The Addicts of Vermont
February 7, 2014
THE spiritual implosion of America, which comes with the inability to sustain a manufacturing and agricultural economy, is particularly vivid in Vermont, now the land of heroin and single mothers. Geoffrey Norman, writing in The Weekly Standard, quotes a single mother who says Vermont is actually a good place to be an addict because there are so many accomodating government programs.
— Comments —
Don Vincenzo writes:
If several decades ago anyone had predicted that a serious and deadly drug habit would find its way amongst many of the residents of the Green Mountain State of Vermont, I would have thought this modern day Jeremiah was seriously delusional. For those of a certain age – mine – the people of Vermont were a sturdy and civic-minded society with a Congregational Church in the center of each town. Recall also that this is where the town meeting, the paradigm of American democracy, made nationally famous by Norman Rockwell’s illustration, was alive and well.
After reading the piece, I am reminded of the surrender of the British forces in America at Yorktown after the Revolutionary War. General Cornwallis had his musicians play, ”And the World Turned Upside Down,” which is an appropriate title for my antiquated view of too many residents of Vermont.
There is a postscript to this missive that should be included. Last week, a fellow parishioner sent me a rundown of the the states listed by which had the highest to the lowest church attendance in the U.S. Mississippi was the state with the largest portion (81%) of the population regularly attending church services; and the lowest? None other than the Green Mountain State (22%).
I am reminded of the French proverb: a coincidence is an event in which God chooses to remain anonymous.
Laura writes:
I respectfully disagree with your view of Vermont in the past. If you look at those lovely Congregational churches, purely on an architectural level, you see what a diluted form of Christianity they represented. Also, it was a very individualistic culture even then and public schooling system was rapidly growing. The latter was instrumental in destroying the working class of Vermont and turning it into a socialist state. Also there was no way to protect the manufacturing economy of Vermont under the rules of laissez-faire capitalism.
