Good morning, RVA! It's 72 °F, and, along with the remnants of Hurricane Ida, cooler weather has arrived! You can expect highs in the 80s and a chance of rain pretty much throughout the entire day. NBC12's Andrew Freiden says, "This morning looks to be mainly dry but some storms this afternoon could turn severe." Tomorrow and Friday look like real stunners.
Water cooler
Oof, the Freelance Star reports that two Spotsylvania County schools have reverted to fully virtual learning for 10 days to stop the spread of COVID-19 among students. I didn't even know that was allowed under the law passed by the General Assembly this past summer. Is this a sign of things to come in the Richmond region or the result of different mitigation measures and vaccine uptake rates? We'll get to find out soon, I guess.
Yesterday, on National Overdose Awareness Day, Chris Suarez at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports on our region's spike in fatal overdoses over the past year—2,308 people in Virginia died of an overdose in 2020. That's a 40% increase from the number of deaths recorded in 2019. If you'd like an easy way to get involved, the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts provide free in-person and virtual trainings on how to use Narcan to treat a narcotic overdose in an emergency situation.
Also by the RTD's Chris Suarez, this weird story about a hastily called meeting between two City Council members and the Mayor's administration, ostensibly to talk about police morale. I think this is mostly a non-story. I did, however, want to point out that while Councilmember Trammell is quoted about having transparency concerns around canceling the meeting, the Council Clerk’s office "issued a public notice about the virtual gathering with a link to participate on the advice of acting City Attorney Haskell Brown, nine minutes after it started." Hardly transparent. I think this conversation can wait until the next Public Safety committee meeting (September 28th) or, heck, even Council's next informal meeting (September 13th).
Reader Alex sent me this event to share with y'all: Ride and Dive 2021 (Facebook), an end-of-summer challenge to ride bikes to (and swim in!) all of the City's public pools. Here's Alex: "We want to use this as an opportunity to let people know what a great resource we have in our public pools and to show that biking across the city is not as daunting as it seems—while also showing the good and the bad of our current bike infrastructure." It definitely seems like a "ride at your own risk" sort of situation, but how charming and exactly up my alley is this?? Meet up at 11:30 AM this Saturday, September 4th, at the Hotchkiss Pool for the first swim of the day.
I wish I could figure out how to link to specific issues of the RVAgreen 2050 email to prove to you that it really is the most wonderful email I get from anyone or anything related to the City of Richmond. The best I can do is this PDF, which doesn't get you any of the great links. Just trust me and sign up for the email here, and try not to die of anticipation as you wait for September's edition. While I'm thinking about it, if I were to give out awards for civic and civic-adjacent communications, I would nominate: RVAgreen 2050 for best email by a City office or department (of course), @rvah2o for best social media presence, and Councilmember Addison for best email by an elected official. I love fake awards! Who would you nominate for a fake civic or civic-adjacent award?
This morning's longread
Let’s Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem
World politics is probably the thing I understand the least, but this piece in the New York Times from Ezra Klein resonated with me. Make sure you read all the way through to the end for some good quotes from Sen. Chris Murphy about what a non-militarized U.S. presence throughout the world could look like.
To state the obvious: There was no good way to lose Afghanistan to the Taliban. A better withdrawal was possible — and our stingy, chaotic visa process was unforgivable — but so was a worse one. Either way, there was no hope of an end to the war that didn’t reveal our decades of folly, no matter how deeply America’s belief in its own enduring innocence demanded one. That is the reckoning that lies beneath events that are still unfolding, and much of the cable news conversation is a frenzied, bipartisan effort to avoid it.
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