Acts of the Apostles
December 06, 2024 at 10:09PMJoe Sexton’s profile of two pastors in Barre, Vermont, whose churches specifically serve people with substance abuse problems—Barre, like so many smaller towns abandoned by industry, is firmly in the grip of the opioid crises—is so much more than that. It’s a love letter to the kind of smaller but robust community that was once a central component in the engine of American progress, and to all the people who live there and are trying to find their way toward something that feels like success and security.
Barre, of course, is not the city it was yesterday, certainly not the place it was decades ago. For much of the 20th century, it was one of the granite capitals of the world; a draw for immigrants from Italy and Scotland, eastern Europe and Scandinavia; and a hotbed of labor activism. Built on the strong backs of quarry workers and stone polishers, it became known as a city of churches and banks, and for years it was the livelier sister city to Montpelier, lit up with bars and restaurants, brimming with dancing and brawling. It had an opera house and handsome museums, too.
Today, its foundations are cracking. Barre has been steadily losing population for 70 years, with fully 10 percent of its residents gone in a single decade, from 2010 to 2020. The granite industry is no longer a robust engine of jobs and stability, shrunk by mechanization and undercut by global competition. It is the drug trade, though, that has taken one of the deepest cuts at the city’s sense of itself and of its future. Barre has for years now been a distribution hub for out-of-state traffickers, its homes turned into “trap houses,” from which first heroin and now mostly fentanyl and crack cocaine are spread through the city’s streets. That trade has brought guns and crime, from the petty to the violent.
In the face of all that, Barre, a cramped city of just four square miles and just over 8,000 people, has not quit on itself. Its people and institutions have mounted a committed response to the drug menace through education, treatment programs and the dogged work of the city’s police force.
And yet.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/06/acts-of-the-apostles/
via IFTTT
Watch