Fluid ImaginationA smart tax system…is one in which you “tax the late-career folks who aren’t really going anywhere and use it to invest in the things that attract and provide support and are appealing for future high-income earners.”
— Final Reading: ‘A small fraction of a small fraction’: Lawmakers weigh risks of millionaire tax flight, from VTDigger.com
On October 27, 1985, sometime around 2:30 A.M. in my home village in Vermont, Ronald Amadon, a food service worker at the local college, walked from one of the village’s two bars to his parents’ home about a quarter of a mile away. He had worked during the big Oktoberfest on campus and followed that with some celebrating at the bar. As he approached his parents’ home, he was attacked with a knife by John Kugler, a young man from a New York town just over the border who had recently escaped from a mental facility in New York and was now renting a mobile home in my village.
The Rutland Herald reported that a neighbor heard someone call out, “Help me! Help me!,” but the neighbor was too frightened to go outside. “[Amadon] was screaming his head off,” the neighbor said, “He was very hysterical.” Another neighbor said the victim “sounded like a woman,” while a third heard Amadon cry, “Oh my god!”
Amadon went to a nearby friend’s house, bleeding from his stab wounds, and asked his friend to call the ambulance. The friend asked who had stabbed him, and Amadon replied, “I don’t know who he is, but I’ll never forget his face.”
After calling for help, the friend reached out to Amadon’s parents, who lived just down the road. Amadon’s mother joined him in the ambulance on the way to Rutland Regional Medical Center. Tragically, he would not survive the journey.
Ronald Amadon died at 4:21 A.M. of one stab wound to the chest and one to the abdomen, as well as having cuts on his hand and lip.
Police initially stopped Kugler for a motor vehicle violation before arresting him for the murder. According to the Herald, Kugler said to a reporter, “Forgive me.”
In a later affidavit for the court, police alleged that Kugler told them “he killed Amadon when Amadon came walking past him acting like a homosexual.”
Amadon’s murder was not the only act of homophobic violence in the Rutland region in the mid-eighties. Two days later, a Herald story ran with the headline, “Rights Activists Decry Violence Directed At Gays.” The activists noted the homophobic slaying of a Brandon man in February 1984, whose “body was found on the ice at the base of a 120-foot-deep West Rutland marble quarry.”
On January 25, 1986, the Herald reported that a District Court judge ruled that, following a psychiatric assessment, “Kugler was incompetent to stand trial.” The psychiatrist found Kugler to be “suffering from delusions, paranoia, hallucinations, and possibly the scars of severe drug and alcohol abuse.” The psychiatrist reported that, as a teenager, Kugler used to sniff gasoline “until he nearly keeled over.” He later moved on to harder drugs, such as heroin and PCP.
Kugler was committed to the Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury, where psychiatrists expected him to spend the rest of his life.
Before his attack on Amadon, Kugler had been arrested in New York for assaulting another man with a large rock and a tire chain. Authorities placed him in the Capital District Psychiatric Center in Albany, but he later walked out without being stopped. Despite knowing his whereabouts before his attack on Amadon, Rutland County law enforcement could not return him to New York due to a loophole in Vermont’s laws. As the Herald reported at the time, “Vermont law has no provisions for Vermont officials returning an uncommitted mental patient to another state, as they can with criminal fugitives… With no pending criminal charges, extradition was impossible.”
Six years after the murder, in January 1992, the Herald reported that two psychiatrists found Kugler “was no longer insane and did not pose a threat to himself or others.” A judge ruled that he could be released back into the community but had to remain in state custody.
In July 1994, the Herald reported Kugler escaped from the Arroway halfway house in Burlington and “may be headed back to the Rutland area.” About ten days later, police changed their mind and said he “may be headed to New York.” The police expressed concern that Kugler could “become violent if he is no longer taking his medications” for “paranoid schizophrenia.” He later turned himself in.
But in August 1995, Kugler again escaped from psychiatric confinement, walking away from the state hospital in Waterbury. He had been staying in an unlocked ward and was allowed to roam the grounds. One day, he did not return. Kugler “turned up a week later near Philadelphia, where he was stopped by police for allegedly driving drunk.”
Meanwhile, Ronald Amadon remained murdered, dead at the age of 22, because he “acted like a homosexual.”
As you may know, June is Pride Month. It commemorates the 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York, which became the catalyst for the modern LGBT movement for civil rights. As President Biden noted in his proclamation yesterday, “Pride is a time to recall the trials the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) community has endured and to rejoice in the triumphs of trailblazing individuals who have bravely fought — and continue to fight — for full equality.”
According to the Herald, Ronald Amadon “was thoughtful, quiet, and well-liked…a gentle man.” At Amadon’s funeral, Rev. Marshall Hudson-Knapp recalled, “Ron had a love for everyone he knew,” and he recited the lyrics of a song that Ronald had written as a boy, “My name is R-O-N-N-I-E. I’ll love you if you’ll love me. For that’s the way it’s meant to be.”
A friend recalled outside of the funeral, “He was a really special guy. He had a lot of friends.” He also loved antiquing and frequently stopped at area shops to browse. One store owner said, “I remember Ronnie stopping by just a few days before he died. He was a gentle and wonderful boy.”
As my village celebrates Pride for all the LGBTQ+ individuals we call our friends, family, and neighbors, we ought not to forget the ugly, homophobic tragedy that once occurred on our streets. Let us remember the life and death of Ronald Amadon.
Thanks to Monica Allen, who first reported on the case for the Rutland Herald in the 1980s, and to Liz Anderson, who followed up on the case for the Herald in the 1990s.
2021 marks my nineteenth year living in this little village in Vermont (excluding three years when I lived about six miles south of the village). Eight years ago, my wife and I bought a house here, and for the last eight years, we’ve been raising our daughter here. My wife works for the local public school, while I work for the local private school.
In short, this little village is our home.
For the past few months, I’ve had a pretty big itch about wanting to contribute more to the community, and about a week ago, I found a way to scratch it.
There’s a great little company in Vermont (and parts of New York) called The Front Porch Forum. They try to help neighbors connect with one another through an email-based forum, and last week, one of my friends and neighbors posted a job opening for a part-time Website Content Manager for the Poultney Historical Society.
I emailed my friend, met her to discuss the position over a cup of coffee, and yesterday, I spent about two hours in the historical schoolhouse the Society calls home.
I was all alone with the collection, and I couldn’t have been happier.
While there are a lot of tasks to help the Society get the website where they want it to be, I decided to spend my first day just going through some of the archives, trying to find an interesting story to share.
Here’s what I came up with: “Our Partisan Divide is Nothing New.”
I look forward to spending many more hours combing through the Historical Society’s archives, trying to find ways to bring the history of our little village to life.
I’m currently reading a book titled Liquid Reign. While terribly written on a sentence-by-sentence level (c’mon, man! stick with a consistent tense!), its non-dystopian/non-utopian vision of a future run on liquid democracy and the blockchain is one of the most inspiring books I’ve read. The intelligence, humor, and cultural preferences of the author shine through the text, as does his clear-eyed, evidence-based understanding of the negative impacts of his vision. I also love how at the end of each chapter he links the reader to whatever inspired the concepts he introduces or explores. Finally, I love that the author published the novel using a Creative Commons license, living up to the novel’s obvious ethic.
In case you’ve never heard of it (as I hadn’t just a few weeks ago), liquid democracy is the radical idea that you should be in charge of your vote.
In the most idealistic version of American democracy, every two years, you are allowed to select from among your neighbors an individual to travel to Washington D.C. to represent your and/or your community’s interests. On every question that comes before the American people for the next two years, you delegate your vote to this representative.
Additionally, every four years, you have the opportunity to influence the selection of the nation’s chief executive. Your influence is minimal though not insignificant (depending on which state you live in), and it allows you to breathe at least some of your preferences into the spirit of our nation’s laws.
Finally, every six years, your entire state receives the opportunity to delegate its vote on every question to one individual who lives in your state but whom you’ve probably never met and who almost certainly will never know your name.
When you’ve delegated your vote on every question to three individuals, two of whom you’ve probably never met and the last of whom you probably barely know, why would you believe you live in a democracy?
To be fair, direct democracy is difficult in small societies and untenable in large ones. We cannot expect every voter to be legitimately informed on every question (of course, when the United States Congress is passing 5,000+ page bills less than 24 hours after they’ve been released, we obviously don’t expect our well-paid, professional representatives to be legitimately informed either).
But a liquid democracy provides voters with the opportunity to vote directly (and participate directly) on every question that sparks their interest or to delegate their vote to whomever they like on any topic or question for which they don’t have the time, knowledge, expertise, or interest.
A quick example. While I care a lot about the corruptive effects of money on our democracy, I don’t have enough understanding of the nuances involved to vote on the low-level regulations necessary to counteract it. However, I’ve listened to enough speeches and read enough articles by Lawrence Lessig to know I trust him on the issue. Instead of directly participating in any of the many decisions necessary to enact meaningful anticorruption laws, I could delegate all my votes on the topic to him.
If, in turn, Mr. Lessig knew someone he trusted more than himself on the issue, he could delegate my vote and his vote and any other vote he controls on the issue to that more trustworthy person. I would be notified of the change and would be able to decide whether to keep my vote with that new person or take it back for myself.
And I could do something similar on virtually every decision that needs to be made in our democracy.
Additionally, because I can retract my vote from my delegates at any time, there is no more election cycle. Delegates must continue to prove their worthiness to carry my vote, and the minute they lose my faith or someone else impresses me more, I can change who represents me.
The idea is so powerfully simple that it seems like a no-brainer, with the only questions being ones of implementation. How private is a person’s vote? How does the system stay informed as to who is delegated by whom and on what range of issues? How does a voter know when their delegate has cast their vote? What issues are available to vote on? Etc.
The book answers most of its implementation questions with “the blockchain,” but not in a way that means “magic.” When it comes to blockchain technology and its potential over the next several decades, the author seems to know what he’s talking about, and he’s nerdy enough to include most of it in his plot, characterization, and dialogue.
I, however, cannot distinguish this sufficiently advanced technology from magic, and so were you to ask me, I’d simply say, “the blockchain.”
One thing that excites me about the book is the level of research and insight it demonstrates. It must have been so fun for the author to look deeply into a wide variety of technological possibilities and threats (not just blockchain, but virtual reality, artificial intelligence, green transportation, resilient communities, and so much more), combine them with a deep knowledge of alternative political and economical models (such as anarchism, socialism, liquid democracy, the military-industrial complex, etc.) and a fun sense of oracality for cultural and social movements to provide a deeply realistic vision of the future, one where the worst of us still lives and thrives among the best of us.
I’d like to do something similar, but concentrate my efforts on my local community. I’ve written an experimental novel that attempts to imagine an alternative future for my state, but it was (and was intended to be) wholly divorced from reality. In its second chapter, it introduces an eight-year-old girl with “a third eye in the middle of her forehead, [a] persimmon-irised, ebony-eyeballed third eye in the middle of the child’s pale, white forehead.” From that moment on, everything I wrote in the book said “Fuck it” to reality (or in the language of the novel, “skrinkle lee”).
I’d like to try again — not to write another novel on the secession of Vermont, but to envision a non-fantasy-based, evidence-riven, activist-driven, hopeful future for my community.
In 2005, our local environmental guru, Bill McKibben, penned a book entitled, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks. The book is based on a long, multi-day walk that McKibben takes from his home in the heart of the Green Mountains to another home he owns in the heart of the Adirondacks. Along the way, he visits with and tells the story of a number of entrepreneurs and activists who call the valley between them home, and he uses what he learns to suggest a reality-based vision of what’s possible.
Meanwhile, for the past 10 years, I’ve been actively working with young people who live at the southern end of McKibben’s same valley, people whose daily lives are filled with trauma and struggle and who can hardly lift their head high enough to hope for something better.
I want to help these people connect with the resources they need to participate in the hopeful future McKibben so beautifully writes about. I want to research the wide variety of ways our local entrepreneurs, educators, and activists can help individuals who are struggling cross the gap between what is and what can be, and like the author of Liquid Reign, I want to use my skills for research and writing to do it.
From Teachers, child care workers, more high-risk Vermonters eligible for vaccination next week:
With the Johnson & Johnson vaccine coming online and the federal pharmacy program ramping up, Gov. Phil Scott announced Tuesday that school staff, child care workers and more Vermonters with high-risk conditions would become eligible to receive the Covid-19 vaccine starting [March 8, 2021].
With my wife and I both working as teachers, this is incredible news!
From Sanders blasts MLB for dropping Vermont Lake Monsters ball club:
“If the multibillionaire owners of Major League Baseball have enough money to pay hundreds of millions in compensation to a single superstar baseball player,” Sanders said, “they have enough money to prevent 40 minor league teams from shutting down in Vermont and all over this country.”
Women make up 15% of Alabama’s state legislature. In Vermont, the number is 39% — which is still too low, but is also the second highest in the nation.
Alabama’s heavily-male dominated legislature just passed the most draconian anti-abortion law in the country. If it gets upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, it will usher in an even larger wave of anti-abortion laws, voted on by men and victimizing women.
Vermont’s more representative state legislature, meanwhile, recently approved the following amendment to the state’s most fundamental legal document, to serve as a law above all laws:
That an individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course and shall not be denied or infringed unless justified by a compelling State interest achieved by the least restrictive means.
Every woman needs to know:
You will always have a safe haven in Vermont.
You just have to get here.
PS: My town’s state representative voted against the amendment. More of my community members need to know that.