeling … that we are just out here alone trying to determine what we need to do with what our community will support and what the spread looks like in our own community,” she said Educators are also trying to resist being dragged into the culture wars around masking and vaccines. “I am hearing direct reports of personal fear from principals and superintendents," Nease wrote in her back-to-school letter to the community on Aug. 19. "One of my superintendent colleagues has received a death threat. Some principals are receiving letters from groups threatening to storm the schools on the first day. Leaders are receiving voicemails from very angry community members screaming at them. Today, when seeking out advice and support we were told to access law enforcement.” Nease discusses the uncertainty and anxiety around the new school year and how she and other educators are managing a second pandemic school year.

A curious hallmark of the Covid-19 pandemic is the backlash that it has spawned. Right-wing politicians and their media allies are emboldened as they rage against masks and vaccines, spout conspiracy theories and attack doctors and scientists. Republican governors in Florida and Texas, where infections are raging among children, are blocking schools from mandating that children wear masks, a simple public health measure. Those same states are reporting that their ICUs are full, many of them with children. This type of behavior is not new. The Anti-Vaccination League of America was founded in 1908 just as a vaccine against smallpox — a disease that had killed millions — was being mandated by some states, while mandates were prohibited by others. The effort to blame China for the pandemic also has a familiar ring. “The idea of looking for scapegoats, of casting blame has taken on new life during Covid,” says Martin Halliwell, professor of American Studies at the University of Leicester in the UK. “Stigmatizing has a long narrative. There is a constant, the idea of looking for someone to blame.” Martin Halliwell tells the story of America’s social and political struggles around public health in his new book, American Health Crisis: 100 Years of Panic, Planning, and Politics. He discusses what is new and familiar about our current public health crisis.

An extremist movement led by angry and entitled white men is spreading throughout the country, and Vermont is providing fertile ground for their violent hatred. That’s the contention of Michael Shank, a resident of Brandon, who says that he is moving in order to escape armed white extremists who have been harassing him and been tolerated by local authorities. Shank made his case in an op-ed article for USA Today on Aug. 4, titled: "White extremism is winning in my Vermont town. I'm selling my animal sanctuary and moving." On Friday, August 13, 2021, Shank's neighbor, Eric Grenier, a convicted felon, was arrested on weapons charges. Shank has accused Grenier of making death threats. Shank writes that white extremists have “bullied countless people of color in Vermont, who had to flee their communities because it became increasingly hostile and unsafe for them. And now it’s pushing me out, too.” Shank tells The Vermont Conversation, “Not only are people unsafe in our communities…but they are unsafe in terms of who they turn to for protection…. The very people who are supposed to protect them aren’t protecting them.” He cites recent reports about racial disparities in policing in Vermont that show that Black and Hispanic drivers are 3 to 4 times more likely to be searched by police during traffic stops — despite having a lower “hit rate” for contraband. The bias that pervades policing has created a permissive environment for racial harassment and white extremism to flourish, says Shank. “Vermont has a leadership problem on this issue,” he asserts. “We are allowing the racism to metastasize.” Shank has also worked in Afghanistan as a senior policy adviser to former California Rep. Mike Honda, and he discusses what led to the Taliban retaking the country. Michael Shank is communications director for the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance. He is also an adjunct faculty member at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs.

What would you do if you knew that your father fought for the Nazis? For years, Alexander Wolff harbored this dark family secret. Wolff, a staff writer for Sports Illustrated for more than three decades, longed to know more about his family’s role in Nazi Germany. Was his father, Niko Wolff, involved in the worst Nazi crimes, including the extermination of Jews? How did Niko hide the fact that he was part Jewish? How else was his family involved in the war? In 2017, Wolff left Sports Illustrated and moved with his family from their home in Cornwall, Vt., to Germany, where he spent a year probing his family’s secrets. He also wanted to learn more about his grandfather, Kurt Wolff, a young German Jewish publisher who published renowned authors including Franz Kafka and Joseph Roth before fleeing the Nazis and coming to New York, where he founded Pantheon Books, a highly regarded publishing house. Alex Wolff’s tumultuous family saga is the subject of his new book, Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home. He is also the author of The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama and is the former owner of the semi-pro Vermont basketball team the Frost Heaves.

In 2019, producer Bess O’Brien set out across Vermont to capture the stories and lives of teenagers. She wanted to hear about their joys and struggles in their own words. O'Brien did this in 2005, and the result was an award-winning musical, The Voices Project. This time, following a year-long delay due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the students who comprise the cast of the Listen Up musical are finally taking their songs and stories to the public from August 4 through August 15, 2021. The students sing and speak their truth about a range of current youth issues ranging from racial justice to mental health, gun violence, sexual identity, disability, family, love and community. On this week's Vermont Conversation, student cast members Theo Novotny, Miles Novotny and Sadie Chamberlain perform and discuss the issues raised in the musical and the process of making it, and producer Bess O’Brien describes how and why the musical was created.