Man, VTDigger couldn’t have picked a worse possible day to literally slap a smiley face on a map of Vermont. Because it happened on the very day that “over 800 people — including nearly 300 children” were deliberately unsheltered, on one of the hottest days of the year so far, by an uncaring Scott administration. That’s on top of another 138 unsheltered in late June because they had timed out their administration-ordained eligibility limits for motel vouchers. (Further evidence, says I, that the governor doesn’t give a fuck about the homeless.)

This latest offense against humanity was triggered by an administration decision in early June to impose those limits on an extension of winter eligibility into the spring. The decision came as a surprise to helping agencies, advocates, and more than a few members of the Legislature. And it meant that a whole bunch of recipients suddenly found themselves S.O.L. at the end of June.

Including Samantha Burnett, whose shocking story is recounted by Keith Whitcomb Jr. of the Times Argus and Rutland Herald.

“I’m eight-months pregnant. I’m literally due any day,” said Samantha Burnett, 23, during a downpour outside the Econo Lodge in Rutland City.

She said she has been living at the hotel since November. Burnett said she’s from Addison County and lost her job two months ago because her employer wouldn’t approve maternity leave. She has a friend who will let her cook food at her place, but is relying on another friend to find her a rundown vehicle she can sleep in.

Despite her own troubles, she’s most concerned with what will happen to her baby. She’s afraid the state will put the newborn out for adoption because, well, she’s homeless. It wouldn’t matter that she’s homeless because of the state’s own policy choices.

What the hell, Vermont. Is this who we are? Letting an expectant mother sleep in an abandoned car?

Sadly, there’s plenty of evidence that yes, this is exactly who we are. After all, we happily re-elected a governor who, need I repeat myself, doesn’t give a fuck about the homeless. By the transitive property, I conclude that the rest of us don’t really give a fuck either.

Just as a reminder: If Phil Scott wasn’t governor, we would have a fully-funded voucher program that isn’t a bureaucratic nightmare AND a plan to transition to a better system, designed by lawmakers in the House and vetoed by the governor. Because we all re-elected Scott, we’ve got none of that.

So go ahead, Vermont, get yourself a piece of VTDigger’s smiley-face merch. The money will go to a good cause, and we’re gonna need all the smiley faces we can get to mask the human suffering we’ve just enabled.

And if early days are any indication, we’re prepared to respond to this humanitarian crisis with a spicy combination of fear, oppression, and othering. “The homeless” are, in our collective imagination, a faceless mass of mental illness, addiction, and criminal intent. They are to be feared, if not loathed. They are to be gotten out of the way. We don’t care where they go or what they do, as long as we don’t have to see them.

Exhibit A. The city of Burlington created a plan to let a small number of people sleep in their vehicles at Perkins Pier, only to quickly cancel it 24 hours later because of overwhelmingly negative feedback — including threats of violence aimed at participants. What the city’s homelessness official Sarah Russell called “a very small number of vehicles over a very short period of time” was just too damned much for The Good People of Burlington, a city with a reputation for liberalism. A reputation that falls apart when put to the test.

Exhibit B. Just as hundreds of people were dumped into the streets by the Scott administration, the Barre City Council adopted a “public conduct” ordinance that vaguely defines new offenses against the public order in a way that seems designed to, in the words of ordinance opponent Ellen Kaye, “‘marginalize’ if not ‘criminalize’ those without resources.” And Barre is getting a new influx of people without resources; according to Kaye, 109 people have just been exited from state-paid motel rooms.

Exhibit C. The Montpelier Bridge, one of my favorite local newspapers, chose to spotlight the unhoused status of a man who got into a dispute with city police. I mean, it’s right there in the title: “Montpelier Police Shoot Unhoused Man with ‘Bean Bag Rounds.'” The first sentence of the story doubles down by describing, without naming, “a 42-year-old unhoused man.”

He only gets a name in the subsequent paragraph: “Victor C. Pino, 42, no address.”

Let’s back up to the headline. If Mr. Pino had an address but happened to be black, would The Bridge publish a headline that said “Montpelier Police Shoot Black Man with ‘Bean Bag Rounds'”? No, they would not. If he was Jewish, would The Bridge approve a headline saying “Montpelier Police Shoot Jew”? Of course they wouldn’t. And if they did, they’d be rightly pilloried into issuing a correction and apology.

And if Pino had a home, they sure wouldn’t write a headline that referred to a police confrontation with a “housed man.” And I’ll bet you a shiny new dime that far more crimes are committed by housed people than unhoused.

The Bridge might argue that Pino’s homelessness is relevant because of community concerns about unhoused people in the city — a situation about to be worsened because of the Scott administration’s policy choices. But this kind of spotlighting feeds into those concerns. It “others” the homeless, sets them apart from the rest of us, makes them an object of fear and hatred. Excludes them from polite society, not to mention simple humanity.

Many unhoused people have problems. Some of them need help, intervention, treatment. But before any of that, they need a roof over their heads. It’s proven that providing shelter for the unhoused is a necessary precursor to rebuilding their lives. We are failing to do that. As a result, we will see more problems, not fewer. The unsheltered aren’t going to simply disappear, much as The Good Folk of Our Brave Little State would like them to.

The situation is likely to get a lot worse before long. Reporter Carly Berlin, who walks the housing beat for VTDigger and Vermont Public, recently reported that the state will need to shelve nearly 1,000 Section 8 housing vouchers by the end of this year because of Congressional cutbacks. How many of those households will be able to afford housing without the vouchers? Not many.

And that Big Beautiful Bill that’s on its way to Trump? State officials estimate that it will cost 45,000 Vermonters their health care coverage. Given the fact that medical debt is already “the leading cause of bankruptcy” in the U.S., we’re about to sentence millions more to financial uncertainty. Many will go as long as they can without health care.

So we’re only at the beginning of a truly dark period for our most vulnerable people. You know, the ones Phil Scott claims as a top priority for his administration? And our response to this growing darkness is already trending toward exclusion and enforcement.

But sure, go ahead and get yourself a piece of smiley-face VTDigger merch. Might help you lie to yourself about Vermont being an exceptionally good and decent place.