I know I talk shit about Virginia, but...

I moved down here in '78 when my mom remarried.

We lived in some shitty, ghettoesque places (looking your way,
1978-1980 Penn Daw Garden Apartments, Rt.1 Alexandria - thanks
for letting little kids get jumped by multiple older thugs).

But this is a beautiful state.  I miss the way it was.

I don't post much anymore because I know I drink and post
(mostly ignorantly).

It's sad to watch The Old Dominion lost to an endless,
relentless cadre of carpetbaggers.  (Technically, I'm one of
those carpetbaggers).

Long live Real VA!

Are you drinking now?

Drunk.

But yes. I love Virginia. My family was born and raised in rural south central va (prince Edward, charlotte, lunenburg counties) and I moved to the area a few years ago. Wouldn't change it. 90% of Virginia is still good.

I loved Virginia.  There used to be a time I was proud to say I was from VA but not any more.  I've lived in VA my entire life and am ashamed of what The Old Dominion has turned into.  This state has so much natural beauty and probably the best "four seasons" in America but its politics make it a tough place to want to stay in any longer.  Perhaps common sense will come back into popularity in this state and it will again be the great place it used to be.


ETA: 11-3-21  That glimmer of hope has arrived!!!

Virginia get a black eye from the Byrd Family political organization.

I spent my growing up years in Virginia.

We have some advantages.

The schools had a strong 'Track System' embedded for many years.
I managed to skip grades all the way to high school.
I freaked out the IHM Sister that was head of the match department at O'Connell HS.

I had managed to do four years of math in the 8th grade.
She skipped me to a Junior level math class in Freshman year.

I showed her the Solid Geometry book I had worked though i the 8th grade.
She put me in Algebra-Trig  with a bunch of Juniors.
I proceeded to get straight A's and freaked out the Juniors by consistently being the
high score in A-TRig, than Analysis, then BC calculus my junior year.
I had nuns with PhD degrees in Chemistry and Calculus.
the guy I had for Freshman Biology had retired from Howard University as the department head in biology.

Doctor 'K' was a different sort of guy.
A very well educated black man that did not take any crap in class.
He had played semi pro soccer in the Caribbean Islands.

He used a night worm preserved in Formalin as a pointer in biology class.
The nun used to announce class scores on tests as she handed them back.
Five on the AP test. Only one other person did nearly as well.
He had taken all sorts of public school summer classes while attending
Catholic Schools during the rest of the year.
We both learned very well.
I ended up at VPI, he went to one of the Texas State Universities.

He did ME, I did EE.
I learned how to work the Laplace Transform, first absolute solutions, then with numerical approximations.
I could do numerical solutions for the Maxwell Equations for Electromagnetic Fields.

At the time there was no real access to Community College
(NoVaCoCo, Northern Virginia Community College) for high
school students, so no math my Senior Year.
I still found a college text book from Va Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
State University, VPI&SU) at the time and studied on my own.
A nice Calculus professor graded my tests for me, and seemed to thoroughly enjoy
the time  spent talking with him when I had questions.

The track system died soon after VA schools integrated.
After the "Massive Resistance" crap of refusing to integrate the schools the track system
was killed off as being 'discriminatory' towards minorities.

FPNI in Hometown.  

I moved here when my dad retired from the Navy. I'm happy that I spent my 20s to see the last half of this great state. Now in my 30s, it's sad to see it decline. I do hope that someday people will "wake up" and see the Virginia that was is better. But I doubt that. The left wants people so dependent on the state, and education will be thrown into the trash because the government wants to control what they teach and how they teach it and to make sure it is taught as early as possible. Someday those kids will grow up voting blue without knowing why and just assume that whatever they were told must be true. So unfortunately we lost big and that seems to continuing at least for the next generation or so. We'll all be long gone before we see any hope of this state returning back to what it was. There will be empty homes, schools will have high drop out rates, people will be dependent on the government for everything, and nobody will have a job. The bad news is that when we get really old, chances are these people will be the one to take care of us and like the UK health system, you better believe someday our medicare will be extremely selective in how they treat people of certain age because they want you to die if you don't vote for them.