This commentary is by Nicholas Boke, a freelance writer and international education consultant who lives in Chester.
I wish I weren’t compelled to pay attention to the news these days. It’s all pretty dire, whether it’s about fistfights after a Vermont middle-school basketball game or Russia firing missiles at Ukrainian hospitals, about Lebanese leaders pushing their country deeper into despair or American librarians receiving anonymous death threats.
If you’re like me, you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what the hell’s going on. The possibilities are wide-ranging: Maybe it’s the way those who’ve been running things for years respond to the likelihood that they’ll be toppled from power; or maybe those Covid years that redefined our social and economic lives unsettled us; maybe it’s those international reshufflings, as China figures out how to be a world power, the UK grapples with the biggest mistake any country has made in recent memory, and Russia dreams of a long-lost czarist empire.
The term “mental health” will show up in any explanation(s) you pick, covering everything from American gun violence to Putin’s attack on Ukraine. It’s probably a pretty accurate explanation for almost everything, from the increase in homicides in Vermont to Haiti’s descent into chaos.
You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned Hurricane Ian’s destruction in Florida or California’s devastation wrought by that series of atmospheric rivers.
I didn’t mention them — or the fact that Pakistan’s still pretty much underwater while the horn of Africa is bone dry — because such examples of extreme, erratic weather events may lie at the heart of the world’s mental health problems.
Sure, there are a lot of climate-change deniers out there, including fossil-fuel company executives who believe in climate change, but think their wealth will protect them from the worst. But others — the person-in-the-street who insists that climate change is, say, a hoax promoted by Democrats to keep themselves in power — can’t deny that weird weather is happening.
And I’m pretty sure that the increasing relentlessness of this weird stuff is unsettling everybody’s mental health everywhere, even if they say that climate change just isn’t real. Sometimes such ongoing anxiety just makes us a bit loopy, but sometimes it pushes people to a point at which we harm our loved ones, or shoot up a shopping mall or a neighboring country.
What does this mean for America? The Vermont House Judiciary Committee is holding hearings on H.89, a shield law to protect abortion-seekers who come to Vermont from states where abortion is a crime — as well as Vermont doctors who provide those abortions — from punishment by such states.
Although our legislators aren’t mentioning civil war, this bill is dealing with exactly that: a war between the states.
Not a war between North and South, or a war fought by armies or militias trying to take over this state capital or that military installation. It’d be a war between states like Florida with its “anti-woke” legislation and California with its promotion of efforts to tell the full story of American history; and between Georgia’s Republican officials who refused to overturn the 2020 presidential election and Wisconsin’s Trump-supporting Republicans who told their followers to “fan the flame and get the word out about Democrats trying to steal this election.”
The war would entail not only the legality of abortion, but library policies and the content of school textbooks, support for child care and health care for the poor, the role of the police, and many other things.
It’ll take place within states as well as between them, as supporters of one worldview try to take over legislatures and municipal organizations to determine what children can and cannot read and know, and what their citizens can do with their bodies and minds.
That is — as H.89 implicitly acknowledges — where we find ourselves.
