As usual your writing has explained this perfectly. Selling carbon credits is a shell game of sorts. Blame just shifts by pretending to buy your way out. I confess, so I'm absolved. Yet I continue the same bad habits for another week. There is no place for this in Vermont.
What I keep coming back to is that this moment is making something impossible to unsee. The institutions many of us were taught to trust are showing us their bones. Not their mission statements. Not their public-facing virtue. Their bones. And maybe that is the terrible clarity we needed. We are watching, in real time, what happens when systems are built to preserve power more efficiently than they protect people. That does not mean nothing good has ever come from them. It means we have to stop confusing access to a system with actual care.
To me, this is the fork in the road. We can keep paying the toll and pinning all our hope on one election cycle, or we can start behaving like people who understand that belonging is a practice and survival is communal. That does not mean abandoning federal responsibility. It means refusing to outsource our moral imagination to systems too bulky, captured and indifferent to hold us. I think the shift toward younger, more progressive, more interdependent politics is really a hunger for a different architecture: smaller rooms, mutual care, local accountability, shared resources and communities that take care of each other before crisis becomes catastrophe. Not innocence. Not absolution. Changed behavior.
If you meant anything that is promoted in Vermont these days as progressive, count me out. Like the politics of certain groups the result isn’t progressive but, in fact, regressive. It is obvious and in your face.
We don’t need anything new. We need to return to the way it was. It worked fine until certain groups took over to divide and conquer and no longer existed for the greater good. Vermont needs to rid themselves of these people controlling us.
As usual your writing has explained this perfectly. Selling carbon credits is a shell game of sorts. Blame just shifts by pretending to buy your way out. I confess, so I'm absolved. Yet I continue the same bad habits for another week. There is no place for this in Vermont.
What I keep coming back to is that this moment is making something impossible to unsee. The institutions many of us were taught to trust are showing us their bones. Not their mission statements. Not their public-facing virtue. Their bones. And maybe that is the terrible clarity we needed. We are watching, in real time, what happens when systems are built to preserve power more efficiently than they protect people. That does not mean nothing good has ever come from them. It means we have to stop confusing access to a system with actual care.
To me, this is the fork in the road. We can keep paying the toll and pinning all our hope on one election cycle, or we can start behaving like people who understand that belonging is a practice and survival is communal. That does not mean abandoning federal responsibility. It means refusing to outsource our moral imagination to systems too bulky, captured and indifferent to hold us. I think the shift toward younger, more progressive, more interdependent politics is really a hunger for a different architecture: smaller rooms, mutual care, local accountability, shared resources and communities that take care of each other before crisis becomes catastrophe. Not innocence. Not absolution. Changed behavior.
I was listening until I saw “progressive”.
If you meant anything that is promoted in Vermont these days as progressive, count me out. Like the politics of certain groups the result isn’t progressive but, in fact, regressive. It is obvious and in your face.
We don’t need anything new. We need to return to the way it was. It worked fine until certain groups took over to divide and conquer and no longer existed for the greater good. Vermont needs to rid themselves of these people controlling us.