Hello, Worcesterites --
If you want to go online to hear a neighbor talk about a book he's just written, you can do so this Thursday at 7 p.m.
I've been incredibly lucky in my life to have been a journalist, a teacher, and a civil liberties advocate. Each of these professions is, essentially, about fairness – about how people are treated equitably. In my 45 years of working in these three areas, I accumulated a boatload of questions about the concept of equity and about government's role in ensuring we're treated fairly. I wanted to untangle the questions, specifically as they related to Vermont, once I retired from my job as executive director of the ACLU-VT in 2016.
So, I've been working on a book these last four years, and it's finally been published – "Equal Is Equal, Fair Is Fair." The book is about Vermont's push during the last 25 years for equity in education, marriage benefits for same-sex couples, and health care services. The questions I wanted to answer were, Why Vermont, and why success in the first two areas but not the third? What's the history behind these movements?
The book's got a lot of history about the Brigham and Baker court decisions, and a lot of politics about health care. There's stuff that I was surprised to learn (like Vermont has been trying to "reform" health care for 100 years, literally), and stuff that still makes me tear-up -- the 8-year-old child who gave her name to the school funding case, and the never-say-die doctor from Bakersfield/Montpelier who's been stirring up "good" trouble around health care reform for 30 years.
There's a Zoom "launch" of the book on Thursday at 7 p.m., If you're interested in attending, here's a link to the online registration page -- www.phoenixbooks.biz/event/allen-gilbert-equal-equal-fair-fair There's no charge, but you need to register ahead of time to be able to log on to the event.
More details about the book are at www.equalisequal.com
(If you weren't in Worcester in the 1990s, you may not know that Worcester played an important role in the Brigham school funding case; we were one of the plaintiffs.)
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