Editor’s note: This commentary is by Nate Denny, a former woodworker and teacher from Northfield.
A neighbor plants signs in her front yard, hoping that they take root in the infertile soil and spread the message that human beings should not be prejudiced in any way. A passerby takes offense at the suggestion that he may be a racist, so, under cover of darkness, he returns and destroys or relocates the messages of moral superiority. On the weekends he fires hundreds of rounds on a commando assault course built on a friend’s woodlot; they are within their constitutional rights to do so, and the frequency and rapidity of fire and eardrum-shattering explosions let everyone in a five-mile radius know that they are well-armed and prepared for … well, who knows what they are preparing for, but it sure sounds bad.
The unofficial firing range borders on a ski resort in one watershed that has received a permit to pump water from another watershed in an effort to stay in business in the face of unpredictable precipitation as fishermen notice that the fish they want to eat or just torture for sport are suffering from drought and depletion of this life-sustaining resource. Farmers pumping water from the same warm and turbid rivers spray manure slurry onto their fields in order to grow corn and grass that cows will efficiently turn into methane and more milk than the public wants to consume. The nitrogen-rich run-off fertilizes the algae choking the rivers that lead to ponds and lakes where power boats designed to create enormous wakes threaten to swamp kayakers who glower in frustration as they transfer algae from rivers to ponds in their conspicuous acts of eco-superiority.
As the summer comes to an end, heat stroke seems to be affecting the young(ish) people protesting racism and police brutality as they tear up and burn newspapers while refusing to prove that their cause justifies inconveniencing the public by speaking to the press, which somehow both political extremes have come to perceive as the enemy. Police officers observing the protests ignore the young fellow lurking nearby and prominently displaying a military-style rifle, but at least they don’t offer him water and encouragement. Meanwhile their brother (and sister) officers in another jurisdiction are issued “Brady letters” by prosecutors that signify that their testimony will not be accepted in a court of law because they were protecting one of their own or manufacturing evidence.
Of course these recent events and observations are not so neatly connected, but that is the tendency of the human brain, to try to find or imagine connections, to tell a story that makes sense to us, even if the plot becomes absurd. We scan the news and social media like rubber-neckers, assuring ourselves that we wouldn’t make the same mistakes, thrilling in the schadenfreude of seeing our neighbors fail and suffer, and imagining how under pressure we would make the exact right decision if we were in charge of policy at the state or national level, or if we were out of work and struggling to pay the bills we wouldn’t become addicted to painkillers as an escape. “How could these people be so dumb?” we think to ourselves or say to our friends, and then go back to figuring out how to get back to our regularly scheduled lives.
And more absurdity ensues:Hockey players infect each other with Covid-19 because life must go on, especially viral life that lingers longer and spreads farther in cold and dry air. A young man ignorant of almost everything, apparently, is suspected of appearing in black face after he gleefully allows noxious fumes from the exhaust stacks in his buddy’s truck to coat his face in cancer-causing particulates. Dog owners wrap their pets’ defecations in plastic bags and leave the evidence of their inability to complete the task in the grass along bike paths for everyone to see and for municipal maintenance crews to clean up. The tents of the homeless are becoming visible through the trees now that the leaves are falling and temperatures are plummeting, and we wonder how they dispose of their own human waste, then decide it would be better not to think about it.
These acts of selfishness and egotism fill online pages day after day in Vermont, supposedly the model for other states to emulate. Our need for self-expression explodes in each other’s faces in our quest for individual gratification. No one should be surprised that a malignant narcissist is leading the nation into the abyss. He is, after all, the most American of Americans and we Vermonters are complicit in his crimes and the steady degradation of our own small society.
One wonders how deep is the abyss on whose edge we teeter.
