Let the good times roll in the City of Falls Church!
In our 33 years, this newspaper has never been more optimistic about where the Little City is heading than now. In another 33 years, perhaps, it is reasonable to expect that the current population of some 14,500 will double, and by even more if things can be worked out with neighboring Fairfax County to annex some more land much as happened in the last decade that really marked the takeoff point for the current economic boom here.
If people are better off here, financially, then we should not be beating ourselves up about that fact, we should be viewing it as a challenge to get the most out of everyone to the good of all. In the Italian Renaissance, it was not argued that only the lower or middle classes should be afforded the benefits of the transformative art, architecture, music and invention that propelled western civilization. On the contrary, the issue was how to translate wealth, or as we prefer to call it, weal, as in “common weal” or “commonwealth,” into a universal gain, a good for all. Such “weal” is, after all, what good government strives for in a democracy to the benefit of all the people.
Yes, the issue is how to deploy “weal,” what to do with it. In Falls Church, resources are put to this end in education, safety, sustainability and quality of life. They are not squandered in dead-end things, such as splurging on extravagance for its own sake, but in those that make things better for those coming after us, and for the world writ large.
The responsibility this presents for our citizens is this: how to take what you have been blessed to attain and put it toward good things for our future and for the wider world. Do decisions about this stand the test of self-conscious scrutiny? The old adage is that the more you give, the more you have. In this region of the world, this is not always popular. We are in the wider orbit of an ethos which eschews such approaches and instead celebrates “Greed is good.”
At the local level we can see the substance of politics much more clearly. It is not Left Versus Right at this level, it is General Good and virtue versus selfishness and indifference. For those who seek to do good at this level, our enemies are not so much massive authoritarian dictators and monoliths, but stinginess and self-centered short sightedness. These are the things that divide us.
Growth and The Good go hand in hand more clearly at this level. We are not here to covet what we have, but to join it to a wider purpose and thereby make the whole world a better, more survivable and enjoyable place for everybody. The more lives the better, the more resources at our disposal the better, the more laughter and love, the better.