Support Families

Thank you for including the issue of birth center closures around the state as part of your “Gen Zero” series [“Expecting Trouble: As Hospitals Close Birth Centers, Vermonters Are Traveling Farther — and Confronting What’s Lost When a Community Lacks Essential Care,” September 9].

While I very much understand the demographic problem here, many of us are tired of hearing that there aren’t enough young people, and that we aren’t having enough babies, while watching the support systems for youth and families disappear. Last year my community lost our birthing center, our teen center, our youth summer recreation program and received a large cut to our public library, where many of our youth and families spend their time.

Meanwhile, as a parent and public librarian, I see a school that is filled with kids, a library that is bursting with youth in the afterschool hours, and a town with many families trying to raise kids and make this their permanent home. We are here, and we are trying to stay. But our personal health insurance premiums are rising — and we pay for the rising insurance premiums of our local and statewide workforce through our property taxes — while watching our leaders gut the programs that allow us to grow and support our families. If I was entering the housing market now, instead of 15 years ago, my family would never be able to afford our home.

I’d love to see us break out of this self-perpetuating doom cycle and rally behind the systems and programs that support our families. It truly benefits us all.

Mind-Stealing Meta

[Re “Vermont to Receive $92.7 Million in Settlement With Meta,” online, August 26]: Way to go, bringing to the forefront the giant that is stealing our children’s minds — so proud of the behind-the-scenes work to get this done! As a longtime educator I applaud this big deal. Thank you for this.

Stop School Takeover

[Re “‘Do Not Slow Down’ on Ed Reform, Gov Tells School Leaders,” online, September 7]: Gov. Phil Scott telling school boards “Do Not Slow Down” sounds a lot like President Donald Trump saying he is going to move fast. Why is he pushing this on school districts that have been very careful about their budgets after he appointed Education Secretary Zoie Saunders without Senate confirmation? This reeks of MAGA and should be resisted at every turn.

Consolidating school districts into CESAs and giving the state control of per-pupil spending is right out of the Republican playbook. Rural schools will be shortchanged and forced to close, and towns will lose the glue that keeps the community together. Write to your school boards and legislators to stop this takeover — and be sure to vote in November.

Helter Shelter

[Re “Nonprofit Pulls South Burlington Shelter Proposal,” online, September 4]: Geez, is anyone other than CVOEO executive director Peter Dragon surprised that the city of South Burlington wasn’t interested in having a homeless shelter in their town? Clearly the persons running the social services and shelters in Burlington care more for their clients’ well-being than the well-being of all the other residents in the city of Burlington. South Burlington has data they are using to inform their decision about the cost increase of providing these services in their community — disorder, community safety, strains on city services all add up to budget woes.

The fact that Mr. Dragon was “caught off guard” proves that he is either unaware of the damage caused to the city of Burlington (which I doubt) or uninterested in mitigating the damage through the services that they provide.

Not the Ticket

[Re “Safety in Numbers?: As Police Make Fewer Traffic Stops Nationwide, South Burlington Is Bucking the Trend,” August 26]: It sounds like the South Burlington Police Department wants more accountability for unsafe driving. That’s great. I agree that mitigating these behaviors is crucial to community well-being.

They don’t seem to connect that when a majority of drivers speed, this indicates that the design of the street and the posted speed limit are mismatched, not that every speeding driver is derelict and in need of reprimand.

Police Chief Bill Breault emphasizes a need for his officers to be “proactive” and not just “driving around and waiting to respond to calls.” Is Breault concerned with unsafe driving behavior in his community, or is he concerned that his officers are wasting money burning gas when they could be bringing in ticket revenue?

If I were the police chief, I’d assess public safety data before creating a new initiative. If I were concerned with racial disparities, I would be, to quote Breault, “proactive” by educating my officers on systemic racism, testing them on implicit bias and thinking of creative steps to prevent racial profiling in the first place.

Notably, law enforcement officers are consistently among the most prevalent offenders of traffic regulations. We all see cops speeding, parking illegally or distracted — typing on a laptop while driving.

If public safety is about enforcing the laws, then the overwhelming majority of drivers would regularly receive tickets. If traffic laws are about public safety, then police would not frequently and casually violate them. If the police department wants safer streets, they can start by leading by example.

Good Recommendation

[Re From the Publisher: “Vacation Mode,” September 2]: Thanks to Paula Routly for sharing her visit to that gem of Franklin County, Cold Hollow Sculpture Park, in Enosburg Falls. Despite living almost in its backyard, in East Fairfield, I only learned about the park after reading about it in Seven Days back in 2015, in an article by Amy Lilly. I visited the next weekend and was smitten by the grandeur and playfulness of David Stromeyer’s work and the warm, instructive welcome from David’s wife, Sarah. I’ve been volunteering at the park ever since, greeting people in the Welcome Barn and helping to support visiting artists and speakers. The view from the “office” is amazing!

Different Tastes

[Re “Diner Times: With Burl’s Downtown Kitchenette, a Burlington Diner Is a Diner Once Again” July 29]: My bride and I recently experienced breakfast at Burl’s Diner in Burlington. Our expectations were high, but we walked away disappointed. Will we go back? No.

The staff were great; no complaints there.

I ordered an omelette with home fries and toast, and my lady ordered eggs over medium with home fries and toast.

Simple orders, but: Her eggs were cooked hard, and the home fries were Cajun-seasoned with other unknown ingredients which made them too hot for our palates. There was nothing on the menu that suggested the home fries were pre-seasoned. My omelette was OK but not good enough to make me order it again.

First impressions make a difference.

Missing Context

Several readers responded to Ken Picard’s “Dark Matters: A Haunting New ‘Disaster Comic’ Turns an Unflinching Eye to the Dehumanization That Fuels Genocides” [September 2].

Ken Picard’s profile of Dana Walrath’s The Book of Genocides treats it as settled fact that Israel’s founding in 1948 was an act of genocide and “settler colonization.” That’s not history; it’s opinion dressed up as fact.

Jews are indigenous to the land, with continuous presence there for thousands of years, predating both Islam and Arab settlement. Jews who later immigrated from Europe weren’t colonizers, they were descendants of that same population, exiled after Rome’s conquest and dispersed across Europe for centuries before returning.

The UN’s 1947 partition plan provided statehood to both Jews and Arabs. Jews accepted it; Palestinian Arabs and neighboring Arab states rejected it. The war that followed led to displacements on both sides — roughly 700,000 Arabs, some due to orders from their own leaders, who urged them out, promising a quick return once Arab armies won, and roughly 850,000 Jews forced out of countries across the Arab world, stripped of citizenship and property, erasing millennia-old Jewish communities.

Flattening this into a single word, genocide, doesn’t clarify history. It erases it. Arab population in Israel today is larger than it was in 1948, and Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank has grown for decades, not a pattern consistent with genocidal intent.

None of this is meant to make light of the deaths and suffering of Palestinians. But retelling 1948 as a settler-colonial genocide, then extending that frame to today’s war, isn’t education, it’s biased advocacy.

Ken Picard’s review of Dana Walrath’s The Book of Genocides presents one of the gravest accusations imaginable, that Israel has committed genocide since its founding, as though it were established fact. It is not.

Genocide has a precise legal meaning: prohibited acts committed with the specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. No international court has ruled that Israel has committed genocide; the case before the International Court of Justice remains unresolved. The 2025 UN Commission of Inquiry reached that conclusion, but it is not a court, and its findings are strongly contested.

Seven Days nevertheless offered no competing legal analysis, historical perspective, or Israeli or Jewish voice. Walrath’s claim that the alleged genocide began in 1948 is repeated without mentioning the UN partition proposal, its acceptance by Jewish leaders, its rejection by Arab leaders or the invasion of the new State of Israel by surrounding Arab armies.

The review similarly ignores the Hamas massacre and hostage taking of October 7 that precipitated the current war. It also omits evidence complicating the genocide accusation, including Israel’s humanitarian pauses that enabled approximately 559,000 Gazan children to receive polio vaccinations in 2024.

Israeli policies and military actions should be scrutinized, and Palestinian suffering must not be minimized. But accusations of genocide demand evidence, legal precision and historical context.

Seven Days provided none. It published an admiring profile and treated the artist’s ideology as history. Vermonters deserve journalism that investigates extraordinary accusations rather than simply amplifying them.

The recent book review of Dana Walrath’s The Book of Genocides [“Dark Matters: A Haunting New ‘Disaster Comic’ Turns an Unflinching Eye to the Dehumanization That Fuels Genocides,” September 2] accepts the author’s inaccurate description of the Palestinian refugee problem created during the 1948 war launched against Israel by five neighboring Arab countries. Contrary to Ms. Walrath’s contention, the resulting refugee crisis following the 1948 war, commonly referred to by Palestinians as the Nakba, did not constitute a genocide under any accepted definition. Neither the United Nations nor any other independent organization has ever found that this 1948 refugee problem constituted a “genocide.”

While Ms. Walrath is free to say, “In my mind, it was genocide [starting] in 1948,” as quoted in the review, Seven Days should feel some obligation to its readers not to permit such inflammatory falsehoods to go unchallenged in this tense political climate. Numerous independent historians and scholars have examined the Nakba and the 1948 Palestinian refugee problem and have concluded that the displacement of the Palestinian population during this period was the result of numerous factors, including: Palestinians voluntarily leaving their towns to escape dangerous combat conditions; local Palestinian/Arab leaders and military officials issuing instructions to men, women and children to evacuate certain areas; and Israeli military activities and in certain cases direct orders that caused civilians to flee.

On such a heated controversy, some historical context should be provided by the book reviewer rather than merely reproducing the author’s hyperbole and hate-engendering cartoons.

I was troubled by Ken Picard’s review of Dana Walrath’s The Book of Genocides [“Dark Matters: A Haunting New ‘Disaster Comic’ Turns an Unflinching Eye to the Dehumanization That Fuels Genocides,” September 2]. A review need not adjudicate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it should scrutinize a book’s disputed premise. Picard instead reports without challenge Walrath’s belief that a “Palestinian genocide” began in 1948 and has always been about “land theft” and “settler colonization.” That political judgment effectively locates the original crime in Israel’s creation.

The destruction in Gaza is undeniable, but destruction alone does not establish genocide. The evidence points more convincingly to Israel’s objective of destroying Hamas — which carried out the October 7 massacre, took Israeli hostages and openly seeks Israel’s destruction — than to a plan to exterminate Palestinians. Hamas embedded itself within civilian society and has enjoyed substantial popular support while subjecting Palestinians to its destructive ideology. This does not excuse every Israeli action or make every civilian casualty lawful. It does provide an alternative explanation for the war that must be seriously addressed before genocidal intent can responsibly be asserted.

For those who believe “words matter,” indiscriminate use of “genocide” dilutes the legal meaning of the term: the intended destruction of a people as a people. Applying it to Israel continuously since 1948 creates a painful moral inversion. It places the Jewish state, created in the Holocaust’s shadow as a refuge and guarantor of Jewish self-determination, in the same moral category as those who sought to exterminate the Jews. Whatever Walrath’s intention, this grave accusation demands scrutiny, not the reviewer’s warm endorsement.

This article appears in Performing Arts Preview • 2026.