One of the lesser aftereffects of The Great Unhousing (Abridged) is the fact that the fine old Vermont pastime of “camping” is now a euphemism for “no shelter for YOU!” So there’s that.

Otherwise, I’m sure Our Political Betters are hoping that the issue will Just Go Away, Already now that they’ve managed to squeeze out a partial, inadequate offramp for the motel voucher program.

News flash: It’s not going away. We may have avoided unhousing 2,000-odd households, at least for now, but we’ve done nothing for the 800 or so households who were kicked out of their motel rooms this month. And the deal between the Legislature and the Scott administration sets the stage for a drip, drip, drip of unhousing over the next several months due to the mean-spirited restrictions put on the extended program. You know, avoid the big one-day eviction events, the media doesn’t notice, the unhoused disappear into their cars or unsanctioned campsites or wherever the hell they go as long as they go somewhere, and the political headaches are manageable.

That’s right, our goal is not to help the vulnerable and alleviate suffering, it’s to keep the issue off the radar. But some of us are planning to keep making noise.

I’m not shutting up. More to the point, Brenda Siegel isn’t shutting up. She’s out there tracking down members of the June cohort who ought to qualify for extended vouchers due to their circumstances, issuing a comprehensive takedown of the voucher deal, and otherwise being the very opposite of the kind of well-behaved woman who seldom makes history.

I will say more about Siegel and the gears she’s busily pouring sand into, but I may not say it better than fellow blogger Kevin Ellis did in his essay on Siegel’s refusal to play the political game.

Brenda has been working on homelessness and the drug overdose crisis in Vermont for several years. When she started there was no one advocating for these people. While there are state agencies, non-profit housing organizations, affordable housing lobbyists, and service providers who run shelters, no one was going through the motels to create an inventory of the residents’ needs. No one was educating the media and the politicians. And no one was banging on the door and saying, “This is not good enough.’’

People have said a lot of things about Siegel, most of them unflattering. She’s too strident. She won’t let well enough alone. She’s in it for self-promotion.

About that. She wasn’t the first or only advocate for the voucher recipients, but she brought their voices into the process and made them impossible to ignore. She forced Our Betters to make a far better deal than they would have otherwise. She continues to fight the good fight. She will almost certainly save lives in the process, lives that our state government couldn’t be bothered to save.

And as for self-promotion… in pursuit of what, exactly? She’s proven herself to be a strong advocate — and the kind of troublemaker who can’t be controlled and won’t be welcome in polite Democratic circles anytime soon.

Those would be the same polite Democratic circles who haven’t been able to lay a glove on Phil Scott and who were willing to trade principle for pragmatism to make a deal with him to settle the voucher issue.

Notice I said “settle,” not “solve.”

Democratic leadership would never have gone as far as they did if not for the efforts of Siegel, Anne Sosin, and other advocates — not to mention the relative steadfastness of 17 House members who forced leadership to make a deal instead of simply letting all the unhoused go hang.

Or go camping, where the best days are spent.

Point being, it took an outbreak of impoliteness to force Our Betters to make partial accommodation for our most vulnerable. It took a willingness to not be well-behaved. We could use more of that in our politics.