Joy as Social Change

IT FEELS GOOD to laugh out loud.

In the past year I haven’t felt lighthearted about weighty topics such as our political leadership, globalization, and climate change. But Bill McKibben’s latest book, Radio Free Vermont, reminds me that humor can be as powerful as protest in speaking truth to both injustice and abuse of power.

Prolific writer, climate organizer, Sojourners columnist, and co-founder of the organization 350.org, McKibben has given his life to galvanizing the climate movement. He advocates for a diversity of strategies, from a carbon tax to public art, with a seriousness reflecting the high stakes of inaction. In his first work of fiction, the satirical plot of Radio Free Vermont revolves around the exploits of Vern Barclay, a 72-year-old radio announcer who finds himself at the center of a campaign to convince Vermonters to secede from the U.S.

His motley crew of allies includes Perry Alterson, a teenager with technological expertise who ends every sentence with a question; Trance Harper, a former Olympic biathlon winner; and Sylvia Granger, a firefighter who harbors these fugitives while teaching investment bankers and corporate attorneys how to drive in the mud and fell trees for firewood in their new state.

The narrative begins with acts of nonviolent and almost joy-filled resistance by the accidental activists, which include taking over the airwaves at Starbucks with Radio Free Vermont (“underground, underpowered, and underfoot”) and the rather polite hijacking of a Coors Light truck to replace the cargo with Vermont craft beers (which are mentioned by name in nearly every chapter). It’s like the Vermont Welcome Wagon received training in civil disobedience, with a local brew never far from reach.

The campaign gains momentum when Barclay covers the opening of a Walmart and becomes partners in crime with the young Alterson, who engineers a sewage system backflow into the new store. With this corporate sabotage, the two are branded as terrorists, soon joined by Harper, who takes the spotlight at the governor’s opening of an event facility with a retractable roof, by raising a flag of independence sewn by Barclay’s 96-year-old mother.

What follows is a page-turning escapade to protect small interests—community, land, farms, forests, and families. While in hiding with his crew, Barclay ponders the right direction for the small towns in his state. He recognizes that the problems faced by his team may not reflect the magnitude of challenges such as police brutality and voter suppression, but inaction on any scale feels like a cop-out to the country’s inept leaders.

The annual town hall meetings become the focal point in the book for grassroots decision-making. One moral of this “fable” is to push us toward creative and civil resistance in the face of incompetent and ill-prepared leadership. I have to wonder: In towns more diverse than rural Vermont, what are the vehicles—beyond the ballot—for creating accessible, collective resistance that matters? How do we build coalitions such as the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina that bind together our diverse acts of resistance, all of which have meaning? Perhaps one critical point of this book is that we must continue to organize and resist, even while living into the questions.

I was reminded of McKibben’s 2010 visit to the college where I teach, a mere four days before his Global Work Party to confront climate change, with more than 7,000 concurrent events across the world. My students and I left his lecture feeling the enormous gravity of the mission. Eight years later, I hear an additional message from this book: We need to be vigilant in our resistance and maintain a lighthearted spirit in the work. At a time when it truly matters, Radio Free Vermont left me smiling, rather than downtrodden. And given his history of persistence, I like to imagine McKibben writing this book, chuckling about a quirky detail, and then taking a sip of a Vermont IPA.