To City of Falls Church voters: Bravo! You chose the right course for the City’s future in Tuesday’s election, and the best is yet to come.
Gone are the slippery slopes of negativity and sly pathways to discrimination, and before us are amazing opportunities for an inclusive, creative and bountiful future that residents can not only enjoy but rises as a model for all our young to go off and emulate around the world. Our outstanding students should be studying how things get done here, and the spirit in which they get done, and take that as a guide for their own futures wherever they take them.
We are pleased that Falls Church, for most of us, is not a place to hunker down in defiance of the world, to stingily fend off others, to repudiate neighborliness and compassion in favor of mine, mine, mine!
Falls Church may be small geographically and demographically, but its hearts are the size of a continent. At least we take that as an interpretation of not only this Tuesday’s City Council and School Board votes, but in many recent decisions in support of referenda to advance the City’s future and enable the optimum settings for the development and education of our young, and young at heart.
After all, what’s big by contrast given the size of our universe? Texas? A Greenland not for sale? The only thing as vast as this universe of ours, the only thing that is a match for it, is heart, and somehow it finds a way to pervade everything. So, forget the “Little” in “The Little City.” There’s nothing little about guiding the universe with love.
Everything we do should be with an eye to its cosmic consequences. To desire the good and to act accordingly with honesty, integrity and compassion obliterates all the temporal failings and ugly repudiations of such values, no matter how prevalent in our current body politic, in our current White House, they appear to be. Ours are more than American values, ours are the values that derive from the life force of the universe as a whole and that we, in our bones, know are right.
So let’s press ahead now, this election done but a big one coming in a year, to do not just the minimum on the misguided grounds that we are but “little,” but on a trajectory of the “called,” to design creative new solutions to housing, to uplifting the disadvantaged and the marginalized to a new standing of enfranchisement and engagement in our social fabric, to think outside the proverbial box, to do amazing things we didn’t think possible.
Our new high school project is an example of this. Who would have thought this could be done, paid for by fresh, creative new economic development tying the City’s stake to those of Virginia Tech, WMATA and perhaps other players like the Beyer and Federal Realty properties?
