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By Guy Page
Dozens of Franklin County legislators of both parties and other community leaders have publicly pledged to a peaceful, fair transition of power – regardless of who wins the general election in November.
The letter below, issued this week, is an outcome of a series of meetings held by Braver Angels, a citizens’ organization committed to depolarizing America. The headline reads ‘We Stand Together for Democracy” and the letter reads:
We recognize that there are differences of opinion in Franklin County regarding the desirable outcome of the national election on November 5. As Franklin County citizens, we are Americans first. We all have the power to be heard by voting for the candidate of our choice.
We are confident that Vermont’s elections are competently administered by towns in Franklin County. To have a healthy democracy we need people to help out. We encourage you to be informed and involved. As Americans, it is our duty to protect our democracy and our constitutional republic by ensuring a peaceful and fair election and a peaceful transition of power regardless of who wins.
In our communities we strive to take care of each other and see the best in each other regardless of our political views. We invite you to believe in our best selves. Let’s build a stronger, healthier and more resilient community together!
The letters is signed by John Bouchard (Braver Angels- BA), Kaki Hutchinson, David Hutchinson, Dan Pipes (BA), Nancy Shaw, Tyrone Shaw, Bruce Fischer, Sen. Randy Brock, Pam McCarthy (BA), Janet Bailey, Leon Berthiaume, Andy Crossman (BA), Karyn Rocheleau, Annette Hannah, Nancy Volatile-Wood, Tom Hungerford, Rep. Mike McCarthy (BA), Eli Chevalier (BA), Rep. Carolyn Branagan, Joan Grundhauser, Jack McCarthy (BA), Carol Ann Ostrander, Tara Webster (BA), Heidi Crossman (BA), Jan Johnson, Kimberly A. Watkin, Tammy Flanders Hetrick (BA), , Shanna Ratner (BA), Albin Voegele (BA), Melissa Manson, Karin Berno, John Newton, Saint Albans Messenger, Craig Volatile-Wood, Michael Grundhauser, Sue Knightes, Melanie Steeneck, Zach Scheffler, Marie Brodeur Cohen, Rick Holcomb, Wendy J. Maquera, Rev. Preston Fuller, Rev. Michael Oldham, Rev. Jason McConnell, Rev. Tyler Smith, Rep. Tom Oliver, Rep. Lisa Hango, Rep. James Gregoire, Rep. Wayne Laroche, Rep. Allen Penny Demar, Rep. Casey Toof, Rep. Ashley Bartley, Rep. Lynn Dickinson, Sen. Robert W. Norris, Laura Bellstrom, MD, John Patrick Hartnett, Jennifer Bright, Pamela Lavee, Louanne Collins, and Leslie Britch.
Braver Angels (www.braverangels.org) is a citizen’s organization uniting red, blue, and purple Americans in a working alliance to depolarize America. The statewide Braver Angels organization, modeled after Abraham Lincoln’s “the better angels of our nature” reference in his first inaugural speech, has held several workshops around Vermont.
For more information on Braver Angels Franklin County please email braverangelsFC@gmail.org.
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Categories: Elections
Sounds like a responsible organizations! While not a Franlkin County resident, I support their approach!
This crowd should have stand together and stopped the governor from shutting down the state with the COVID KILL SHOT scandal. These clowns sold you out and i would never vote for these crooks again.
We are seeing this playing out in our country right now. https://cornerstonechapel.n
et/teaching/20241013/?fbclid=IwY2xjawF8p6lleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHXJgWTmPUFBLqRK7TNVXt4jrqLN5aJDzRTdX7yqtI6SEOz0v1GN1EhGDow_aem_GOavj2a4c1UmYhl2dL3TfQ
They seem to have good intentions but come on:
“We are confident that Vermont’s elections are competently administered by towns in Franklin County”
Really?
Who sends the ballots out? Who creates the programmed card that goes in the machine? Who built the machine? Who’s code is it in the machine? Who handled the mailed in ballots? Who maintains the actual Voter Registration list? What is ERIC?
I’ll give you a hint, none of those are administered by Franklin County towns, some of them aren’t even administered in our state.
So good intentions or not please don’t mislead the public to believe that our elections are safe or secure, because they are neither.
A word of caution:
Re: ‘We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies.’
These words by Abraham Lincoln were uttered during his ‘Better Angels’ inaugural address on March 4, 1861. Five weeks later, the American Civil War began. There is a lesson to be learned in this history.
But no. This is semantic word play by one of the greatest orators in American history. Lincoln, apparently, did not ‘mean to do harm… or he did not see it… or he justified it because he was absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of himself.’ But Lincoln was wrong. And the country paid a heavy price for the error. Slavery might very well have ended more quickly and more peacefully. We’ll never know for sure.
‘Differences of opinion’ is an oft used euphemistic phrase that over-simplifies the infinite scope of human nature. Just ask the lamb what its opinion is of the two wolves who impose their democratic majority rule when choosing the day’s lunch menu. Why can’t we be friends?
Denying the fact that, from time to time at least, “it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them”, is done at one’s own peril.
If we are, indeed, ‘Americans first’, that means we abide by a Constitution that is based on the premise that we are, first and foremost in fact, individuals, “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.“
It doesn’t mean we ‘must’ be friends.
In other words, the only way our Republic can survive is if we recognize the fact that sometimes some of us may choose to take our ball and go home. And, sometimes, when a majority, whatever it is, wolves or lambs, tries to steal our ball, we have the right to defend it and ourselves. Taking away that ‘right’ is the surest way to tyranny. Lincoln, after all, suspended habeas corpus (the ‘Constitutional’ right to protect oneself in a court of law from illegal imprisonment) two weeks after the start of the Civil War… only seven weeks after espousing our ‘Better Angels’.
Are we condemned to kinetic conflict? Well, yes. Sooner or later, as individuals, we will confront this possibility. The question is, how best can we limit these confrontations?
I suggest that the answer is in the guarantee of certain inalienable rights set forth by our Constitution. Our ‘pursuit’ of happiness, as defined by life and liberty, describes what we today call ‘free enterprise’. I may hate your guts. But that doesn’t mean we can’t live together on the same planet and interact with each other when it suits our mutual purpose. It is this epiphany imbedded in the concept of free markets that makes the American Republic, its Constitution, and Americans, exceptional – ‘if we can keep it’.
“The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another… the key insight of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it.” – Milton Friedman
I agree fully that we must seek bipartisan agreement where possible –on policies. Is this a policy? — it begs the question. There is no “peaceful transition” if there is rampant election fraud (though I know it is verboten to ever, ever question election results — unless one is a Democrat). As Jim Condos observed, it is more important that people trust the process even than the process itself. I have a ballot sitting here for my daughter who moved out of state years ago. Not feeling much confidence…. And I don’t think many on the Left will accept the results if the GOP wins EVEN IF there is no question of election integrity. So once again, conservatives are to abide by rules the Left ignores? Forgive my skepticism — I really do continue to seek common ground. But it begs the question — there is no common ground unless there is “fair” election integrity. How many illegals voting in Burlington, BTW? Just asking for a friend….
You can’t trash the system by running roughshod over voters and then demand respect for the trashed system. The Progressive supermajority has been shoving crap down our throats for years, and now on the eve of payback they want to play nice. We shall see…..
I wonder what Front Porch Fraud has to say in this matter. 🙂 Maybe it wants everybody to play nice so it can go on influencing elections and throttling good Vermonters, or has it agreed to be civil and fair?
Platitudes may change attitudes, but they don’t change the lies and high taxes.
BTW, democracy = mob rule, which is what we have been witnessing. We’ve had enough of that poison — we are not a democracy, and never were. Methinks the supermajority is smelling the tar and feathers, and the very thought of accountability terrifies them. Let’s see some bipartisan tax repeal, and some bipartisan anti-racism (meaning no more race-based BS coming out of the legislature in violation of the Constitutions). That would do a lot more than platitudes: time to walk the walk, not blather more blather.
America doesn’t need to be “depolarized”; it needs to be reestablished in accordance with its connotational principles. These “Braver Angels” are the same type of Uniparty buddies who have been selling the American citizens out and enriching themselves for the last 60 years. “Fight, fight, fight.”
correction: constitutional
They called us a democracy. Which we are not. Then they said, “ As Americans, it is our duty to protect our democracy and our constitutional republic ….. “ How can we be a democracy AND a constitutional republic? They want the signees to declare there is no election fraud in Vermont. And then, there is this sentence, ‘We invite you to believe in our best selves.’ 🙄 What does that even mean?
This letter, asking for a peaceful, fair transition of power – regardless of who wins the general election in November’, seems to me patronizing. The signers are to some degree and inadvertently agreeing that there was a Trump run insurrection on January 6th at our nations capital . Which we know there wasn’t.
I would never have put my name to this warm fuzzy little pledge.