Pictures show Mr. Perriello's aides, Nicholas and Ebony
As promised, our 5th District Representative in Congress, Rep. Tom Perriello, was in Martinsville early Monday morning to meet with my business partner, Doris Berry, and me, along with many others to discuss whatever concerns we may have about anything.
Even though the announcement was buried on page 5(C) of the local newspaper we already knew that he was coming so we were there. When we arrived at 8 am, he was already there , early in fact (!) and met all of us in 10 minute increments so that we could discuss what was on our minds.
Currently we are trying to juggle selling real estate with trying to save people's homes and we hope to be able to contribute what we can in both those efforts. So far we have met with considerable resistance from lenders we have spoken with on behalf of beleaguered homeowners. The technique seems to be a rope-a-dope routine: put us on hold, make us talk with this person and then that one, promise to call us back (then they don't), and ultimately their remedy is to give the homeowner paperwork that would make the most pedantic of us shrink into a fetal position were we not just damned determined to follow the Rube Goldbergesque gauntlet of forms to the end and to get answers.
We will persevere. Our citizens are a tough group of people. Some of them may be barely literate but they are survivors and they are not stupid. While others enjoyed the fake economy of the past few years citizens here soldiered on, pretty much forgotten except for the occasional embarrasing headlines concerning, among other things: the highest unemployment in Virginia (currently 18.5%; the Henry County Sheriff and several deputies disgraced and imprisoned for various crimes; the MZM mess that tainted Virgil Goode; the Henry County Administrator embezzling over $800,000 from the taxpayers... I could go on, but I expect most readers already know all of these debacles.
People here don't even seem to react anymore to bad news and it was no shock or at least shouldn't have been to people outside our area that the economy unraveled with such rapidity. We have been there. We were the first to experience the amazing joy of free trade - our industries, primarily textiles and later furniture, were bought out in many cases, downsized and then shut down while greedy free traders without any social conscience freely chased cheap labor all over the globe, leaving in their wake workers who had no work and no prospects for finding any.
Previously the paternalistic, generational promise for nearly a hundred years had been that education was not all that important when you could get a job, buy a Trans Am, buy a single-wide, get drunk and perhaps beat up various family members, maybe do drugs, get absolution on Sunday, rinse and repeat. Once that lifestyle was gone we were given various forms of hope, but hope tastes bitter when you live on it for over twenty years without respite, as many have found when we were forgotten except during election time.
Elections are over now, except in Minnesota, so the task of repairing our economy has begun, but this time is different because we here are not alone-it now involves the entire world. Ebony and Nicholas, pictured above, were two of the people we met yesterday-gracious, kind, and caring. They took their notes on Blackberries and notepads and remained respectful and kept time so that all could be heard.
Meeting Mr. Perriello was like having someone take a psychic reading - I nearly felt he peeked into my soul and I didn't feel like I was speaking with a politician and nor did he seem anything other than completely engaged in his constituents' stories. Either he is the best politician I have ever met or he is the genuine article. His background of service more than suggests the latter and I expect he will deliver on his promise to help.
It will take all of us, however, to help him to help us. No one can do all of this alone and we are going to figure this puzzle out one person, one family at a time. And we will keep on doing this. It is what we do.
Let's get cracking... together... again.
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