The Wrong Name on the Right Prize

The New England Better Newspaper Competition recently honored the Freedom & Unity op-ed series published by the Addison Independent. The category was “community involvement.” Judges look for work that is “useful and edifying.”

The award has my name on it. That’s not quite right.

We are grateful to the Addison Independent for running this series, as it did with the previous series I helped orchestrate in 2024, Living Together. Angelo Lynn knows you don’t sell papers by making people feel bad about themselves. And yet he kept giving us space. We don’t take that for granted.

But the prize belongs to Jerome Hazelwood, Matt and Elizabeth Hunt, Fable Hawthorne, Joshin Byrnes, Oscar Haney, Pete Antos-Ketcham, and Mariah Davignon. They are the reason this series earned some critical acclaim.

Here’s why.

The photo above was taken on the Middlebury town green. The symbolic epicenter of community life in Addison County. The bandstand is right there. Neighbors gather there. Families picnic there. It belongs to everyone.

And yet a neighbor sits there alone, bundled against the cold, back to the camera. Surrounded by community. Outside of it.

That image is the whole story.

There is a question that bubbles up, mostly unspoken, in communities of privilege. Someone from outside our comfort zone enters the space, and the community sizes them up. The question is: Are you like us? Do you share our vocabulary, our values, our expectations about how the world works? It is a question that flattens people. It turns neighbors into guests who must earn their welcome.

This series tried to ask a different question.

What’s it like to be you?

We are in need of transformative change. Not incremental. Not performative. Transformative. The indicators are not subtle. Social disconnection is epidemic. Homelessness in Vermont has exploded. Hunger is rising. The gulf between those with more than enough and those without what they need keeps widening. We are heading in the wrong direction.

Change is scary. Especially for those of us who have grown comfortable in our own lives, our own families, our own tribes. And lately it seems that so many of us are being consumed by events we feel helpless to control. Distant. Often tragic. Viewed through a screen. And so we respond by expressing our opinions. We rally. We post. We make sure the people around us know which side we are on. We perform our values for an audience of the like-minded, certain we’ll be heard. At least by our tribe.

It feels like something. It feels like action.

But while we are doing it, a neighbor spends another night without shelter. A child misses another meal. Someone who just needs one person to look them in the eye goes another day without it.

Transformation does not happen at a distance. It does not happen on a screen. It happens in proximity. Face to face. Present.

One lesson from seminary surprised me more than most. Communities faced with the need to change often fear the messenger of that need more than they fear the problem itself. Think about how many times Jesus casts out demons in the Gospels. The person tormented is freed. And what does the crowd do? They don’t celebrate. They don’t say, “Hallelujah, our neighbor is free!” They question his authority. They are frightened. The demon controlled their neighbor. But it was Jesus who discomforted them. They’d grown used to their demons.

That pattern is ancient. It is very much alive.

Like our Voices from the Edge podcast, the Freedom & Unity series introduced perspectives that are often discomforting and challenging. GMJ and I are always honored that the Addison Independent is willing to give those perspectives and those voices a platform. The series was not comforting. It was not bias-confirming. It asked Addison County readers to sit, for a few minutes, with the honest answer to a different question. Not “Are you like us?” but “What is it like to be you?”

That is useful. That is edifying. And that is why the prize belongs to our marginalized neighbors with whom we are proud to stand.

Read the full Freedom & Unity series at the Addison Independent.