July 22, 2011
2. Newblog2011: 07/22/11 Vermont Baby Boomers don't know they're over 30/ young, educated people refuse to stay in Vermont if they can help it/If you can't beat 'em, give 'em a human sacrifice
A man who looks as if he could be 20 years older than I am stalked me to the law library this morning. The place is almost completely empty, and he could have sat anywhere. However, he decided to sit at a table a few feet away from me and cough repeatedly and unnecessarily.
One of the things that I meant to write about today is the fact that, for years, Vermont has been incapable of attracting and retaining college-and-beyond educated people in their 20’s and 30’s. It has been an oft-lamented problem for decades, and yet it’s a problem which nobody with any power seems particularly eager to resolve.
50 years ago, some Baby Boomers showed up in Vermont from other states. They had what were, at the time, values, educations and ideals that were vastly superior to the values, educations and ideals of most residents of Vermont, a state which to this day is still quite rural. I don’t say that to malign “real Vermonters;” I also don’t say it to malign rural places. The rural beauty of Vermont is part of what I like about it. The rural aspect of Vermont is, unfortunately, part of what kept the majority of its Euro-American native population uneducated and unsophisticated long past the time when other, more urban areas in the United States had evolved. Most of the children of the transplanted Baby Boomers fled Vermont as soon as they were of age and/or financially able to do so.
The word “fled” in the previous sentence ISN’T an exaggeration.
The Vermont Baby Boomers and their now-antiquated social views about women still dominate because nobody who could replace them wants to live here. That’s another reason why the harassment took hold here; Hollywood and the media, political and corporate bastions of male dominance, the purveyors of all of which have had the power and means to create and live in their own realities and to force those realities onto the rest of the world while ignoring, minimizing and denying the abilities and accomplishments of women in ways that other professions can’t have found their counterparts in what was called, when I was a teenager, “The Whitest State in The Union.” You still don’t see a lot of non-whites living in any part of the state; there are some refugees from other countries, mostly in Burlington, and a few, non-white Americans who find a way to live here, but it’s not a diverse place.
One of the major problems at the moment is that the Vermont Baby Boomers don’t realize that their opinions about gender are antiquated. They discovered the Internet late in life, compared to the children and youth of today. Many Baby Boomers still don’t use the Internet, and now that there’s been a massive campaign by the big harassers to turn back the clock, resulting in the Internet and other media being full of misogyny, those Vermont Baby Boomers who might have been paying more attention to the Internet this year because of what’s been going on have looked out upon the world for the first time in decades and they see the world as they remember it, with only a few technological differences to distinguish it from the world of their youth.
For me to say that the Vermont Baby Boomers are sexist doesn’t mean that they’re not racist; of course they are. However, there’s a black President now who’s willing to indulge the Vermont Baby Boomers in their sexism, so they’ll take what they can get.
Are the Vermont Baby Boomers racist in principle? Of course not! Are they racist in fact, in their true and hidden attitudes? I think that many of them likely are.
It’s also been my impression for a long time that much of the media and the rest of the big harassers are as racist as they are sexist, and, before President Obama began to bully me viciously, he himself was being bullied. He deflected that kind of attention away from himself by turning it on me and on all women, everywhere. He also tried to indicate that my subsequent objections to and criticism of his behavior were things I said because I’m racist.
I’ve tried not to be a racist, for a very long time. I never was particularly racist, and, once I started thinking about some of my experiences as a psychiatric patient and how the stigmatized identity from having had those experiences was grafted unto me by society changed my entire life for the much worse, I found that I was able to extrapolate from those thoughts to having some insight about what the experience of black Americans must have been like for much of the country’s history. I have never said that I knew a lot about black American culture, because I know that I don’t know much about it; however, I do think that there have been times when I’ve understood what some things about being black in the United States must be like, without having needed anyone to explain it to me in the moment.
The older man is still coughing; it’s getting worse, actually. I need to take a break before he really gets to me.
Copyright L. Kochman July 22, 2011 @ 10:59 a.m./edit and addition @ 11:00 a.m.
2. Newblog2011: 07/22/11 Vermont Baby Boomers don't know they're over 30/ young, educated people refuse to stay in Vermont if they can help it/If you can't beat 'em, give 'em a human sacrifice
A man who looks as if he could be 20 years older than I am stalked me to the law library this morning. The place is almost completely empty, and he could have sat anywhere. However, he decided to sit at a table a few feet away from me and cough repeatedly and unnecessarily.
One of the things that I meant to write about today is the fact that, for years, Vermont has been incapable of attracting and retaining college-and-beyond educated people in their 20’s and 30’s. It has been an oft-lamented problem for decades, and yet it’s a problem which nobody with any power seems particularly eager to resolve.
50 years ago, some Baby Boomers showed up in Vermont from other states. They had what were, at the time, values, educations and ideals that were vastly superior to the values, educations and ideals of most residents of Vermont, a state which to this day is still quite rural. I don’t say that to malign “real Vermonters;” I also don’t say it to malign rural places. The rural beauty of Vermont is part of what I like about it. The rural aspect of Vermont is, unfortunately, part of what kept the majority of its Euro-American native population uneducated and unsophisticated long past the time when other, more urban areas in the United States had evolved. Most of the children of the transplanted Baby Boomers fled Vermont as soon as they were of age and/or financially able to do so.
The word “fled” in the previous sentence ISN’T an exaggeration.
The Vermont Baby Boomers and their now-antiquated social views about women still dominate because nobody who could replace them wants to live here. That’s another reason why the harassment took hold here; Hollywood and the media, political and corporate bastions of male dominance, the purveyors of all of which have had the power and means to create and live in their own realities and to force those realities onto the rest of the world while ignoring, minimizing and denying the abilities and accomplishments of women in ways that other professions can’t have found their counterparts in what was called, when I was a teenager, “The Whitest State in The Union.” You still don’t see a lot of non-whites living in any part of the state; there are some refugees from other countries, mostly in Burlington, and a few, non-white Americans who find a way to live here, but it’s not a diverse place.
One of the major problems at the moment is that the Vermont Baby Boomers don’t realize that their opinions about gender are antiquated. They discovered the Internet late in life, compared to the children and youth of today. Many Baby Boomers still don’t use the Internet, and now that there’s been a massive campaign by the big harassers to turn back the clock, resulting in the Internet and other media being full of misogyny, those Vermont Baby Boomers who might have been paying more attention to the Internet this year because of what’s been going on have looked out upon the world for the first time in decades and they see the world as they remember it, with only a few technological differences to distinguish it from the world of their youth.
For me to say that the Vermont Baby Boomers are sexist doesn’t mean that they’re not racist; of course they are. However, there’s a black President now who’s willing to indulge the Vermont Baby Boomers in their sexism, so they’ll take what they can get.
Are the Vermont Baby Boomers racist in principle? Of course not! Are they racist in fact, in their true and hidden attitudes? I think that many of them likely are.
It’s also been my impression for a long time that much of the media and the rest of the big harassers are as racist as they are sexist, and, before President Obama began to bully me viciously, he himself was being bullied. He deflected that kind of attention away from himself by turning it on me and on all women, everywhere. He also tried to indicate that my subsequent objections to and criticism of his behavior were things I said because I’m racist.
I’ve tried not to be a racist, for a very long time. I never was particularly racist, and, once I started thinking about some of my experiences as a psychiatric patient and how the stigmatized identity from having had those experiences was grafted unto me by society changed my entire life for the much worse, I found that I was able to extrapolate from those thoughts to having some insight about what the experience of black Americans must have been like for much of the country’s history. I have never said that I knew a lot about black American culture, because I know that I don’t know much about it; however, I do think that there have been times when I’ve understood what some things about being black in the United States must be like, without having needed anyone to explain it to me in the moment.
The older man is still coughing; it’s getting worse, actually. I need to take a break before he really gets to me.
Copyright L. Kochman July 22, 2011 @ 10:59 a.m./edit and addition @ 11:00 a.m.