Archive
Besides his books, Bill has written a variety of poems, short stories, opinion pieces, and more.
Guns: A River of Blood
Photo of Schubart by Eric Borg I’ve spent my 76 years fighting impulses, impulses to jump into quarries, impulses to ride uninspectable motorcycles, and impulses to binge on food –...
When the State Takes A Child
The most extreme authority Vermonters have accorded their government is the taking of a human life. This ended in 1972, 18 years after the last Vermonter was electrocuted in Windsor...
How To Spend a Windfall
I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth… …but the $2.7B one-time federal tsunami of cash coming into a state of 624,000 people is a big deal, especially when...
Winooski: A pioneer in diversity and learning
On March 15, Governor Scott took a courageous and prescient action. He wrote the U.S. Department of State requesting they triple the number of refugees sent to Vermont next year. If...
Vermont State College System and the Headwinds of Privilege
Change is relentless. Humanity’s efforts to understand, accommodate, and survive it are invariably buffeted by the headwinds stirred up by those whose privilege may be curtailed by that change. Reversing...
Do You Have a Book in You?
Apart from speaking and drawing, writing is one of humankind’s earliest forms of communication. The first written words emerged as cuneiform writing in 3200 BC in Mesopotamia – present day Iraq. The written...
Vermont: Reactive or Reactionary?
To our detriment, we’re largely a reactive state. Our ship of state is captained from the stern. We scan our wake for bad signs. A corpse floats by… we need...
Draft Vision for a Unified VT State College System 102220
Problem Statement: As is, the current constellation of Vermont’s four State Colleges(VSC) is financially, pedagogically, and demographically unsustainable. What has changed? The sheer financial burden of tenured and administrative personnel...
Healthcare: A Lucrative Business or a Definable Right?
In healthcare, as in hunger and housing, we face a moral choice. Is Mammon or caritas – profit or wellbeing – the best driver of community health initiatives? In his...
An Open or Shut Case? Our Community Schools
Many Vermont towns are torn between the financial imperative to consolidate their shrinking student populations into larger nearby educational facilities and their deep desire to retain the cohesive value that...
Social Media, Free Speech, & The Right to Bear Arms
The term “social media” has never made linguistic sense to me. It seems like an oxymoron. To me “social” implies my predigital childhood, where people I knew walked and talked...
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
But experience is less likely to teach us how to bid our dearest possessions adieu. And if it were to? We wouldn’t welcome the education. For we come to hold...
