Monthly Archives: May 2017

Memorialize peace

My Dad in the cockpit!

My Dad in the cockpit!

I remember as if it were yesterday my Mom crying, the keening, the ancestral Irish wailing of her mother’s people, a soulful wound disgorged by screams and tears, when she learned my Dad’s brother, Charles, died of internal bleeding.

Years earlier, my uncle Charles had been shot in the chest in World War II in Italy and captured by the Nazis.

Charles was denied a blood transfusion in a Bronx hospital that would have saved his life.

President Woodrow Wilson promised that World War I would be the war to end all wars.  It was not.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in WWII, said, “There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.”

The “blood it costs” is the lost life of a spouse, sibling, child, relation, close friend, a loved one, leaving survivors bereft, never to know those they loved alive again.

Each of us would likely risk our lives, perhaps without a thought, on impulse, or instinct, for someone we love, to risk our life for one who makes our life whole and meaningful.

But would you do it for a nation-state hell-bent on exploiting the resources or citizens of another nation?  Continue reading

Lost children found

Victoria and Virginia Quintana – taken to Argentina - 2010

Victoria and Virginia Quintana – taken to Argentina – 2010

Lovettsville’s Tony Quintana has been living a waking nightmare ever since his wife took his two daughters, Victoria (born 2006) and Virginia (born 2008), to Argentina, and refused to return them to the United States, despite a local state-side court order awarding Tony custody.

The young girls were taken from Loudoun county and America in January 2010, seven and a half years ago.

Tony feared this might be the last time he’d ever see his daughters.

After a quest worthy of Homer’s Odysseus, however, when it seemed like he’d lost his girls forever, Tony saw his daughters pass through customs at Dulles and swept them up in his arms.

It was a stunning moment, last Tuesday, laden with unimaginable emotion, realizing a moment Tony longed for, that many thought improbable, and quite beyond Tony’s grasp, until it finally happened, when a miracle emerged from the unending mist of uncertainty, and his girls were with him at long last.

This Dickensian tragedy of a Dad separated from his daughters, taken to another nation-state occurs more often than you might imagine. Continue reading

Being a mom is a job

Mom_Rusty_rocking_chair_v2Teddy Roosevelt once said that a Mom’s “career is more worthy of honor and more useful to the community than the career of any man …”

Too bad we don’t treat our Moms that way.

My Mom raised two boys.  My younger brother, by three years, was Charlie.  When Charlie came home and my Mom put him in my lap with my legs dangling over the side of the couch, and said, she’d gotten my brother from the hospital, I asked, “When does he go back.”

I found out he wasn’t going back and my Mom spent her time clothing and washing and cleaning and feeding and walking and reading and entertaining and teaching and getting us to school.

We lived at 143rd and Willis Avenue in the South Bronx and my Dad was the Superintendent of our building after he returned from service in World War II.  My brother and I never knew what we didn’t have.  But it must have been challenging for this young post war couple.

Our society is high on child-rearing but doesn’t fairly judge the worth of Moms who raise children.

Not then nor now.

Moms who are college educated pay a “mommy tax” of more than a million dollars in lost income when they have a child, according to Ann Crittenden, who wrote “The Price of Motherhood,” about “why the most important job in the world is still the least valued.” Continue reading

Words matter

Supervisor Ron Meyer

Supervisor Ron Meyer

George Orwell, author of “1984,” made the point that language has the power in politics to mask the truth and mislead the public.

In “1984,” in his novel, he coined the phrase “Newspeak,” referring to the abuse of language by the government.

In Loudoun County, we have long had a “transition” area in the County’s Comprehensive Plan, serving as a buffer between western Loudoun (rural) and eastern Loudoun (suburban).

Every Members of the Board of Supervisors knows what that means.

In a recent County study, inviting us to “envision” the future, we were told there is a “market” demand to add 50,000 residential units to our already over-crowded County.

Citizens have said loud and clear – we do not want 50,000 more units – not in the West or the East or the Transition area,

When the “vision” statement for the “new and improved” comprehensive plan was considered by the Board of Supervisors last week, a majority of the Board favored myopia, narrowing the County’s “vision,” and kicking the County’s long-held land use policy of “transition” to the curb.

Supervisor Ron Meyer (R-Broad Run) feigned a misunderstanding of the English language when he said, “As far as saying something’s a transition setting, I’m not sure what that means in the English language.”

If Mr. Meyer suffered a language lapse, he could have consulted a dictionary.

Merriam Webster says a “transition” is the “passage from one state, stage, subject, or place to another.”

Loudoun’s “transition” area is a “passage” from suburban development through mixed development to rural development.

Mr. Meyer understood perfectly what and where the transition area was when, as a Board candidate in 2015, he answered the Chamber’s questionnaire, faulting the Comprehensive Plan, including the Transition area, under review and subject to revision now.

Mr. Meyer said, “Current planning does not reflect community realities in this [transition] area and it will be vital to better plan the transportation network and land use polices to ‘fill in the gap’ in a smart and responsible way between suburban areas in Ashburn and Leesburg in this small corner of the Transition Area (underscoring supplied).”

Mr. Meyer’s shoddy mimicry of Orwell’s “Newspeak” sought to eliminate “transition” to compromise any thought or memory of the policy that has preserved and protected the County’s special character.

Nor did Mr. Meyer stop with his faux misapprehension of what “transition” meant.

Mr. Meyer swelled with intolerant and disrespectful humor, when he said, “What is the transition setting, does that have to do with someone’s gender identity?’” Continue reading

Let them eat pizza

PizzaOur children may have been eating more fruit and vegetables, grown healthier and thinned down some in school the last several years because of the School Lunch Program.

If they did, it is likely because a bi-partisan Congress and the USDA put in place back in 2012 some more rigorous standards to encourage nutrition and to fight childhood obesity.

These regulations required more whole grains, a wider variety of fruits and vegetables, and less sodium and meat in the school lunch regimen.

The National School Lunch program is a federally assisted meals program that operates in public and nonprofit private schools and residential childcare institutions.  The meals are nutritionally balanced, low cost or free.  This is not a recent idea.  Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act in 1946.

It was hoped that feeding children would fight poverty and reduce disease.  For, without good food, our children get diet-related diseases, and they don’t learn so well.

There is serious concern in the schools and among parents of children attending school in Loudoun County and across the nation that the current more rigorous school diet is not going to remain so healthy under the current Administration.

The Department of Agriculture (USDA) lightened and diluted the school regulations as they apply to nutritional standards this past Monday.

USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue, the former Governor of Georgia, announced an interim rule to provide “regulatory flexibility” for the National School Lunch Program. Continue reading