Editor’s note: This commentary is by Con Hogan, of Plainfield, who is a former member of the Green Mountain Care Board. He was secretary of the Vermont Agency of Human Services from 1991 to 1999.
[O]n April 12, I sat down in front of the TV, to watch the Boston Bruin’s first game of the NHL playoffs. A classy old timer came onto the ice to sing the national anthems of Canada and the United States. As our “Star Spangled Banner” was being sung, I experienced a hitch in my throat. I almost teared up.
That had never happened to me before. Over the years, I’ve heard the anthem at least a thousand times, watching baseball on TV, attending high school basketball games, and a variety of other venues. I had never, in all those other moments, had such a physical reaction to our anthem.
It caused me to go to another room, sit down and think about why this had happened.
Over the course of an hour or so, it became clearer. I was reacting to the very serious slippage of important fundamentals that have made our democracy work in this country so well over the last 250 years.
A split press around ideology came to mind. To watch MSNBC and Fox is the equivalent of watching the press in two different countries. The rise in gross public language involved in our ever more difficult politics, along with the deterioration of many of our fundamental civic institutions, was also on my mind.
I thought about a Congress that nationally has little public support and which shows little sign of doing its civic duties well. The drift away from fact to alternative fact added to my consternation.
Also coming to mind was the severe decline globally of the ability to work together on things that will define and affect the lives of all people in all places over the years. I thought about climate change, trade, and the rise of tensions and ever more brutal warfare around the world, and the rising prospects of actual wars among countries that should be leading us all in working for peace and prosperity. Included in my thoughts was the desperate situation of millions of refugees in motion across the globe.
Finally, I dwelled on our children’s lack of education about history, with many of those children trapped in the depersonalized digital world of here and now.
It goes on. The net effect is an obvious deterioration of our democracy and its ability to get the job done in a vital way.
It was a pretty miserable half hour.
Then I got to thinking about where we live, Vermont, a state small enough to maintain our active communities, and fundamental human relationships. We have a citizen legislature with no deep county government. People in communities talk directly with their legislators. We take our environment seriously. We are generous with our citizens who experience problems. We have no billboards. Having spent most of my life here, I believe Vermont has the cleanest government in the United States. Certainly we have problems and disagreements, and we make mistakes, but we work hard, together, to deal with them.
I have worked in and out of Vermont government since 1971, for nine different governors, of both parties, and I say, with solid certainty, that every one of them worked hard to improve the lives of Vermonters, and that on a scandal scale, we don’t even compute.
Then I thought about the “Star Spangled Banner” again.
