This commentary is by Nicholas Boke of Chester. He is a freelance writer and international education consultant.Probably Vermont GOP Chair Paul Dame should have dropped the “handful of protesters” from his expression of concern about how Vice President JD Vance would be greeted when he and his f amily showed up in Vermont for a ski weekend.That “handful” turned out to entail at least quite a few hundred if not thousands of very angry people who stood along Main Street in Waitsfield as Vance and his wife and kids passed through town.Such a response was not, Dame went on to say, “the generous and welcoming Vermont that I grew up with.”Well, if the vice president and his boss had been “generous and welcoming” to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier in the day that Vance showed up to play on Vermont’s mountainsides, he might have deserved the kind of treatment that Dame hoped for. Maybe if Vance hadn’t, as the BBC accurately put it, “led the attack on Zelensky before Donald Trump joined the fray,” the dozens of Vermonters who welcomed him might have become the hundreds.Yes, attack. That’s what it was. An attack set in motion by the vice president, an official who hardly ever shows up at press conferences with foreign dignitaries. But he clearly had a job to do, and had been told how and when to set the embarrassing catastrophe in motion.So, it’s no wonder that the roadside Ukrainian and LGBTQ flags and the hand-written posters in Warren weren’t very friendly.READ MORE And I’m very sorry if Susan Green of Warren was, like Dame, disappointed. She had told WCAX that Vance’s visit “is awesome. I hope I get to see him. I hear his kids are in ski school.”This entire series of events took place while a gradual shift seems to have been running throughout the country.It’s a shift, a recent PBS/NPR News/Marist Poll reveals, that shows that Trump’s general approval rating is more or less the same it’s been throughout his history as president: 45% approving and 49% disapproving with 88% of Republicans approving and only 36% of independents. But beneath that surface, other things are appearing.For example, there’s the 56% who say that Trump is “moving just a little too fast,” feeling concerned that he’s rushing, not “considering the impact” of his (and, of course, Elon Musk’s) actions. And 55% believed that pulling back federal funding and unleashing broad-scale firings are causing “more harm than good.” Musk, by the way, had a 39% favorable rating and a 50% unfavorable. Surely there’ll be an end to his unelected presidency in the near future.All this became especially clear at the end of Chester’s town meeting on March 3. The town hall was packed, around 100 people according to several officials. After our House representative and two of Windsor County’s senators spoke — keeping well within the five-minute limit that Moderator Bill Dakin had given them — Dakin went on to expertly move us through the 22 articles. There were well-reasoned explanations of and questions about the first three, the bond issues that would be voted on by Australian ballot the next day. Then we got the tricky ones that would be voted on that night: the $70,000 for a police cruiser and the $4 million-plus for the town’s expenses and debts. Both passed unanimously, with the town funding being bolstered by Town Manager Julie Hance’s response to a question about how much money she had raised for the town last year through grants: “Three million dollars,” she responded.Then the exemptions from property taxes for several services deemed important to the community, support for Visiting Nurses and Hospice care, for MOOver, and for a new local substance and alcohol abuse prevention organization that seems to be doing good work with local teenagers, to name a few.Every article generated good questions and responses, then was approved. When all this formal business was finished, Shawn Cunningham stood up to propose a resolution he had written. It read:“As fellow people of the north — and keepers of the maples — the people of Chester, Vermont affirm their friendship with and their respect for our neighbors — the people of the sovereign nation of Canada.”The moment he finished, the several-dozen tired citizens who had made it to the end of the program burst into applause.Cunningham hadn’t made a political or partisan statement, just a reminder that we’re all in this business of living together, wherever we live, whoever we are.It didn’t require explanation. There weren’t any questions. Just unanimous approval. Then, proudly and happily, we adjourned.Read the story on VTDigger here: Nicholas Boke: Maybe, just maybe. ...read more read less