17 minute read
Comment ................................ 7,12,13 News & Notes
FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM
LOCAL N���-P����
Advertisement
JULY 8 – 14, 2021 | PAGE 11
C�������� N��� � N����
Local Students Recognized for Academic Honors
The following students were recognized for achieving outstanding grade-point averages for their respective universities for the Spring 2021 semester. All students are from Falls Church.
Carthage College — Joshua Nicholson.
College of Charleston —
Giuliana Tosi.
College of the Holy Cross — Alexandra Biggs and Diana Chavez Cruz.
Georgia Tech — Dylan Kemelor.
Shenandoah University — Karina Starling and William Aranibar-Vargas.
St. Lawrence University — Carolyn Holran.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute — Daraius Boston, James Englander and Dylan Turetsky.
Youngstown State University — Zachary Power.
F.C Resident Authors Five Books Post Retirement
Paul Martin, 75, retired as book and magazine editor from the National Geographic Society in 2009 and has since written two mysteries and three collections of biographical work. In total, he’s penned eleven books of fiction and nonfiction and has contributed to a dozen other publications on history, culture and science.
His latest novel, entitled “Dance of the Millions,” is a mystery set in post-WWI Cuba. It will be available for purchase Nov. 2.
His other work is within the nonfiction category and consists of three collections (“Secret Heroes,” “Villains, Scoundrels, and Rogues” and “American Trailblazers”), profiling over a hundred little-known, but altogether fascinating, men and women from America’s history.
FALLS CHURCH SCOUTS BSA TROOP 1996 supported the George Mason Chapter of VASSAR by cleaning up the gravesite of Major Simon Summers at the historic Falls Church Episcopal last month, where George Washington served as a vestryman. Major Summers and his family occupy some of the oldest graves at the historic church and the gravesite was badly overgrown. After clearing and cleaning the gravesite, the Troop also installed sod — and returned to water it — to complete the job in prepara-
tion for July 4th. (P�����: C������� S�������� O����������)
McLean Rotary Club Installs New President & Officers
John McEvilly was installed as president of the Rotary Club of McLean, Virginia, for the Rotary Year 2021 – 2022, on Tuesday, June 29 during a special meeting held at the garden pavilion of The Lewinsville Retirement Residence (1515 Great Falls St). McEvilly previously served as Club President from 1999 to 2000 and as President of the McLean Rotary Club Foundation in 2016.
He retired in 2020 after a career in commercial real estate, most recently when he served as a principal of Avison Young. He also served as an officer with the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, completing one and one-half tours with the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing at Da Nang, RVN.
McLean Rotarian and Past President John Tharrington inducted McEvilly and the Club’s new officers and directors.
This was the first in-person meeting of the Club since the beginning of the pandemic.
The Rotary Club held its first in-person luncheon since the pandemic this past Tuesday at the Redeemer Lutheran Church (1545 Chain Bridge Rd).
For More Information About Careers, Education, Medical Bene ts and More Call/Text: Sta Sergeant James TureKruse (571) 274-3217 Or visit: AIRFORCE.COM
PAGE 12 | JULY 8 – 14, 2021
COMMENT
A Penny for Your Thoughts
News of Greater Falls Church
By Supervisor Penny Gross
The Brood X cicadas, and their songs, may be gone, but the effect of their several week sojourn in Northern Virginia is readily apparent in many treetops. Female cicadas make small slits in the ends of tree branches to lay their eggs. That small slit kills the branch tip, a condition known as flagging.
The crown and branches of a large tree may have hundreds of brown “flags” right now, a good indication of where the next Brood X will emerge in 2038.
Entomologists and foresters tell us that cicada flagging will not kill a tree; flagging simply “prunes” a tree. The fallen “flags” can be disposed of as yard waste.
The rice-like cicada eggs already have sucked at the tree fluids that sustain them as they fall and burrow into the ground that will shelter them for another 17 years, as the fascinating cycle starts anew.
At the same time that the 2021 cicada cycle was fading, the Fairfax County Tree Commission released its annual tree-planting report to the Board of Supervisors.
The Tree Commission is an advisory group of about a dozen members who make recommendations to the board, but who also are committed to trees and their benefits to the environment.
In Fiscal Year 2021 (which ended on June 30), a grand total of 22,247 trees were planted or distributed through various local and state government agencies or non-profit organizations.
That number does not include homeowners who may have planted their own trees purchased through a commercial entity, like a garden center or nursery.
The Virginia Department of Forestry distributed more than 2,000 seedlings, which were planted by county agencies on county-owned land. At least six of those trees were planted at the Mason District Governmental Center by George Mason University students.
One of the new trees stands watch outside my office window; it sported tiny pink flowers when it was first installed on a cold March morning.
The Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District and Earth Sangha distributed more than 13,000 seedlings and trees, and Fairfax ReLeaf planted another 6,500 seedlings within the county.
“Plant Virginia Trees: Plant NOVA Natives” is a five-year planting and preservation campaign with 140 partnering organizations, focused on government, non-profit, private and individual landowners.
The Tree Commission report says that the goal is to change landscaping culture, address climate change, and contribute to the Virginia Department of Forestry’s goal of planting 600,000 trees by 2025.
Native trees are important to local habitats; many popular landscaping trees, like Bradford pear, are non-native, invasive, and fraught with problems.
Beautiful blossoms for about three weeks in the springtime, but brittle, subject to wind and weather damage, and short-lived.
The seedling distribution mentioned above uses only native plants; a good place to see native trees and plants in the landscape is Green Spring Gardens, a jewel of a Fairfax County Park near the intersection of Braddock Road and Little River Turnpike in Mason District.
Staff, volunteers, and Master Gardeners can provide tips and lots of information about planting and caring for native plantings in the suburban landscape.
Native trees planted now will be mature and ready for the next Brood X cicadas in 2038!
Penny Gross is the Mason District Supervisor, in the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. She may be emailed at mason@fairfaxcounty.gov.
C��� �� F���� C����� CRIME REPORT
Week of June 28 – July 4, 2021
Larceny from Building, W Broad St, between 9:30 PM, June 26 and 4 PM, June 29, a bicycle was removed from a rack in an underground parking garage.
Larceny from Building, E Columbia St, July 2, 4:20 PM, a blue and silver Kent children’s bike was taken from an open garage.
Burglary — Residential, E Columbia St, July 1, between 7 and 8:15 PM, unknown suspect(s) entered a secured garage and took a blue Novara bicycle and other items of value.
Larceny from Building, E Broad St, July 3, between 1:30 and 3:30 PM, an unattended item was taken by unknown suspect(s). Larceny from Building, Lawton St, July 3, 4:16 PM, unknown suspect took a package from a front porch. Suspect described as a male, wearing a baseball hat, dark blue t-shirt, dark pants and dark shoes.
Drunk in Public, Park Ave, July 4, 12:15 AM, a male, 20, of Falls Church, VA, was arrested for Drunk in Public.
WWW.FCNP.COM
FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM
From the Front Row: Delegate Kaye Kory’s Richmond Report
I am honored to have been elected as the Chair of the Disabilities Commission.
The stated purpose of the Disabilities Commission is to identify and recommend legislative priorities and policies for adoption or examination by the General Assembly in order to provide ongoing support in developing and reviewing services and funding related to Virginians with physical and sensory disabilities.
The Commission is charged with reporting to the Governor each year.
Obviously, the mission is broadly conceived and can apply to many areas of services and service needs of Virginians identified as disabled. The Commission has begun the work of developing an agenda, but has not yet prioritized its goals.
The Covid emergency has highlighted many institutions and services that our society and our Commonwealth take for granted and rarely evaluate on a fundamental basis.
We must take this emergency as an opportunity to do so in areas that are the basis for building a Commonwealth that lifts up all residents, leaving no one behind.
We know that adequate housing is a major part of an equitable society’s foundation — especially adequate housing for the most vulnerable populations.
Virginians with disabilities can be seen as vulnerable and we know are particularly in need of adequate housing. They must overcome multiple barriers in order to obtain accessible independent housing. The unaffordability of rental housing is a pervasive barrier to obtaining accessible and independent housing.
The cost burden substantially exceeds the commonly accepted guidance that housing should cost no more than 30 percent of an individual’s monthly income.
Despite strong Fair Housing protections in state and federal law, housing discrimination against people with disabilities is a continuing and pervasive problem.
In 2020, the General Assembly passed legislation making discrimination based on source income illegal, “source of income” is defined as a source that lawfully provides funds to or on behalf of a renter or buyer of housing, including any state or federal assistance, benefit or subsidy program. However, SSI and other financial supplements do not provide sufficient income to afford housing without a housing subsidy, leaving Virginians with disabilities open to income discrimination in an already limited housing market.
There is an insufficient supply of physically accessible housing in Virginia and a growing demand.
The growing demand is fueled by the fact that individuals with disabilities are increasingly living their lives in the community, rather than in institutions — which is as it should be — and is in response to federal and state policy actions.
This growing demand threatens to undermine Virginia’s constrained capacity to meet this critical need.
Lack of accessible housing is not the only barrier facing those with disabilities; discrimination is another real barrier.
Evidence suggests that housing discrimination, both overt and subtle, continues to limit the housing options available to those with disabilties. Current demographic and economic trends threaten to further strain housing resources.
Our Commonwealth must expand affordable independent living options as well as adopt state local policies and practices that encourage accessible housing development.
We must vigorously enforce our Fair Housing laws and hold violators of accessibility requirements accountable.
Now is the time and now we have the opportunity to act, and act boldly, to create “a life like yours.”
Delegate Kory represents the 38th District in the Virginia House of Delegates. She may be emailed at DelKKory@ house.virginia.gov.
FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM
America’s ‘Anti-
Truth’ Epidemic
Don’t let up!
This has to be the unifying theme behind the multi-pronged efforts of U.S. law enforcement to go after the criminal elements responsible for both fueling the Trump organization’s financial machine based in New York, and for the January 6 insurrection at the nation’s Capitol in Washington, D.C. Nicholas F. Moreover, anyone who believes in democracy and, for goodness sake, the Benton preference of facts over fiction, must be unyielding in their opposition to the FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS Trump machine, and the now growing Republican Party-wide insanity that continues to dispute the outcome of last November’s presidential election. The “Big Lie” ultimately sits behind all these fronts that are challenging the very viability of the U.S. democracy in these perilous times. It’s not just a particular lie, but the notion fueling the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, that the art of persisting in the Big Lie, the idea that merely by asserting it, a falsehood of any dimension, but the bigger the better, is a valid determinant in the fight for power.
Americans have enjoyed years of relative domestic peace since the end of the Vietnam War and the draft in the mid-1970s, and few have questioned the straightforward notion that truth and facts are what should govern our affairs.
But lurking since that time have been those who would destroy such seemingly simple notions. Starting out as a marginalized fringe, these elements have step by step moved into the center lanes of our culture and now represent a major menace to our way of life.
Taken as a whole, they represent what can be understood as an all-out assault on reason and truth, acting on behalf of a wide variety of lunatic conspiracy theories and “alternative” truths.
Many such notions were incubating in the multitude of anti-rational cults of religious and other trends that fed off the failed Vietnam War effort and dying embers of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s. The 1970s became known as the “Me” decade for a reason, because the dominant social engineers of our culture saw efforts to turn the public’s attention away from wider social issues toward introspective ones functioned as the best antidote against pressures for meaningful social change.
While dominant social currents looked at the rise of cults in the 1970s with amusement and derision, they were growing by leaps and bounds, and they all had the same m.o., to undercut normal reason and rationality with almost any variety of the opposite. Needed were commonly sociopathic “leaders” who would make up and spout almost anything impose it on their flocks, who would be fed such delusionary crap in the context of various forms of sensory deprivation and group peer pressures.
It was sadly the willingness of persons to fall into this mental trap because of an overriding desire to “belong” to a group or perceived cause that was the entry point for their willing “suspension of disbelief” and subordination of their own faculties of reason and common sense to this process.
Running parallel with this was a sinister current within the realm of academia and agencies of social engineering to develop an attending philosophical current that came under the overarching rubric of “postmodernism,” also known as radical “post-truth,” which questioned every commonly understood notion of rationality, ostensibly in the name of elevating every crazy idea into the same universe of valid options as common reason.
The concept of “universals,” even things as simple as the laws of gravity, were deemed suspect.
While this menace exploded through mind-controlling cults, they also found homes in existing religious fundamentalist currents, where concepts such as Biblical inerrancy overtook appeals for basic morality as the driver of “faith.”
It is this evil “anti-truth” movement, as it were, has been totally underappreciated by dominant and common pragmatist currents in society until, behold, almost half of America no longer believes the outcome of a presidential election, or that vaccines are anything but a plot to destroy them.
Needless to say, America’s strategic adversaries, Russia, China and others, have delighted in and intervened to advance these dangerous tools of chaos and dissembling here.
Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com.
COMMENT
JULY 8 – 14, 2021 | PAGE 13
The New York Times this May compiled a list of ‘50s-era American highways being rethought in an age when environmental concerns and past racial injustices in land use are at the national forefront. Arlington’s section of Route 1, that elevated structure that pierces Crystal City, made the cut.
On June 16, The Virginia Transportation Department released its feasibility study proposing “multimodal improvements” at National Landing to improve safety, accessibility and the pedestrian experience crossing Route 1” (for too long known as Jefferson Davis Highway, but now Richmond Highway). The plan for wider crosswalks, narrower lanes, bicycle-friendly intersections, plantings on medians, restrictions on left turns and new lighting and signage left several parties unhappy. The bone of contention: VDOT’s favoring of a $180 million option of dismantling the elevated highway between South 12th and 23rd sts. to make it grade-level.
Crystal City is in flux. The longstanding freeway-side Americana Hotel will soon be demolished. The county in 2018 approved a JBG redevelopment of Crystal Square for street-level retail and entertainment. Amazon continues its groundbreaking for the double helix design of its headquarters, construction of Metropolitan Park, its latest plan for 1,900 hires, and its donations for affordable housing. (Last week it announced $25,000 for the Columbia Pike Revitalization
Our Man in Arlington Organization’s cultural projects.) By Charlie Clark But Amazon is not driving the fate of Route 1, even though VDOT acknowledges a goal of meeting “transportation needs with the coming of Amazon and other related development.” The National Landing Business Improvement District (which preAmazon bore the name of Crystal City) has been boosting the conversion of the utilitarian pass-through to an “urban boulevard.” The BID seeks “a downtown community that prioritizes people over cars,” said Tracy Sayegh Gabriel, president and executive director. “We believe an elevated highway is incompatible with that vision and support VDOT’s recommended at-grade alternative for Route 1.” But it recommends further safety adjustments, such as a 25-mph speed limit. Jay Corbalis, vice president of public affairs for JBG Smith, also favors the grade-level option, adding, “National Landing is poised to become the most transit-oriented neighborhood in the country.” But a coalition of three neighborhood civic associations, joined under the name Livability22202, blasted the study favoring the grade-level option as incomplete. The presentation “raises further questions, fails to address a number of community concerns, and recommends a traffic pattern that, by VDOT’s own recognition, reduces safety,” their statement read. “If Arlington County and the state proceed without addressing these concerns, our community will be further divided by a dangerous, wide road that puts cars before pedestrians and bikes.”
No safety analysis was done, the group charged, and the study treated Route 1 as a street rather than a wider corridor and “thus disregards significant stretches of Route 1, Glebe Rd., and the proposal for the airport access road in the Crystal City Sector Plan. And “besides future real estate tax revenue, this project does not deliver any sort of improvement to the community,” they said. Carol Fuller, president of the Crystal City Civic Association, told me she’s been working for 10 months with VDOT but the plan still “favors commercial interest over residents.” She knows “it’s a David and Goliath battle, and we know who’s going to win.” Fuller has been busy making the VDOT deadline for comments and writing to the county board and state legislators.
*** 70-plus history enthusiasts assembled July 4 at the Hume School on Arlington Ridge Road to celebrate the reopening of the Arlington Historical Museum. County Board Chairman Matt de Ferranti (with colleagues Katie Cristol and Takis Karontonis) spoke of current debates over Arlington’s past. State Del. Patrick Hope presented the museum with a framed copy of the General Assembly’s March 2020 proclamation honoring the 100th anniversary of Arlington’s renaming.
Society president Cathy Hix announced a $l.7 million-$2 million fund-raising effort to preserve and enhance the museum’s 130-year-old building. It was the society’s first event attended by this columnist as a newly recruited board member.
FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM JULY 8 – 14, 2021 | PAGE 15
WHO’S THE BEST?
The News-Press BEST OF FALLS CHURCH reader vote is back and it’s time to cast your ballot for your Falls Church-area favorites! Our 11th annual contest features a host of all new categories — now 36 in all — for readers to vote on the best eating, drinking, shopping and more in and around the Little City . Winners will be featured in a special BEST OF FALLS CHURCH edition of the News-Press on August 26!
