Quiet, bucolic Vermont

I wouldn't go so far as to say I 💗 VT, but I like Vermont just fine. 

It's pretty, quiet, bucolic. A nice place to visit; not sure if I'd want to live there. My late husband, a native Vermonter, sure didn't. Jim couldn't flee the state fast enough. He hit 17, took off for college, and pretty much never looked back. 

But I've always liked Vermont. Pretty, scenic, quiet, bucolic - with enough urban refugees/granola hippies from places like NY, CT, and MA to ensure there are enough places with enough interesting shops and restaurants to make a visit worth while. 

For the good folks of Pawlet, however, things have made a right turn - a very hard right turn - and the quiet and bucolic are no longer quite so quiet and bucolic.

What happened is the arrival in town of one:

...Daniel Banyai, a 47-year-old New Yorker who, attracted by Vermont’s relaxed gun laws, bought 30 acres in this rural town of around 1,400 and transformed it into his dream project, a training camp where visitors could practice shooting as if engaged in armed combat. (Source: NY Times)

Talk about a dream project, we're talking wet dream for militia wannabes who wanna to play soldier and pretend they're the few, the proud, the Marines. We're not just talking about guys getting their rocks off gunning around with assault rifles:

On his land, in facilities he said cost $1.6 million, visitors can re-enact a range of field exercises — a suburban house, for home invasions; a large open space surrounded by berms, for carjacking and vehicle assaults; and shipboard structures, for high-seas piracy. Months of protests, he said, have made such exercises relevant to many Americans.

“People are more believing the hypotheticals with all the rioting,” he said. “People are getting more conscientious of, you know, how do I defend myself?”

There's a war on, don't you know, even if it's just a hypotheticals kind of war, and you never know when you're going to have to climb over a berm and take out a few antifas, libtards, or BLM protesters.  

Since white nationalist RWNJs (Right Wing Nut Jobs) are a bigger threat to the security, stability, and sanity of the USA than any other group, us antifa libtard BLM-ers are the ones who ought to be getting more conscientious, errrrrr, make that conscious, about defending ourselves. But Daniel Banyai sees things differently. Hooah! Which, I will note, may well be an army battle cry, but there's only one tiny little letter "h" separating hooah from hoo-hah. Which is what Mr. Banyai is creating up there in Pawlet, Vermont. 

All this is making the townspeople - who for the most part are living in ancestral places that have been in their families since the 1700's or who blew in as grownups, drawn to quiet and bucolic - plenty nervous.

Some of them have installed cameras with infrared lights so they could pick up figures that might be moving in the dark around their houses. A few have invested in bulletproof vests.

None of it makes them feel entirely safe. Michelle Tilander, 63, a retired physical therapist who moved to West Pawlet 10 years ago, said she had written a letter to be opened in case she or her husband should be hurt or killed.

“The police come in, they’ll find that envelope and they’ll know who to question,” she said.

That must make for a nice quiet and bucolic retirement. 

What the town folks are having a problem with is all the noise. Not just the continual firing of the ARs, but the explosions - because what's a fake war without IEDs and other noisemakers - that make it sound like Pawlet is under siege. 

And, by the way, a lot of those towns people are gun owners. Unlike many other states in the Northeast (c.f., Massachusetts) Vermont is not gun shy. It's just that they don't care to play war. 

They've complained to the town powers that be - that's a pic of Pawlet's town hall - about the noise. They've complained about Banyai's apparently having bypassed some pretty onerous licensing requirements that Pawletans have all suffered through to put up new chicken coops and the like, let alone set up a profit-making Fallujah. Banyai's a self-proclaimed "ask forgiveness not permission" kind of guy. I get that he didn't ask permission, but it doesn't sound like he's interested in asking for forgiveness, either. 

Things are escalating, of course, and many of the towns people feel threatened. This is, of course, because they are being threatened on social media - where truly awful stuff has been posted - not to mention up close and fairly personal. (Someone's truck was fired on.)

And Banyai, who's now running for selectman, has called out town officials for being corrupt, homophobic, and KKK. Town meetings will certainly improve if he's elected.

Townspeople have tried to get the Staties involved, but they claim that there are no Vermont laws being broken. But some laws may be. The ATF apparently has a few eyes on Banyai. 

“I’m never leaving this land,” he said in an interview. “And I didn’t ask for this war to start, but I’m going to see it through. I want to see through my victory because I bought this land free and clear.”

Looks like things could get about as unquiet and unbucolic as they can get, up there in Vermont.  

Maybe my husband was right when he hopped on a bus and got the hell out of town.