Good Morning, RVA: Back to our regularly scheduled programming
Kind of.
Photo by: gregorywass
Good morning, RVA! It’s 49 °F and rainy. It’ll continue to rain through the morning and possibly into the afternoon, at which point the sun will come out and dry up any remaining traces of yesterday’s random snow day.
Until then, Chesterfield, Hanover, Henrico, and Richmond public schools are all operating on a 2-hour delay.
Water cooler
Katy Burnell Evans has a good recap of where we stand with fully funding Richmond Public Schools. Turns out, we stand in a grim, grim place. But, while bumming us all out, she mentions Garet Prior and Richmond Forward, who’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting to keep folks informed about school facilities and funding. Do this now: Sign up for their email updates! You’ll instantly be 100% more informed than you were 30 seconds ago!
While the RTD has run a double handful of articles condemning the Virginia Senate for banishing reporters to the second-floor balcony, Peter Galuszka wrote this great article for Style Weekly about the Virginia Capitol Correspondents Association’s membership requirements. To get direct access to Virgina’s legislative sausage factory you’ve gotta be a member of the VCCA, but their membership requirements are written to basically exclude any media who can’t afford a full-time state government reporter. So unless you work for the short list of Virginia’s newspapers and TV stations, you’re probably out of luck.
Right now, the Fan is slushy, wet, and gross–but yesterday it sure looked great! Heaton Johnson snapped a few photos for us that definitely made me wish I hadn’t stayed inside under a pile of blankets all day.
The Grammys happened last night, which apparently is a total blind spot for me. Here’s what the Internet has told me that I missed: Johnny Depp is in a band with Alice Cooper and Joe Perry, TSwift won her second album of the year for 1989 and gave a rad acceptance speech, Lady Gaga got a David Bowie tattoo, Kendrick Lamar continues to do amazing things with live performances, and whoa Alabama Shakes. You can see all the winners right here.
Sports!
- Rams host one of the other rams (the ones from Rhode Island) tonight at 7:30 PM. Watch on CBSSN.
- Spiders head down to Davidson for a 7:00 PM tip. You can watch on ASN.
- #7 Virginia handled N.C. State, 73-53.
This morning’s longread
The Conversation I’m Tired of Not Having
So what is to be done? The pessimist in me says nothing can be done. Polite society has walled itself off and policymakers are largely indifferent. Better funding for schools is and will remain elusive, because middle class and wealthy people have been conditioned over the last 35 years to think of themselves as taxpayers, rather than citizens. They consistently oppose higher taxes–especially tax expenditures for programs for “the other.”
Not about Richmond, but might as well be. Also. if you want to throw up, read one of the responses he got to this piece.
This morning’s Instagram
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Ross Catrow
Founder and publisher of RVANews.
Notice: Comments that are not conducive to an interesting and thoughtful conversation may be removed at the editor’s discretion.
Thanks for sharing “The Conversation I’m Tired of Not Having” and the horrific response letter that teacher got. The first sentence in that post resonated with me because it is basically something I said out loud while lobbying the VA general assembly just last week.
The sentence from the article: “I want to tell you a secret: America really doesn’t care what happens to poor people and most black people. There I said it.”
I was surprised at my own belief of the statement as soon as I said it, but knew it to be true in all of its simplicity. That the reasons I was using to try to convince my lawmakers about the cause I believed in wouldn’t work, because at the core, I knew that what this author said was true–most of these old, rich, white men didn’t care about poor people, especially women.
I’m not sure what to do with this realization. But glad people are talking about it.