While I spend most of my time looking for local news, it’s impossible to ignore national events and their effect on local Vermonters. The importance of paying attention to all of it was nowhere more evident than this past Friday at Hardwick’s Peace Park where roughly 50 people stood in freezing cold weather to express solidarity with Americans elsewhere in the country who have been putting their lives on the line to document federal overreach.
Civil unrest in Minneapolis has grabbed the attention of media and citizens alike since the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti, on January 24, at the hands of border patrol officers there, and before that Renee Nicole Good on January 7.
A report in The New York Times, January 12, that in other times might have drawn much attention, has barely been noticed, as has a subsequent update, January 21.
The second report, headlined, “Trump’s E.P.A. Has Put a Value on Human Life: Zero Dollars,” seemed to me a reflection of the U.S. Border Patrol’s valuation of those human lives needlessly ended in Minneapolis recently, and elsewhere earlier in the Trump Presidency.
The first report noted, “In a reversal, the agency plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits, and not the monetary value of saving human lives.”
“For the past 30 years, the E.P.A. has pegged the value of a statistical life at around $11.7 million. Although experts have recommended increasing the value, the agency has updated the metric only to account for inflation and wage growth,” wrote Maxine Joselow in The New York Times.
“Other federal agencies have used the metric to justify regulations affecting everything from safety features on cars to cancer warning labels on cigarette packs.”
Curiously, “Brigit Hirsch, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, said in an email that the agency was still considering the health effects of fine particulate matter and ozone, but was no longer assigning them a dollar value in cost-benefit analyses. ‘We’re not putting a dollar value on those impacts right now,’ she said. ‘That does not mean E.P.A. is ignoring or undervaluing them.’”
“Some critics have raised moral objections to using the tool at all, saying a human life is priceless. But supporters say its use has helped prevent hundreds of thousands of premature deaths from air pollution, which kills more Americans each year than vehicle crashes.”
The report continues, quoting Susan Dudley . . . as saying the E.P.A. makes valid points that setting a value on human life suggests a false precision.
“On the other hand,” she said, “the way to rectify that is not to stop quantifying the health effects altogether.”
Meanwhile, on January 21, “Federal immigration officers are asserting sweeping power to forcibly enter people’s homes without a judge’s warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo obtained by The Associated Press, marking a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches.”
The devaluation of human life and rejection of Constitutional protections for not just citizens, but anyone in the U.S., is of a piece with other actions by the second Trump administration since it came into office just over one year ago, January 20, 2025.
That contempt for human life is reflected in the recent removal of slavery exhibits on display since 2010 at the President’s House historical site in Old Philadelphia under an executive order by President Trump called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
“Mayor Cherelle Parker said the city’s agreement with the federal government dates back to 2006 and “requires parties to meet and confer if there are to be any changes made to an exhibit,” A CBS News story reported.
A judge has now required the 30 panels removed from the site to be preserved while a lawsuit filed by the city proceeds.
Tempers elsewhere in Philadelphia have escalated as Democratic Prosecutor Larry Krasner is facing criticism for inflammatory remarks he made denouncing ICE agents as “a small bunch of wannabe Nazis,” adding, “if we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities.”
House Intelligence Committee member Greg Steube, R-Fla., then called out Krasner and recommended Attorney General Pam Bondi take a closer look at his ever-escalating remarks on the issue, citing federal code categorizing threatening a federal officer as a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Krasner earlier vowed to prosecute federal officers who break state laws in response to the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, joining a coalition of prosecutors dubbed “Fight Against Federal Overreach,” or F.A.F.O,, a cheeky reference to the acronym for “f*** around and find out,” which is said to have become a favorite phrase of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other members of the Trump administration, wrote Marco Margaritoff on huffpost.com January 30.
Krasner had earlier supported Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal who issued a stark warning to ICE agents and President Donald Trump following Good’s killing in Minneapolis by an ICE agent.
“No law enforcement professional wears a mask, none, none,” she said, as she went on to call anyone committing a crime while masked, a criminal who would be stopped before they could whisk anyone away.
The tensions clearly seem based on how human life is valued, with much of it along thinly-veiled racial lines.
The U.S. prepares to mark its 250th anniversary this July 4, and most every president before this one can be found making statements about the unique strength of the U.S. being in our population of immigrants. (And maybe all, but I didn’t have time to fully research that.)
It’s only recently some have come to see this country is founded on stolen land and those people it was stolen from must also be valued equally.
It’s hard to imagine where these escalating tensions might end, though I’d bet it depends more on accepting the inherent value of us all rather than on exclusion and violent rhetoric, or worse, violent action.
Paul Fixx, editor
Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.
Your editorial and the use of a five-year-old, as a Judas goat, by ICE agents, reminded me of this quote, from the 1965 film, Dr. Zhivago: “Gen. Yevgraf Zhivago: I told myself it was beneath my dignity to arrest a man for pilfering firewood. But nothing ordered by the party is beneath the dignity of any man, and the party was right: One man desperate for a bit of fuel is pathetic. Five million people desperate for fuel will destroy a city. That was the first time I ever saw my brother. But I knew him. And I knew that I would disobey the party. Perhaps it was the tie of blood between us, but I doubt it. We were only half tied anyway, and brothers will betray a brother. Indeed, as a policeman, I would say, get hold of a man’s brother and you’re halfway home. Nor was it admiration for a better man than me. I did admire him, but I didn’t think he was a better man. Besides, I’ve executed better men than me with a small pistol.”
Your comment Peter, referring to an incident that wasn’t even hinted at in my editorial, is most curious.
The little boy is not mentioned in the editorial. There are now many incidents that seem polar opposites of US news before 2025. They remind me of foreign governments, that rubbed out civil liberties, as in the film.
For example, today’s news includes:
President Trump shared a video on social media that depicted the Obamas as apes. He deleted it, when members of both parties objected.
Trump administration officials offered to release funding for a New York – New Jersey rail project, if Senator Chuck Schumer agreed to rename Penn Station and Dulles Airport for Trump.
The government wants to speed up deporting the 5-year-old boy, in a blue bunny hat, detained in Minnesota.