My Old Dominion

Dear Nancy Pfotenhauer;
I am a native Virginian. I was born at home, the middle of five children and didn't live on a paved road until college. My father is a war veteran and my mother has worked as a school teacher. My high school was 800 students; the school district covered half a county and in that half we had a total of three stoplights. My brother, my sister and I would ride our bikes down our dusty little road the five miles to the closest town where we would stop at the general store to buy Cokes. The closest mall was an hour away.
This "All-American" life wasn't near Roanoke, Salem, Danville or Floyd; this was 40 miles from Washington, DC.
Northwest of there, in fact.
That would make it Northern Virginia.
And that was in 1992.
I am 27 years old.

I take great offense to your crass statement that the Northern part of my Commonwealth is any less Virginian than the rest of the state because it may have a more urbanized and diverse feel to parts of it or, as in your definition, it votes in a way you don't like. Virginia is simply a place not easily understood. We are the Mother of Presidents and yet the Capitol of the Confederacy. We have the D-Day Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. We aren't the north but we really aren't the south; we are simply ourselves. Virginia is home to the writers of the Declaration of Independence, The Consititution, The Bill of Rights and the Marshall Plan. We have the oldest legislature in the western hemisphere and we are home to "The Silicon Valley of the East". We've two NASCAR tracks and the headquarters for the Washington Redskins. We are "America": past, present and future.
And Northern Virginia has, in the past ten years, survived a sniper randomly killing us as we go about our days, anthrax attacks and one of the planes from 9/11 departing from our airport only to slam into our Pentagon. We've watched the dot-com bubble grow and burst, we've watched one of our own commit the worst sort of crime at our Commonwealth's Virginia Tech. And we have survived and grown stronger because Virginia stood with us. We might squabble with other regions of our state but that keeps us together and makes us grow, just as it did our forefathers, as it does our families.
We are The Real Virginia. Just as Roanoke, Salem, Danville and Floyd are The Real Virginia.
And your short-sighted dig at us won't do anything to change that.
You went to George Mason, you ought to know better.

Sic Semer Tyrannis!

S. Spooner