What's Wrong with Loudoun County?

 

Loudoun County, Virginia has become the epicenter of the “cold civil war” between the woke/progressive movement – the latest incarnation of the revolution -- and people who are – or who at least consider themselves to be -- “normal”, i.e. ordinary American citizens who ask nothing more than to be left alone. But the question arises, why there, and why now? I believe I can shed some light on the subject, since I lived there for all of 24 years.

First, a bit of geography. Look at a map of Virginia which highlights counties. Working out from D.C., you first come to Arlington County, which was, long ago and far away, part of D.C. (which explains why it's the other part of the 10x10 mile diamond). Arlington, which up until World War II was a scattering of small settlements, got a shot in the arm with the war and the building of the Pentagon and became what is known as a “bedroom suburb”. Over time, Arlington got filled up, so the cancer which actually began with the New Deal spread to Fairfax County, which over time became an even larger and more sprawling bedroom suburb. But like any malignant growth, the government blob needed ever more space, so by 1981 the cancer had spread across the county line into Loudoun – not far, mind you, but enough to constitute a significant “fringe”, beyond which all was still bucolic and green (in the traditional sense). (I used to joke that the suburbs on the eastern edge of Loudoun County were the servants' quarters for Fairfax County. True up to a point, except a lot of the hapless Loudoun residents had to commute all the way into D.C. on a daily basis, a process so brutal that it could be compared to the Trail of Tears. And even so, we spent a lot of time “pitying the fools” who commuted from places even farther away, like Harper's Ferry, Gettysburg, and the Eastern Shore of Maryland. You look hard enough and you can always find someone more miserable than you are.)

So, taking a snapshot circa 1981, Loudoun County was still, by and large, rural. We settled in one of the “borderline” developments, and right across the main road there were horses grazing. And from where we lived to Leesburg (the county seat) it was all horses. Now it's all developments. In fact, the developments have oozed around Leesburg, which is protected by ironclad ordinances, not to mention political pull – in order to preserve its colonial-era, quaint, and picturesque features. (You can't move a brick or prune a tree in “old” Leesburg without getting a permit from the authorities. Needless to say, real estate prices there are comparable to those on Martha's Vineyard. But who can argue with a place that has more boxwood hedges than anywhere else in the U.S.?)

The last time I checked, which was 15 years ago, the suburban sprawl had reached all the way to the first ridge west of Leesburg, and was quickly crawling up said ridge in search of new worlds to despoil. But that was not the only trend of note, by any means. The social history of Washington, D.C. and its suburbs has one overriding theme, which is that people come there in order to get good-paying jobs. And who wouldn't? Problem is, they bring their – in some cases “traditional” – points of view with them. Why, many of them have intact families! And they “cling” to guns and Bibles! And so on. This is because they generally come from farther west or farther south, which means from “the hills”, from “God's country”, and all of that feisty Scotch-Irish DNA doesn't always take kindly to the New Deal/enlightened/progressive/liberal/socialist/woke-ism that emanates out of D.C. like fallout from an atomic blast, except over a much longer time.

So even way back in 1981, there were already signs of trouble. The “Billy Bobs” from up in them thar hills who attended the Evangelical and Fundamentalist churches had to confront, on the job and occasionally right next door, the opposing force – namely big-government socialism and all of its attendant annoyances and persecutions, not to mention its true believers, who considered the outer suburbs as a kind of mission field – the thinking being something along the lines of  “We will enlighten these knuckle-draggers and mouth-breathers, at the point of a gun if need be, and turn them into citizens of the New World Order whether they like it or not.”

Not only that, but the first notable entity in Loudoun County to succumb to the new New Deal mind set was the county government. So you had, basically, a county with a suburban fringe on one end, a “hunt country” elite on the other end (quickly moving on to greener pastures in order to escape suburban sprawl - after cashing out handsomely, needless to say), and in the middle a county government that was indistinguishable from what one might find in, let's say, Sweden, but with even more of an animus toward religion, “family values”, and conservatism of any kind.

“You say 'mayter', and I say to-mah-to”. The ruling class of Loudoun County were NPR listeners, everyone else was into country music. It was BMWs vs. pickup trucks with gun racks. It was polite Episcopalians vs. charismatic Fundamentalists who spoke in tongues. It was gourmet shops vs. BBQ joints. And so on. But, all in all, despite these canyon-like cultural differences there was a kind of peaceful coexistence – the two sides tended to stay out of each other's way most of the time (except when the “regular folks” wound up in court and were confronted by prosecutors straight out of Stalin's show trials).

And – bringing us up to the present day – all was, at first, more or less quiet on the public school front. The “agents of change” had yet to flex their muscles in that venue, and although the county education officials had definite totalitarian tendencies, this had not yet trickled down to the grass roots. Besides, many of the serious traditionalists already had their kids enrolled in church-based schools – all across the spectrum from Evangelical to Fundamentalist. So the public schools were an accident waiting to happen – and sure enough, it has now happened, much to the amazement and puzzlement of all. But if you understand the social history of the place, you understand exactly what's going on. The traditionally-minded, family-oriented people saw nothing terribly wrong with sending their kids off to the public schools, assuming that the “3 R's” were still being taught. Which they were, up to a point – and that was the point at which the agents of change... the vanguard of the revolution, of the culture war... decided to shift into high gear and start introducing... well, you know... all the garbage that is now – whether virtually or in-person, masked or unmasked -- being dumped on public school kids without the knowledge or consent of their parents. And ironically it's the very incidence of the pandemic that has helped bring things to a head. As has been pointed out any number of times, remote, at-home learning necessitated by the pandemic enabled parents to see, for the first time, what their kids were being taught in school, and the response was indignation, outrage, and an urge to not only speak truth to power but to topple that power from its throne. And this was at the same time CRT came along – along with transgender bathrooms and athletes – sex education at a fever pitch (“sex ed” has been with us for decades, but it has now reached escape velocity) – and any of the thousand varieties of race- and gender-shaming that are now everyday business in the public schools. Not to mention masks! Another way of putting it is that the pandemic was supposed to have served as a rationale and as a cover for an escalation of the culture war, in spite of any new level of awareness on the part of the parents. (Or – to put a finer point on it – no one expected the parents to notice that their kids were being brainwashed by Marxists, so when they did notice it caused great consternation and dismay. Busted! And now that sleeping giant known as “parents” is speaking up, and getting in the way, and disturbing the traditionally tranquil atmosphere of school board meetings.)

So imagine if you're a parent with kids in public school in Loudoun County. You moved there to get closer to the cornucopia of unlimited cash and jobs that is D.C. – who wouldn't? And you, innocently, expected the values and attitudes you grew up with in East Overshoe, West Virginia to be reinforced, or at least not actively opposed, by the schools you were sending your kids to. Then came the “reveal”, and now parents are standing up in school board meetings and demanding to know what in hell is going on – and the school board members just sit there stone-faced, like Soviet officials standing on Lenin's Tomb during the May Day parade on Red Square. Yes, they've been “outed”, they've been exposed, but hey – they have all the power, the law is on their side, they represent the dominant culture, and, basically, the parents can just stick it where the sun don't shine. This is their attitude. But I say that this attitude has been building up for nigh unto 40 years now; it's just recently that it has come out into the open through repeated confrontation. And, by the way, it's also a subset of the broader premise that the government owns your children, and all you are is a caretaker at best. And, that the real work – the work of creating a new type of citizen for the servile state – is done away from the atavistic and suffocating atmosphere of “the home”.

And if that weren't enough, now the school boards have called in the FBI to protect them from indignant parents. If you're looking for a Soviet Union starter kit, seek no further – this is not the first battle, nor is it the last, but it's the most consequential. The revolution has always known that the next generation is key – not the grandparents, not the parents (AKA “deplorables”), but the “young skulls full of mush” as Rush Limbaugh used to say. Win the hearts and minds of the next generation and you've won, and the old folks can go to hell; that's the attitude. And the thing is, this works! Or, it works if it is unopposed. Right now the revolution holds all the cards... it has all the political power... it has most (but not all) of the guns... so prospects are not good. But to not oppose would mean to capitulate, to be less then men, less than human... and is this the legacy we want to pass on to the next generation? I fervently hope not.

To paraphrase an old political saying, as Loudoun County goes, so goes the nation – if people do not speak the whole truth to the real power. If they do and fail anyway, it will usher in a long night, and many of us may not live to see the dawn. The Soviet Union lasted 70-plus years before the Russians finally came to their senses and reasserted themselves as a culture – a very traditional and religious one at that. This will take patience, but it will take faith even more.

The K-12 Killing Fields

“School shooting” -- a term that appears more and more often in the headlines, almost to the point where we're tempted to say “Ho hum, another one, hope it's nowhere around here [quick check of location], things are going to hell, etc. What's for dinner?” Yes, even this – unheard of in any past era – has become almost expected, like some sort of seasonal natural phenomenon. And we get the usual hand-wringing and pointless babbling, all of which reflects an attitude of victimhood and helplessness, and a refusal to delve into the real causes. The only question that is consistently asked is the wrong one, namely: What is wrong with “our society” that “allows such things to happen” by refusing to confiscate everyone's guns? But even that is usually drowned in a sea of “grief counseling”, “healing”, “moving on”, and teddy bears.

Now, I don't mean to sound cynical; after all, tragedy is tragedy, and it happens to individuals, not groups or societies. But to remain on a superficial level and not ask the hard questions is to, basically, give up on finding answers and on really doing anything about the problem.

The most obvious question, which is begged over and over again, is this: Why schools? And, more specifically, why public schools? When's the last time you heard of a shooting at a private, Catholic, or Christian (i.e. Evangelical) school? I can't think of a single instance. Naturally enough, most of the perpetrators are themselves students (in the school in question or one nearby), though there are some exceptions. But ease of access is not enough to explain the statistics – nor is the fact that the public schools have a much larger enrollment than all other types combined. It has to be – it seems to me – something about public schools per se that invite this sort of... let's call it “rage” (and rage, as we all know (or ought to) is most commonly a result of helplessness and frustration). The shootings are typically planned, sometimes far in advance... preparations are impressively complete at times, although an escape plan is seldom included since – also typically – the perpetrator has pretty much planned to be killed in the process – to be, in effect, a martyr to his own ambiguous cause. And they all have reasons, and those reasons typically have to do with bullying, or at least having been a “loner”, albeit usually a fairly intelligent one. “Over-sensitivity” -- on the opposite end of the scale from being a bully, I suppose – is an almost inevitable trait, along with being somewhere on the Asperger's scale.

And yet the victims seem, most of the time, to be chosen at random; they are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. In other words, the perpetrator does not seek out the bullies who've been persecuting him, instead blaming the student body as a whole for, I suppose, having an “atmosphere” of bullying and intolerance (the way so many sectors of our society allegedly have an “atmosphere” of racism or sexism, even if there is no tangible evidence). There are, after all, in society at large, bullies and those who aren't bullied but who tacitly go along with bullying, i.e. either approve or don't object. (This is a phenomenon frequently discussed when the topic of Nazi Germany comes up, for example. The “silent majority” -- the great, gray middle – may not commit crimes, but they are silent in the face of crime, preferring to protect their own interests rather than “get involved”.)

But are the schools themselves bullies and persecutors? Don't they exist primarily to teach the “3 R's?” Well, no – not in our time. It's no accident that the video of Pink Floyd's song “Another Brick in the Wall” showed a parade of schoolchildren in grotesque masks filing through a dark factory and then plunging into a giant hopper – all to the tune of “we don't need no thought control”. Preparation for good citizenry is less about tangible subject matter than about attitudes and feelings – and public school teachers identify themselves as “agents of change” (and proud of it).

So perhaps the question should be not only what the public schools do on an ordinary, daily basis, but what they represent or symbolize – especially to people who prefer to “connect the dots” rather than drown their sorrows in sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll (or team sports). The school shooters may have diseased minds and twisted thought processes, but they at least get this much right: The public schools represent the Regime... “the man”... the system... and what used to be called the “establishment” before the people who used that term became the establishment. The public schools are rightly seen – and not just by the deranged – as the cutting edge of society's campaign against true freedom, true liberty, and true individuality. They are a key component of the propaganda apparatus, and the first one the average citizen is likely to encounter (unless they overdose on PBS while still toddlers). And for the “normal” among us, they are no threat, because we have already -- by the time we enter that gaping door on the first day of kindergarten – been sufficiently softened up; we have become little authoritarians. We are unlikely to rebel, except for a few pathetic gestures in early adolescence; and, most importantly of all, we are unlikely to ever question the basic premises upon which our system (political, economic, social) is based. The outlier, however, has little if anything to lose by questioning the party line... by wondering whether we all live in the “matrix”. They value their own individuality, flawed as it may be, over group identity; they are unlikely to ever become political animals or “good citizens”. And yes, the system is designed to tolerate (if not encourage) a certain small percentage of outliers; they act as a safety valve, and mostly as an example the Regime can point to and say (to all the others), “Now you don't want to be like that guy, do you? A geek, a loser, a disruptive influence? No, of course not. Now drink your Kool-Aid and be quiet.”

But then a small percentage of these alienated types – the truly wretched souls – get it into their heads that the only way to express their rage against the machine is to kill off some of its other victims, albeit the willing ones. And like terrorism, their act doesn't teach anyone anything (although it should); it just increases the sum total of fear, alienation, and insecurity in the community. And they (the perps) might say, well fine, I'm showing these people how things really are. Maybe on some level that's true, but who will argue that the lesson is worth the price?

Now don't get me wrong; it's still their fault. You can't water down evil by ascribing it to a group, or a race, or “historical grievances”. And frankly, I've never had much regard for the “insanity defense”. Doesn't it implicitly assume that most murders are committed by sane people? And can that possibly be true? I would say it's false by definition. But having said that, there are certainly environmental factors contributing to violent acts; very few are completely random. And what sort of environment have we created in our time? One where the individual feels increasingly helpless and exploited, so tries to assert himself through risk-taking and “extreme” activities, clothes, tattoos, piercings, and other lifestyle choices – anything to show that he still has some small measure of control over his own existence. (And if you want a veritable fashion show of extreme looks, seek no further than the nearest public high school.) What I'm saying is that when you have a society that exerts control over every aspect of life... that attempts to eliminate all sources of danger or hurt feelings... you're going to get a reaction. The human organism is not programmed to accept, and be grateful for, a completely stress-free existence; we crave danger and risk, and when we don't get it in the normal course of things we create it – and by doing so we, and others, may become victims.