Vermont is not immune to racial problems. Here, racial profiling by police results in rates of traffic stops, searches, and arrests of people of color that far outstrip those of white people and exceed those of many other states, when viewed on a per capita basis. We suspend kids of color from school at much higher rates than white kids; and we incarcerate African American men at one of the highest rates in the country.

The news from and about Russia hasn’t been good lately – what with Olympic doping punishments and suspicious hacking into Democratic party records. But this past week, as a member of the board of the Vermont Council of World Affairs, I got a different perspective.

“Soon the Boomers will be gone and we’ll get what we want. We’ll disrupt the status quo and change the political landscape.” So spoke a young activist lamenting Bernie Sanders’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton.

In my experience as a college professor, a student who plagiarizes doesn’t have the luxury of a speechwriter taking the fall.

What shook me most about the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile by the police was their execution-style. Then, to complicate the violence, five police officers were killed in a peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration a few days later.

In Vermont we have two very clearly defined dates for voting: Election Day, the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November, and Town Meeting Day, which is the first Tuesday in March. To hold an election as important as the one that will decide all of our state elected leaders for the foreseeable future on a day other than Town Meeting or in November just doesn’t make sense. And this year, Vermont’s primary election will be held on August 9th – the very dog days of summer – which to me

I’m struggling to reconcile the unfolding Jay Peak scandal and the “we did a great job” remarks of our elected administration officials. According to the SEC, the developers misused $200M.

David Budbill’s 76th birthday celebration featured readings of his plays and poetry by actors, scholars, and others who have long treasured this poet’s work. It was a truly memorable evening, marred only by the fact that David is now quite ill with a neurological disease.

A pair of hands, black and covered with soot, bound together with rusty iron chains and chiseled by decades of inhumane treatment, represents the injustice of racism in our nation. Sadly, the remnants of the chains remain to this day.

One hundred years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous speech saying, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”