This commentary is by Kristian Connolly, a resident of Montpelier.
Dear Gov. Scott: I have a couple of questions (could you please also pass these along to President Biden on your next phone call?), but first I wanted to introduce myself.
For the past 20 months, my wife, my now-10-year-old daughter, and I have been managing a global pandemic in the way we find works best for the health of our family. For 20 months, we have not contracted Covid, nor passed Covid to anyone. In fact, our health appears to be, as it was before the pandemic, very strong.
After having lived in a rural part of Caledonia County and working remotely from 2014 to 2019, we’ve been living in Montpelier since late 2019. During the pandemic, we’ve not hosted visitors in our home, nor have we visited in the homes of others. Basically, we don’t go indoors anywhere that’s not our home or where we can’t be by ourselves.
But that doesn’t make us shut-ins. We spend a lot of time out and about around Montpelier, on foot and by bike, on soccer fields, etc. We’re the people who will cross the street when others are coming in our direction, if we can, and if not, we put up our masks and pass at no less than 10 feet.
Mostly, to us it just seems very unlikely that 20 months of a worldwide pandemic is due only to people transmitting a virus indoors. So we maintain safe distances at all times.
We’re not unfriendly. We also wave, and say hi, and even smile, which, if we have our masks up, is hopefully visible via our eyes. We’re outdoors in our neighborhood yard routinely, and are certainly happy to talk to people as they pass. We hosted multiple yard sales (and a fundraiser for the local humane society) in our driveway this past summer in which we had contactless payment and the ability to freely interact with our guests from our porch.
We don’t go to restaurants to eat meals, we don’t go to events, and we use curbside pickup for all our needs — including a checkout list at Kellogg-Hubbard Library that must rival anyone’s in the past 20 months.
Since March 2020, we have put a lot of our financial resources regularly into Hunger Mountain Co-op, local CSAs, Big Gear Coffee, Bear Pond Books, Capitol Copy, Montpelier Aubuchon, and Guy’s Farm and Yard, as well as supporting other local businesses when we have had to make one-off purchases — but only if those businesses have offered curbside pickup, a pickup window or delivery (this has especially been the case since the beginning of the summer).
We pay our local utility bills in full and on time. As renters of a home owned by a local, our dollars are largely kept circulating in our community. And these dollars are pretty precious, as we are now both unemployed. We’re taking part-time classes to help facilitate a change in career path, and looking for remote work — which we’ve both done in the past, even before the pandemic — to help pay the bills.
For our daughter’s entire life, we’ve been homeschooling. Mainly because, as parents, we essentially value above all else the importance of being a part of our daughter’s growth and development into an independent person in the world, and we committed to doing that for her before she was born. Thankfully, the onset of the pandemic, and the time that has passed since, did not really alter our usual life very drastically, as it did for a lot of other parents and children.
From June 2020 until this past September, working either remotely or behind the closed doors of the building, my wife, a Vermont certified public librarian, kept a youth department at a local library active and fresh for the community, until it became clear that the library — on the basis of the advice of the state Health Department and Department of Libraries — was going to fully reopen to the public and require her to be indoors with patrons.
If it’s not clear by now, we are not vaccinated. We are not religious. We are not conspiracy theorists. We are not anti-science. In fact, I’d say we are largely pro-scientific understanding and explanation, and pro the ever-continuing processes of both (especially as they relate to a new virus and the efforts to understand and combat it).
We are also pro-nature and human capability, especially when it comes to our own health and making choices about our own health. As I mentioned, all of us are healthy. But we don’t believe our own general health means anything in the face of Covid, because how could we know for sure?
In addition to the general way in which we approach our well-being, part of being healthy, to us, is having a healthy respect for Covid and doing the things we can do to limit our exposure. But since the beginning, it’s also been about having a healthy respect for our fellow community members, and essentially being guided by the premise that we assume that not only do you have Covid, but we do, too.
So we’re protecting both you and ourselves by taking the extremely simple steps of maintaining safe distances, wearing a mask, and avoiding all possible situations in which it is not only extremely possible, but likely, that a virus that literally survives and thrives on being able to jump from person to person will be able to do so.
To reiterate, we are healthy. And our lives are not unhappy. Life is just different than it was before, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Is it always great and fun that there are things we’d like to do but can’t, or won’t, because Covid is a reality of life? Of course not. But are we going to force ourselves into potentially unhealthy and/or life-altering situations just because we want to do some particular thing we now can’t do? No, we’re just not. We’re going to adapt, and continue to try to be healthy.
I hear you talk about people, especially the unvaccinated, taking personal responsibility as the situation has reached unprecedented levels in Vermont, and I hear the president say his patience is wearing thin with people like me and my family.
So, given that my family has responsibly maintained its own health, and responsibly not impacted the health of others, during this global pandemic, I wanted to ask you: What is it, exactly, that you think we’ve done wrong — not just to ourselves, but to our community — by not getting vaccinated or by living in the way we choose to live rather than in the way that you and others would wish us to live?
How are we responsible for the record-breaking case numbers, the record hospitalization rates, and the deaths, particularly since the arrival of the Delta variant and the concurrent relaxing or complete elimination of public health precautions around the state (and country) over the past five or so months?
