“Nothing hurts any more, until the consequences crash through the screen. Immersed almost permanently in virtual worlds, we cannot check what we are told against tangible reality. Is it any wonder that we live in a post-truth era, when we are bereft of experience? … The shrinking of our contact with the tangible world has taken place at a speed to which we struggle to adapt, with consequences we cannot yet grasp.” – George Monbiot in his essay, “Screened Out”
The Democratic Party’s primary for governor is June 13th, and you need to register to vote by May 19 to cast a ballot. You need not register Democrat to participate. Former Congressman Tom Perriello and current Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam are the candidates, and it’s now attracting national attention. Following the unprecedentedly heated campaign for chair of the DNC, the Democratic primary for governor will be the next darling of national media outlets tracking the struggle for power between the neoliberal centrists and the democratic-socialist-leaning progressives, aka Hillary supporters versus those who supported Bernie. But as Perriello himself has pointed out, this is lazy. Such comparisons place this contest of significant consequence in a disembodied context, as if this were merely a debate of liberal philosophy.
I disagree with Monbiot; some of the effects of the isolated withdraw he so well describes are readily visible here in Virginia’s state politics. If they happen at all, conversations too often happen several degrees removed from the actual real-world result of policy, which lets these policy makers off the hook too easily. For instance, here’s Northam’s official rationale for supporting the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley Pipelines:
[T]he lieutenant governor supports the pipelines as long as property rights, safety and the environment are protected.
They are not being protected and this is obvious to anyone who has taken the time to meet some of the people whose property this pipeline is being built on. Private land is being surveyed and prepared for construction under federal eminent domain laws which are more lax than Virginia eminent domain laws, and under either set of laws, “the spirit of eminent domain is to require a landowner to sacrifice their individual interest in order to serve the greater public good,” as former utilities executive Tom Hadwin describes it.
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