After Garrett Graff’s 2016 kerfuffle over not meeting residency requirements brought to a crashing end his plans on running for Vermont lieutenant governor, I’d have thought he’d be more aware of what local means. Born in Vermont but residing outside the state for the immediate-past 10 years, Graff left his job at politico.com and had moved back to the state in 2016 with plans to run for the second-highest elected office in the state. Sadly for him, a candidate for lieutenant governor has to have lived in Vermont for the four years before the election “without interruption of residency”- a requirement he did not meet.
Now I happen to notice he tweeted the following this Sunday in response to one of Donald Trump’s earlier tweets about immigration law and order: Local angry old man continues to lack third-grade understanding of US Constitution, or even basic creed engraved on US Statue of Liberty….
If Vermont approval polls are correct it is likely that a majority of residents would agree with Graff’s quip and his point about Trump’s understanding of the US Constitution. But I’m not sure that — if asked to — I could find any Vermont resident who would consider Donald Trump a local angry old man. Vermont is just not where he’s coming from.
One wonders whether Graff knows how many teats a cow has (reference to Fred Tuttle’s campaign challenge to carpetbagger U.S. Senate candidate Jack McMullen, but you probably knew that). For Graff, “local” either means his own neighborhood of 4 years ago, or it’s an attempt to belittle someone as being too ignorant of the “big picture,” or too unsophisticated to understand what’s really going on. Which would be an insult to the majority of Vermonters, whether born here or here by their own good sense and choosing.
Either way, neither the comment nor its misidentifier of Trump as “local” is the crucial point. What’s really at stake here is the nativist, white Christian supremacy-supporting, immigrant-exclusionary, fascist policies promulgated by Trump and his cronies and allies. That is what prompts ‘local’ people to protest outside restaurants within which Trump administration members are eating. That is what prompts ‘local’ business owners to choose not to serve those complicit in demonizing children and locking them inside cages thousands of miles from their ‘detained’ parents who are now at risk of being deported without even any kind of due process.
And no, refusing service to the powerful in protest against their chosen bigotry, hatred, and outright lies is not the same as the homophobic baker refusing to provide his commercial service for a gay couple, or the homophobic florist who made the same choice — to refuse to provide the same service as they provide to all other customers — simply because those particular customers wanted to celebrate their legal unions, to celebrate their right to live life legally and without discrimination, and to do so by purchasing products freely sold to all other customers, regardless of whether those “other” customers shared religious beliefs, or had committed adultery, or broken any other of the ten commandments held so dear and judged so harshly by some self-identified moral, bible-believing Christians.
Those situations embody the difference between hate and love, between resistance to oppression and the celebration of freedom.