by Jonathan Peter Wilkinson on February 7, 2019

Unless you know about and totally like how your old home town has changed over the last couple of decades, do not go back to a High School Reunion. Don’t do it — even if you liked all those guys and they thought you were the most ice cold cool. I went back. Back home to a small suburb of Richmond, VA. It was where I grew up and I missed the place. I went back home to Virginia and I saw what I saw. I still miss the place. That wasn’t it.

You see the fundamental character of what made Virginia a wonderful place that anyone would feel blessed to have come from has been dragged forth and shot in the name of !PROGRESS! Fellow ex-Virginian Fred Reed describes how Virginia seceded from basic decency and became part of that Land of Morder we call Amerika.

The customary arrogance of the Beltway Bubble runs strong. The city seems isolated from the rest of existence. It talks to itself about itself and isn’t particularly aware of the rest of the world. (“The Bubble” is shorthand for New York, DC, and Hollywood, the tripartite beating heart of political correctness.) The city obsesses over twaddle about Russian malignity, over who grabbed whose ass, and transgender bathrooms. I heard nothing of the roiling currents of growth and change in Asia, of the incipient onslaught of new Asian airliners, the BRI, and de-dollarization. The focus on trivia seemed almost adolescent. A disdain for the rest of the country, nonexistent twenty years ago, now flourishes. It is a virulent snobbishness of class and region. “Flyover land” is the most common name for the rest of America. Hillary made the scorn explicit with her Deplorables, but it shows in casual conversation in which people here speak of Mississippi and Arkansas as “the middle of nowhere.”



This attitude has swallowed far more of Virginia than just the Beltway. If only it has stayed up there. I-495 makes a nice circular rim for a yuppie scumbag trashcan. It brings both a moral and an aesthetic toxic to the beliefs and the sensitivities of all free men. The moral toxin is Crowdism. It is a perverted, frightening, faux-diversity that takes people of every culture, faith and point of origin and turns them into some sort of obnoxious, pushy and secretly frightened Star Wars Clone Army. Daniel Morgan and Thomas Jonathan Jackson would spit in contempt at what passes now for serious adulthood in their old, and sacred native grounds. The NPC nightmare that has increasingly swallowed the blessed land where I was born and raised reminds me of this.

What told me things were wrong at that reunion wasn’t the older, fatter, and less vivacious versions of ourselves that I noticed as we gathered for restrained and somewhat forced politeness back at the old High School. The older I get, the better I was. It was the town. It was what the town had become. Buildings, roads and infrastructure age. But in rural Alabama and in old French and English towns, they seem to age with a certain stately grace. They remind you of things done well and things done correctly. Like a revered and admired wise elder, they remind you of people who lived properly.

In my old part of Virginia the landscapes seem to have rotted. They reminded me of pradise lost. They reminded me of how Crowdist Amerika is committing ecocide as it deliberately drives towards culturecide. My old town has been effectively paved over and pissed away. No more Mr. Swiss. But, hey! They finally got a Starbucks. It’s not just the woods where I played BB-gun war with the neighborhood kids being plowed away. It’s the ugly, modern garbage they put up there instead. People have gotta live somewhere, but how do you anger Jesus enough to get stuck paying a mortgage to live there?

So yes, the State Government has become a freakshow. It’s terrible and it sucks waking up to the Drudgereport blasting a New York Post issue announcing !VIRGINIA IS FOR LOSERS! I want to argue but can’t. “Coonman”, “Poonman,” and “Fake-Hickbilly Wannabee” don’t get elected in a state populated by the decent and the free. And if they all three suffer virulent attacks of genuine self-awareness and resign, they then get replaced by “The Coin-Flip Kid.” Democracy in Virginia is its own best punishment.

When the Alt-Right demonstrated near Mr. Jefferson’s University, they complained about the wrong thing. They didn’t need to get mad over statues being lost. They needed to complain about what had happened to Mr. Jefferson’s Virginia. Yes, I get it. If nobody says anything, the stones themselves would cry out. But let’s not pretend there is anything left of The Virginia. I won’t ever be coming back unless there is no other way to support my wife and kids. I would walk through the rest of my life haunted by the cruelty of goodness now deceased. It would be tempting just to BURN.IT.DOWN.

Tags: nostalgia, social erosion, virginia

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