While Loudoun County and the Commonwealth of Virginia have taken another step to the rear, particularly with its spanking new pro-development board of supervisors, and shall we dub them the Asphaltians and the dirty streamers, there were encouraging electoral signs elsewhere in the nation that give us hope that there are places where politics is not a vast wasteland.
Many of us believe that we have a special responsibility to preserve and protect the environment and to defend individual rights and liberties, and believe that takes work and sacrifice shunned by the Me-party that recoils from anything in the general interest that might even indirectly cost a red cent off their almighty bottom line.
In the nation from one end of the country to the other, Me-party candidates say they are for jobs, been saying it for years but their questionable solution, among others, is to fire public workers, including teachers, cops, firefighters. It’s like these are not real jobs. Think about that when Johnny can’t read, a friend is mugged or a nearby house burns down. The Me-party insists that we should cut back public employees and not allow them to bargain on their own behalf. In the Yes-Massah State, we don’t have to worry about that. Virginia is a right to work state – code for you have a right to work when the Massah tells you that you may. When Ohio Me-party Governor John Kasich set out to curtail the right of the 350,000 state workers to bargain, he ran up against a middle class that put the matter on the ballot and cleaned his clock with a 62% vote in opposition to his plantation view of public service workers. We should think about this when we say we want to cut the federal government, and thus jobs here, as our local economy sits at the end of the tree limb that some Me-party folk would saw off. If we can’t respect public workers for the right reason, perhaps our own selfish survival might help us appreciate what’s better public policy.
We had several local candidates pretending to care about jobs in the recent election instead of their regular diet of radical ideas, and I don’t just mean the recently elected State Senator, Dick Black. Elsewhere in the nation, voters understood that some things that are religious have no business being the law of the land. Mississippi Me-party Governor Haley Barbour conceded that there would be real problems if we made a fecundated ovum a “person” at law, in other words, if the moment of conception was the definition of life. Some Irish believe life only begins when you register as a Democrat. We have at least one presidential candidate who says a corporation is a “person.” Anyhow, Barbour still voted for this crazy idea despite his expressly stated reservations. Mississippi was saved from its Governor’s muddled thinking by its voters who rejected the amendment, if for no other reason, than it would preclude many accepted forms of contraception as well as what the Supreme Court has said is permissible. Even the Roman Catholic Church in Mississippi, under the leadership of Bishop Joseph N. Latino, opposed the amendment as too extreme.
In Arizona, where State Senator Russell Pearce led a controversial crackdown on illegal immigrants, signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer in 2010, that had police refusing to enforce the law, and a federal court throwing out key legislative provisions, the voters demanded a recall election to throw Pearce himself out of office for tarnishing Arizona’s image; and that’s just what they accomplished on election day. We might learn something from Arizona about how we harm others when some don’t understand that we live in a pluralistic society – and that not everyone of a “different” heritage is by that fact “illegal.”
Thomas Jefferson warned that voters “may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves.” I wait to see if Jefferson will be proven right in Virginia when next we vote – as I feel certain that Jefferson would hardly recognize a Virginia that squanders its historic countryside, compromises its legacy of individual rights and liberties, and lags further behind other more forward looking states.
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