Special to the Mirror. This was sent as an advertisement, however the Mirror does not charge for information, so we opted to just run this as an Op-Ed.

Anyone who has been following local news over the last several years has to be familiar with the epic zoning fight waged in Northampton County from 2013-2016. Citizens fighting for the sustainable future of our unique quality of life, thanks to new Board of Supervisors members and legal challenges, staved off a horrific assault from a small handful Of industrialists, poultry advocates, and real estate interests who wanted to develop this county into an Ocean City or Virginia Beach model with a twist of the poultry expansion being waged in Accomack County.

The 2015 Board Of Supervisors election settled the debate over who was the “vocal minority” or “the silent majority” and those pushing the exit from the stated will Of the people as embodied in our ZQQ2 were rejected in a landslide victory for those wishing to save this county from the same mistakes being made in many other localities throughout Virginia and the nation.
But now, that small handful is at it again. …and are attempting to rewrite our protective 2009.

Comprehensive plan to accomplish the same goals Of their 2014 zoning which would have left us With incinerators, poultry houses, industrial uses “by right” (no notice to neighbors) and a full scale commercial development of the Route 13 corridor (the only permeable soils that recharge our drinking water).

This new attempt to regurgitate and then gnaw at the core of a very rotten zoning apple is being orchestrated by the “Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee” and you can read who they are and what they plan by reading the “CPAC FINAL REPORT” on the county’s Planning Department’s website. It is also being choreographed by Jacque Chatmon’s Planning Commission (PC). [Read more…]

Special to the Mirror by Charles Landis

Since publication of my book, An introduction to the History of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, I have often been asked if I grew up on the Shore and/or if my ancestors were among the earliest settlers. I confess, no one from my family, over the past 400 years, ever settled on the Eastern Shore until I became a come-here in 1992.

However, I can claim a linkage to the Eastern Shore that is not Native American but preceding that of the earliest settlement families. In researching my family history for a book I am currently writing, I discovered my roots are, perhaps, unique among all who have ever settled here:

In 1641, my ancestor, Colonel Thomas Ligon, at age 18, came to Jamestown with his cousin Governor Sir William Berkley. (There are six different connections between the Berkley and Ligon families including Governor Berkley’s grandmother, a daughter of Sir William Ligon, Earl Beauchamp, of Madresfield Court, England).

Governor Berkley was a favorite at the court of King Charles II and was granted his request he be appointed Governor of the colony of Virginia. Thomas Ligon was the son of the second grandson of Sir William Ligon and thus had very little chance of receiving any of the appointments given to nobility. He had, however, received an inheritance and Governor Berkley invited him to come with Berkley to Virginia. Thomas Ligon believed this was the only way to make a place for himself since it was not possible in England. [Read more…]

Special to the Mirror, reprinted with permission from the Wall Street Journal By Jonathan Sacks. Given what I see as our recent ‘state of things’, this time of year, the words of Lord Sacks seem so viable and true, “At the heart of this vision is what the post-Holocaust writer Viktor Frankl called our ‘search for meaning.’ The great institutions of modernity were not constructed to provide meaning. Science tells us how the world came to be but not why. Technology gives us power but cannot tell us how to use it. The market gives us choices but no guidance as to which choices to make. Modern democracies give us a maximum of personal freedom but a minimum of shared morality. You can acknowledge the beauty of all these institutions, yet most of us seek something more.”
“Meaning comes not from systems of thought but from stories, and the Jewish story is among the most unusual of all. It tells us that God sought to make us His partners in the work of creation, but we repeatedly disappointed Him. Yet He never gives up. He forgives us time and again. The real religious mystery for Judaism is not our faith in God but God’s faith in us.”
“This is not, as atheists and skeptics sometimes claim, a comforting fiction but quite the opposite. Judaism is God’s call to human responsibility, to create a world that is a worthy home for His presence. That is why Jews are so often to be found as doctors fighting disease, economists fighting poverty, lawyers fighting injustice, teachers fighting ignorance and therapists fighting depression and despair.”

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The Ten Days of Repentance are the holy of holies of Jewish time. They begin this Wednesday evening with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and culminate 10 days later with Yom Kippur, our Day of Atonement. At no other time do I feel so close to God, and I suspect the same is true for most Jews.

These days constitute a courtroom drama like no other. The judge is God himself, and we are on trial for our lives. It begins on Rosh Hashanah, with the sounding of the shofar, the ram’s horn, announcing that the court is in session. The Book of Life, in which our fate will be inscribed, now lies open. As we say in prayer, “On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who will live and who will die.” At home, we eat an apple dipped in honey as a symbol of our hope for a sweet new year.

On Yom Kippur, the atmosphere reaches a peak of intensity in a day of fasting and prayer. Repeatedly we confess our sins, whole alphabetical litanies of them, including ones we probably had neither the time nor the imagination to commit. We throw ourselves on the mercy of the court, which is to say, on God himself. Write us, we say, in the Book of Life.

And at the end of a long and wrenching day, we finish as we began 10 days earlier, with the sound of the ram’s horn—this time not with tears and fears but with cautious yet confident hope. We have admitted the worst about ourselves and survived.

Beneath the surface of this long religious ritual lies one of the more transformative stories of the human spirit. The sociologist Philip Rieff pointed out that the movement from paganism to monotheism was a transition from fate to faith. By this he meant that in the world of myth, people were pitted against powerful, capricious forces personified as gods who were at best indifferent, at worst hostile, to humankind. All you could do was try to propitiate, battle or outwit them. This was a culture of character and fate, and its noblest expression was the literature of Greek tragedy.

Jews came to see the world in a completely different way. The book of Genesis opens with God making humans “in his image and likeness.” This phrase has become so familiar to us that we forget how paradoxical it is, since for the Hebrew Bible, God has no image and likeness. As the narrative quickly makes clear, what humans have in common with God is freedom and moral responsibility.

The Jewish drama is less about character and fate than about will and choice. To the monotheistic mind, the real battles are not “out there,” against external forces of darkness, but “in here,” between the bad and better angels of our nature. As the religion writer Jack Miles once pointed out, you can see the difference in the contrast between Sophocles and Shakespeare. For Sophocles, Oedipus must battle against blind, inexorable fate. For Shakespeare, writing in a monotheistic age, the drama of “Hamlet” lies within, between “the native hue of resolution” and “the pale cast of thought.”

The trouble is, of course, that faced with choice, we often make the wrong one. Given a second chance, Adam and Eve would probably pass on the fruit. Cain might work a little harder on his anger management. And there is a straight line from these biblical episodes to the destruction left by Homo sapiens: war, murder, human devastation and environmental destruction.

That is still our world today. The key fact about us, according to the Bible, is that uniquely in an otherwise law-governed universe, we are able to break the law—a power that we too often relish exercising.

This raises an acute theological dilemma. How are we to reconcile God’s high hopes for humanity with our shabby and threadbare moral record? The short answer is forgiveness.

God wrote forgiveness into the script. He always gives us a second chance, and more. All we have to do is to acknowledge our wrongs, apologize, make amends and resolve to behave better, and God forgives. It allows us to hold simultaneously to the highest moral aspirations while admitting honestly our deepest moral failings. That is the drama of the Jewish High Holy Days.

At the heart of this vision is what the post-Holocaust writer Viktor Frankl called our “search for meaning.” The great institutions of modernity were not constructed to provide meaning. Science tells us how the world came to be but not why. Technology gives us power but cannot tell us how to use it. The market gives us choices but no guidance as to which choices to make. Modern democracies give us a maximum of personal freedom but a minimum of shared morality. You can acknowledge the beauty of all these institutions, yet most of us seek something more.
Meaning comes not from systems of thought but from stories, and the Jewish story is among the most unusual of all. It tells us that God sought to make us His partners in the work of creation, but we repeatedly disappointed Him. Yet He never gives up. He forgives us time and again. The real religious mystery for Judaism is not our faith in God but God’s faith in us.

This is not, as atheists and skeptics sometimes claim, a comforting fiction but quite the opposite. Judaism is God’s call to human responsibility, to create a world that is a worthy home for His presence. That is why Jews are so often to be found as doctors fighting disease, economists fighting poverty, lawyers fighting injustice, teachers fighting ignorance and therapists fighting depression and despair.

Judaism is a supremely activist faith for which the greatest religious challenge is to heal some of the wounds of our deeply fractured world. As Frankl put it: The real question is not what do we want from life but what does life want from us.

‘You may have been a success, but have you also been a blessing?’

That is the question we are asked on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. As we ask God to write us in the Book of Life, he asks us, what have you done with your life thus far? Have you thought about others or only about yourself? Have you brought healing to a place of human pain or hope where you found despair? You may have been a success, but have you also been a blessing? Have you written other people in the Book of Life?

To ask these questions once a year in the company of others publicly willing to confess their faults, lifted by the words and music of ancient prayers, knowing that God forgives every failure we acknowledge as a failure, and that He has faith in us even when we lose faith in ourselves, can be a life-changing experience. That is when we discover that, even in a secular age, God is still there, open to us whenever we are willing to open ourselves to Him.

—Lord Sacks, the 2016 Templeton Prize laureate, is the former chief rabbi of the U.K. and the Commonwealth. The most recent of his many books is “Ceremony and Celebration: An Introduction to the Holidays” (Maggid Books).

Over the last eight years, during the reign of Marxist and Alinsky-ite community organizer Barack Hussein Obama, who in a speech to the African Union in Ethiopia on July 28, 2015, stated “I also stand before you as the son of an African and Africa and its people have helped shape who I am and how I see the world,” whatever in the end that might mean for the values he personally espouses, since he never took the trouble to enlighten us verbally as to what his African values actually were and how they affected his performance and judgment as U.S. president, keeping in mind that the first time he took the presidential oath, he flubbed it and had to do it over, not an auspicious sign at all, so he could only be judged in that regard as to what his values were by his actions, like starting a civil war in Syria so he could remove someone he didn’t like and replace him with someone who would be like putty for Obama, Marxism is about revolution for change, afterall; and especially after his chosen successor Hillary Rodham Clinton got her mouth into the recent presidential circus we all had to endure, hearing Hillary croaking out over and over again, “that’s not who we are,” meaning her followers, while denouncing everyone who didn’t kneel before her alter a “basket of deplorables,” and even up to the other day, where I heard Trump muttering something about, “our values,” without saying what values he was talking about, I have been wondering what these politicians are on about when they talk about “our American values,” which they never ever try to define.
[Read more…]

Special to the Mirror by Northampton County School Board Member Randall Parks

Recently an article was published in the Mirror concerning teacher retention which generated many responses from the citizens of Northampton County. It was indeed refreshing to see the interest and passion demonstrated by our citizens. Unfortunately, many of the responses demonstrated a lack of information and knowledge which bedevils those of us who are intimately involved in establishing and carrying out the policies and programs in our system.

As stated in the article salaries are indeed a large reason for teachers leaving our system to move to a more lucrative position. I know this fact first hand as my daughter taught at Northampton for several years and left for a $10,000 raise in Norfolk. Our HR representative attends job fairs in which the school districts on either side of her offer salaries from seven to ten thousand more as a beginning salary and even more for administrators. Many times our notifications for openings as teachers or administrators are either unanswered or answered by only one or two applicants. Many of our hires are those applicants who were unable to secure jobs in better paying areas and as a last resort took a job in our system until they were able to get a position anywhere else. With such a differential in salaries we are “behind the proverbial eight ball” with nothing we can do to change this fact. After the change to an elected school board, we the newly elected school board, desperately wanted to give a raise to the teachers who had not had a step raise for several years. Each of the three years we have been on the board through some creative budgeting by our finance department and our superintendent, we have been able to give a step raise to our teachers. Unfortunately, we are still well behind the other school divisions in our region as we are the lowest paying one. You must be asking yourself why this fact is true. Since 2009 the state of Virginia has lowered its commitment to public education from 36% of the state budget to 29%. This decrease has cost our system almost a million dollars a year which in the case of smaller systems such as ours has proved well, nothing short of catastrophic. In addition, and perhaps even more important is the method used by the state to determine those monies distributed to each school division. The formula used is called the composite index and according to this formula Northampton County is richer than Accomac County, Virginia Beach, Newport News, Gloucester, Harrisonburg (home of James Madison University), Lexington (home of VMI and Washington and Lee University) as well as many other localities in Virginia, thereby resulting in less money per student than those “poorer” systems. This “fact” is surreal to those of us entrusted in providing the best education we can for our children. Anyone with half a brain can see how ludicrous this situation is and wonder how can the composite index be so wrong and worse yet continues to be used in its present form to literally cheat our children out of the education they deserve. [Read more…]

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the alt-right organizer of the Charlottesville rally Jason Kessler has been an activist in the Occupy movement and a past supporter for President Obama.

“At one recent speech in favor of Charlottesville’s status as a sanctuary city, Kessler live-streamed himself as an attendee questioned him and apologized for an undisclosed spat during Kessler’s apparent involvement with Occupy. Kessler appeared visibly perturbed by the woman’s presence and reminders of their past association.”

Kessler’s apparent “red-pilling”, changing to a rightward shift in his views miraculously happened in just November, 2016.

“Relying on familiar tropes of ‘white genocide’ and ‘demographic displacement,’ Kessler has sought to parlay his status as a lonely dissenter in the “Capital of the Resistance” into notoriety on the larger far right circuit by organizing the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.”

The mercenary nature of Kessler’s involvement, combined with Governor McAulliffe’s stand down order poses more questions than answers. The way the Boston Police handled a crowd of over 40,000 the following weekend makes the Governor’s explanations that much more questionable.

Opinion: The fabricated protests around 130-year-old Confederate memorials is beginning to smell of an agenda, one that the band the Pixies might describe as “ten million pounds of sludge from New York and New Jersey”. In Norfolk, at the city council meeting that decided the fate of “Johnny Reb”, there were very few Virginia accents in the room.

This firestorm, so close to November elections raises a few eyebrows. Mr. Northam may assume, probably accurately, that the Eastern Shore is dyed in the wool and he can throw a large swath of the culture under the bus in order to secure the liberal Northern Virginia vote. It may, however, also be a signal to the electorate that it is time to be more critical about who we feel would best represent the interest of the region.

Special to the Mirror by Paul Plante

Doesn’t that sound like something Shakespeare might have said in one of his plays back when?

And what a time this is to be alive if you like drama, and plenty of it, and let’s face it, we’re all living lives of quiet desperation as someone once said who was said to know such things, and so we all crave drama to get us through the otherwise boring day!

As to drama, and plenty of it, for one thing, as I write these words, one form of language using antiquated words such as I use in here is dying, and a new language based on some form of gibberish called TWEETERESE is being born and is becoming used by the masses on a large scale, with some 328 million TWEETERESE speakers as of last count, while OLD AMERICAN, the language used in here more and more is being relegated to cultural backwaters, as the government itself and the courts all modernize based on an initiative launched by American president Donald Trump, who can actually speak in TWEETERESE, as well as compose presidential orders and missives and proclamations in it, and go over to TWEETERESE themselves so as to not lose a dime of the federal money they would have coming to them to convert. [Read more…]