Good morning, RVA! It's 39 °F, and I think the rain is on its way out of the region. Once that happens, you can expect drier times with highs in the mid-50s and cooler-than-expected temperatures for the next couple of days.
Water cooler
Yesterday, a CDC advisory committee and the CDC proper both signed off on the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for kids aged 5–11! This means pharmacies, pediatricians, and other healthcare providers will start jabbing kids as soon as today. If you've been waiting and waiting (and waiting) to get the younger members of your family vaccinated, get thee to a pharmacy website or call up your healthcare provider to see if they've got appointments available! And remember, Kid Pfizer still requires two doses—but the doses are smaller—so you'll need to eventually make that second appointment, too.
The Virginia Public Access Project has last night's election results, if you can stomach them. Republicans won all three statewide offices and took control of the House of Delegates. Here's the Virginia Mercury's Graham Moomaw and Ned Oliver on the big-three races and here's the Richmond Times-Dispatch's Michael Martz on the House races. I'm sure you've read all the hottest takes by now, but here's mine: White voters across the state, afraid of kids learning about systemic racism (which is what the anti-CRT meme was always about), elected a bunch of Republicans specifically to build racism into our education system. What a scary and dangerous step backward. It's incredibly naive to carry on with this Pollyanna rhetoric of "Republicans want to ban Critical Race Theory, which isn't even a thing, look how logically inconsistent they are!". Republicans' anti-CRT platform is a way for them to launder straight-up racism as something folks—especially liberals—don't know how to debate. Michael Hobbes, who I've written about before, has a great thread on this and says it "short circuits our conventional way off doing politics." We'll quickly see how banning something "which isn't even a thing" turns into policy that strips rights from our neighbors and cements inequities that'll take decades to tear down. As Youngkin said in his victory speech: "We will change the trajectory of this Commonwealth on day one." Anyway, I don't feel very hopeful this morning as there are an unlimited number of mediocre rich white dudes out there willing to outwardly soften Trumpism enough to get elected while holding tight to a platform of explicitly backwards and bad policies. Expect to see a million Glen Youngkins on every ballot across the country for the foreseeable future.
Locally, though, and a total shock to me, it appears that Richmonders voted against bringing a casino to the Southside. I am kind of without words! Two quick thoughts, though: 1) Prepare yourself for a ton of articles about how the mostly white parts of town voted against the casino and the mostly Black parts of town voted for the casino, and 2) The City still—and even more so now—needs to invest tens of millions of dollars into the Southside. There was an opportunity to do that explicitly with ARPA dollars, and that opportunity is not entirely gone, but it's fading fast.
Tonight at 5:30 PM, the Richmond Land Bank Citizen Advisory Panel will hold a meeting to review two applications for the redevelopment of the Bank of American building near Six Points in Highland Park. You can read the two proposals here: a "community space, grocery market, restaurant, events venue, and farmer's market" or a site for "holistic primary, preventative care, and pharmacy services for community members, regardless of ability pay." You can, of course, leave your feedback on a form at the bottom of the previous link, or you can attend the meeting in person and give a public comment with your actual mouth.
Via /r/rva this NBC12 news cast from Election Day in 1987 when Virginia authorized a state lottery. Some strong 80s vibes and familiar faces from three decades ago!
This morning's longread
My Church Doesn’t Know What to Do Anymore
Maybe less applicable given last night, but I thought this piece in the Atlantic by a Richmond-area pastor does a good job describing the exhaustion we're all feeling after living almost two years of pandemic life.
We started to allow a little singing, with masks, but we shortened the songs to keep services brief. I trimmed my sermons to 1,000 words. For those who were uncomfortable with this, we created a separate seating area in the parish hall where masks were required, singing was prohibited, and people could watch the live-stream projected on a wall. A few families with young kids, as well as some who had other health concerns, tried that. It worked for a couple of weeks. Then they asked, “Why don’t you make the people who don’t want to wear masks sit in here instead?” If they were watching the live-stream projected on a wall, they reasoned, they might as well watch from home. I don’t know how to make this work. After a year of trying to assure people that we were still the church even when we weren’t in the same room, I don’t know how to convince them now of the importance of gathering in person.
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