Burlington, Vermont is a great town. College town. New England town. On the shores of Lake Champlain. It’s the biggest city in the state. Its population is less than 43,000.
California, by contrast, has 187 cities and towns that, as of the 2010 census, had populations greater than 43,000.
Some of this is just fun-facting. Some of it, though, is a reminder. California is a huge portion of our country (12% of the population). Vermont is a small portion (0.2%). Their shared statehood makes them coequals in numerous ways, and yet still different. Equal, and inequal, and different.
I’m not sure we think enough about this piece of the American experiment. The grand diversity of states. The challenges to keeping those states united. The struggle in our own minds to balance it all, to give both California and Vermont their due, and to first figure out what that due is.
Nations are a strange thing sometimes.
