Fourteen Years in Vermont

I moved to Vermont on this day fourteen years ago, after having lived for nearly all my life in the San Francisco Bay Area or outlying areas. (My family lived for a year in New Zealand when I was six years old, and I still consider that my first home.) I came to Vermont for a number of reasons, the main one being that I could actually afford to buy a house here. But there were other attractions, like being near the accurately named Green Mountains, and being able to go cross-country skiing without driving five hours first.

Vermont also had an appealing mystique as a fiercely independent state, a “Brave Little State” as it likes to call itself. This was exemplified by a secessionist movement that was supported by both liberals and libertarians.

During the ensuing years, I had a rapid education in house-building, organic gardening, logging, and New England backpacking (much more difficult than in California). These were things that had been unimaginable to the Silicon Valley geek I used to be.

I also had a hands-on education in abusive relationships. This is a long story that I might tell someday. Suffice it to say that towards the end of that story, I felt a bit like a WW-I survivor might have felt: shell-shocked, traumatized, and confused. After three years of false starts, I managed to escape in early January 2020, which was perfect timing – remember what happened soon afterwards?

The result was that I spent the first eight months of 2020, and the first six months of the Scamdemic, being technically homeless. I still owned the house I’d bought when I first moved to Vermont, but I couldn’t live there because it was occupied by a renter. So I ended up moving five times, until I finally was able to move back to my house, having left behind all of my tools, furniture, kitchen supplies, and much more in effecting my escape.

Meanwhile, I was dealing with the societal insanity that was all around me, and getting worse every day. In retrospect, I’m glad I escaped before the Scamdemic, because I’m not sure I could have resisted the much stronger will of my partner, who would have likely succumbed to the insanity. Additionally, the experience of learning how to escape (and understanding why I had to do it) helped me to recognize that our governments and health officials were using the same gaslighting and manipulation that I’d just spent years experiencing on a small scale.

What happened to Vermont in the last three years shocked me. Rather than being a “Brave Little State”, Vermont turned out to be like the co-dependent relationship partner I’d once been: terrified, confused, self-doubting, compliant, constantly excusing the behavior of the abuser, and going along with the abuse in order to be seen as “good”. Thus it was that Vermont turned out to be the most virtuous and compliant state when it came to wearing masks, practicing anti-social distancing, shutting down small businesses, and taking the experimental Trump Juice, aka the Glorious Goo.

It was probably just as well that I had my starry-eyed view of Vermont shattered by the Scamdemic. I still want to live here, because the landscape is so gorgeous and life-affirming, and because I still have a very tiny number of close friends here. But I no longer feel part of the human world at large here, and the sad thing is that I don’t think Vermont will ever recover from the psychic damage it received during the Scamdemic.

The little town I live in was especially harmed by the last three years. The cultural life here is run by compliant and socially well-connected do-gooders who implemented mask and jab mandates for musical events of all types, and who were likely the anonymous gatekeepers who censored me twice on Front Porch Forum for attempting to shine some factual light on the PCR testing madness.

I’m not sure where I’m going to end up now. What I do know is that I need to leave this town and find some place where the insanity is toned down a bit. There are places in Vermont (specifically, the northeast corner of the state) where things seem better. It remains to be be seen whether the skyrocketing real estate prices here will allow me to go with this plan.

In the meantime, there is always music. That will always provide beauty and solace, despite the best efforts of the jab fanatics who run music venues. Here is an example (must be listened to with headphones, not your crappy little laptop speakers, because Debussy uses nearly the entire range of the piano):