Editor’s note: This commentary is by David Farnsworth, an attorney who lives in South Royalton.
[I] thought I was reading something from The Onion, the satirical magazine known for its amusing headlines, when I read Erin Mansfield’s Sept. 28 piece in VTDigger entitled “Pot commission prepares path for ‘inevitable’ legalization.” Wait a minute: Taxman tells public, “Something is inevitable?”
I don’t agree, and no amount of tax-lawyer Jedi mind tricks (“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for”) should convince us otherwise.
Thirty years ago, my wife and I moved to Vermont with three young children. One night we were discussing whether our kids would end up being pot smokers, and I said to my wife, “It’s inevitable.” She replied, “No it isn’t,” and proceeded to educate me.
Over the following years we kept our kids busy with schoolwork, sports, drama, music, hiking, skiing and friends. We consciously steered them away from drug use and other pitfalls that children face every day. We did this because they were kids, and because we had a vision for their futures where they would become independent and self-sustaining adults.
While adults can make their own decisions – including decisions about marijuana use – kids need support and direction from their parents, their community and their government leaders.
So today, as I watch our politicians and their lawyers trying to raise money to run the government, and I read about schools around the state closing due to shrinking enrollment, let me suggest an alternative future.
Imagine, instead, a Vermont where day care is available in every town to every family that lives here. Take some of that unused classroom space and provide it there. Making day care available could put $10,000 or more per child per year back in every young family’s pocket.
It would free up moms, traditional child care providers, to participate in the workforce and community, putting Vermont’s gender-equity “money where its mouth is.”
This would benefit every Vermont employer who thinks Vermont salaries can’t attract talent from out of state. It wouldn’t just help IBM or Green Mountain Coffee Roasters or even the local general store, it would help them all. It would also attract entrepreneurs, especially those with young families who don’t think they can move here because they are tied down with the high cost of day care.
We know that when young families move into town, they reach out, make friends, and rent or buy a house. They buy groceries and buy supplies at the hardware store to fix up their new place. They join the PTA and volunteer fire department, coach Little League, and run for school board. All this activity, economic and social, is precisely what brings life to our towns and cities.
Young families do all these things because they see a future through their children’s eyes. Moreover, they don’t wait for the future; they build it themselves. And they don’t wait; they build it now.
The future Vermont I’ve just described beats marijuana-tourism Vermont hands-down. But unless there is sufficient leadership to tell the tax lawyers, “Yours isn’t the future we are looking for,” a better future for young families in this state will remain a long way from inevitable.
