Afghans arrived near a small Virginia town, exposing two different versions of America https://t.co/BgVtxoNzrS
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) September 25, 2021
The Washington Post once again demonstrating why local reporting is important:
BLACKSTONE, Va. — Mayor Billy Coleburn finished his burger, pulled out his cellphone and braced himself for the two dozen Facebook notifications and slew of unread messages waiting for him. “Let’s see how bad they are,” he said, sitting in a booth at the Brew House on Main Street, in the town of roughly 3,600 people in rural southside Virginia.
The rumors seemed to be evolving each day, ever since an international humanitarian crisis made its way across the world and then landed in Blackstone’s backyard. Just over a mile from the town limits, past a thick tree line and behind the heavily guarded gates of Fort Pickett, there were now more Afghan evacuees than Blackstone residents.
Roughly 5,900 men, women and children who had escaped the chaos and the Taliban in Kabul were now sleeping on cots in barracks and tractor trailers at the Virginia National Guard installation, one of three military bases in Virginia where Afghans are being temporarily housed before getting resettled in communities across the United States.
The makeshift village was largely invisible to anyone beyond the gates of the military base, as were the Afghans within it. They were nowhere to be seen in the town of Blackstone, but somehow seemed to be everywhere too, as their recent arrival transfixed the community.
Coleburn watched as his town seemed to crack into two different Americas: one, welcoming the evacuees with floods of donations and compassion, and the other, apprehensive and suspicious, believing the mere presence of the foreigners posed a threat to the town’s safety. A recent arrest of one Afghan evacuee at Fort Pickett on charges of grand larceny, after he was accused of stealing a car on base, had only inflamed their suspicions…
Coleburn, who is also the owner and editor of the local newspaper, the Courier-Record, says it broke the news in late August that Fort Pickett would likely be called on by the federal government to host thousands of Afghans who left in the wake of the Taliban takeover.
Now the front page of his weekly newspaper was splashed with a bold red headline, “Afghan Numbers Rise,” next to the mug shot of the arrested Afghan man, and its pages had suddenly become a sounding board for the split opinions on welcoming their new neighbors…
Blackstone, a diverse community where roughly half the residents are Black, is also in a deeply conservative area of Virginia, with a big military and veteran population. Men and women in army green fatigues from Fort Pickett can often be seen walking along the pristinely kept Main Street, passing recently remodeled storefronts. As he walks to the Brew House for lunch, Coleburn picks up a stray chewing gum wrapper on the sidewalk and throws it in a trash can. “Drives me crazy,” he says.
The town, he says, has taken immense pride in being the home of Fort Pickett, Blackstone’s major employer. So when he heard some complaints after the base was selected as a housing location for Afghan evacuees, “I said, folks, you can’t sit here and say, ‘We love Fort Pickett,’ and then all of a sudden we get a mission and go, ‘Oh hell no, we don’t want that.’”
Still, to Coleburn, Fort Pickett did seem a bit of an unlikely place to bring thousands of evacuees with critical needs, many arriving with little else than the clothes they were wearing. “This is in a rural area with not a lot of infrastructure. The nearest hospital is 35 miles away,” Coleburn said, and as an added challenge, “a bunch of people are wide-eyed and watching Fox News. Ain’t a lot of MSNBC ‘Morning Joe’ fans around here.”…
Rebecca Freeze, an Iraq combat veteran who lives about 10 miles east of Blackstone in an unincorporated community called Darvills — “a suburb of Blackstone,” she jokes — had been to Fort Pickett after the arrival of the Afghans and had seen what was happening in Blackstone. And what she witnessed had, at least on one occasion, brought her to tears.
Her friend thought to start a Facebook page for donations and volunteers to help their new neighbors but got “some kickback from people who knew her that wasn’t positive,” Freeze said. “So I told her, well let me start the Facebook page, because after 27 years in the Army, let ‘em come. As a female combat veteran I can get PMS and PTSD at the same time.”
So she started the Facebook page — Helping Afghans in Southern VA — and instead of any negative reactions she got a rush of eager volunteers, turning the page into a mosaic of unique contributions. A local artist used proceeds from the artwork he sold to buy soccer balls for Afghan kids. A chiropractor’s office started collecting toys. Renee and David Cannon, the owners of a clothing store on Main Street that had gone out of business, donated culturally appropriate merchandise to the Afghans.
Renee Cannon, 65, said her father, Adren Quest Hance Sr., sponsored two young Vietnamese refugees — and later, the other family members of those refugees — to come live with them in their small town in Hanover County after the Vietnam War, helping them find jobs and learn English and build new lives. When thousands of Afghans began arriving at Fort Pickett, she wanted to live up to what he had taught her years before…
Live Free Or Die! For Men Only? (Women’s March)
SpaceUnit
The polarization of American society is not just extreme. It is ongoing and accelerating to a nearly exponential pace. I look at those on the right and wish to purge myself of everything I see in them. It actually makes me a better person.
Okay, there’s still PLENTY room for improvement, but you get the point.
TheOtherHank
Fort Pickett? There’s an excellent candidate for a name change. I suggest Fort Thomas, after the Union general from Virginia. He was not a traitor.
Geminid
@TheOtherHank: The army will be renaming all those forts named after Confederate generals. I bet North Carolina’s Fort Bragg will be renamed Fort Ridgway, after WW II Airborne commander Matthew Ridgway.
SpaceUnit
@TheOtherHank: I seem to recall reading that the Pentagon was in fact planning to begin making those name changes. I don’t remember what the time line was going to be.
ETA: Oops, Geminid beat me to it.
debbie
@SpaceUnit:
Actually, no. Every wave of immigration in this country’s history has suffered discrimination. Eventually, they assimilate and are eventually tolerated; and when the next wave arrives, they’re the ones who most abuse the new arrivals, as if they had forgotten their own treatment.
And on and on. Same as it ever was.
dmsilev
@TheOtherHank: On the other hand, he did do an excellent job helping the Union win at Gettysburg.
SpaceUnit
@Debbie: This is true, of course. But I’m talking about a moral divide that goes far, far beyond the issue of immigration.
Geminid
@SpaceUnit: I remember reading an article in Army Times about the process. It sounded like it would be slow, but sure. I think there are around eight forts that will be renamed.
debbie
@SpaceUnit:
I think that same lack of morality has also always been around and in all parts of life. If there is a difference, the difference is the speed and anonymity of social media. Trolls would be extinct by now if communication were face to face.
Mike in NC
@SpaceUnit: Congress assembled a committee to review possible name changes to occur by 2023. In Virginia, Forts Lee, A. P. Hill, and Belvoir also need to be renamed. Not affected are state National Guard facilities which are not directly controlled by the DoD.
SpaceUnit
@Geminid: There will be committees and panels and of course plenty of red-state politicians hoping to bog down the process.
Phylllis
@Mike in NC: I believe Lee and Hill will be renamed, along with Pickett.
Starfish
@debbie: This is not true, especially for middle eastern people.
My parents came here in the 1970s. The wave of Islamophobia that came after 9/11/2001 has the first generation children of immigrants who would have been co-opted into whiteness definitely identifying themselves as not white.
SpaceUnit
@Debbie: I suppose so. I mean, I really hope you’re right but it’s just that I used to have republican / right wing friends. We’d jostle over politics a bit but ultimately find some other sort of common ground.
Not anymore. Today the divide is just too extreme. It’s epistemic and all-consuming. Maybe I’m just feeling bleak today.
WV Blondie
I know this is off-topic, but WaPo has posted a HUGE, EXPLOSIVE investigation – joined by news outlets around the world – that’s bigger than the Panama Papers.
I applaud the Washington Post for excellence at all levels of reporting. (Doesn’t mean they get everything right, but damn, they’re outstanding.)
Chetan Murthy
@Starfish: That wave of islamophobia was, IIUC, also one of the major causes of the shift in Asian-American political affiliation generally from GrOPer to Democratic [as I’m sure you know, Muslim-Americans also used to be a Republican constituency, but switched to Dem due to the (ahem) treatment they received at the hands of GrOPers post-9/11] There are still subgroups (like Islamophobic Hindus [spit]) but I think we all learned our lesson, watching what the GrOPers did to Muslim-Americans. Father Niemoller would at least not be too dissatisfied.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
The mayor seems like a decent guy. In a way, the story gives me some hope. You’d think that in a place like that, it would be 80-20 against the Afghan refugees. That it’s split down the middle, maybe we can take some hope from that.
Geminid
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.): The white people in that area of Southside Virginia probably vote 75-25% Republican. The reporter did not ask, but the mayor and the 27 year Army veteran may well have voted for trump. I know people like that.
MisterForkbeard
@WV Blondie: A huge, explosive investigation into…. what?
Is this the Pandora Papers?
Lyrebird
@TheOtherHank: Hey, the others have more details, but I like your suggestion, esp because there have been other Thomases in VA politics since, so it would be pretty popular.
JWR
@MisterForkbeard: Yes, it would appear so.
Bill Arnold
@WV Blondie:
Yes. Impressive leak, that will do some damage to the rich and corrupt. Here’s the piece from the org organizing it:
Pandora Papers: An offshore data tsunami – The Pandora Papers’s 11.9 million records arrived from 14 different offshore services firms in a jumble of files and formats – even ink-on-paper – presenting a massive data-management challenge ((October 3, 2021, Emilia Díaz-Struck et al)
lowtechcyclist
@Mike in NC:
Belvoir?? Really?!
I mean, I lived near Fort Belvoir for about 20 years of my life, and I had no idea there were any negative associations with the name.
Googling tells me the name is from the antebellum Belvoir Plantation that used to occupy part of the site, but that’s pretty thin stuff. It’s a very pleasant name that has no obvious connection with the traitors of 1861-65. Leave it like it is.
Bill Arnold
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
The framing in the RW media was in part how Horrible Biden Was to Betray our Afghan Allies (should be all caps but sorry can’t do that), coupled with the sort of fear mongering about refugees that evil people like Stephen Miller were driving. So it was mixed enough that people thought for themselves a bit about it. There’s also the memory of the Vietnamese boat people in older people. Many of those refugees settled in Virginia; not sure if nearby.
J R in WV
@WV Blondie:
But no clue as to the subject of the investigative scoop? Thanks~!!
Chetan Murthy
@J R in WV:
this seemed like a dead giveaway.
debbie
@Starfish:
Well, 9/11 changed immigration, period. You can’t really compare previous and post-9/11.
debbie
@Bill Arnold:
Odd that the map showing leaks about politicians has zero for the U.S. ? On the other hand, Putin won’t be able to wave this away as fake news. ?
Steeplejack (phone)
@lowtechcyclist:
From the Wikipedia article:
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us
A lot of Trumpers help refugees get settled in America. How they square the cognitive dissonance between who they support politically and that particular type of good work, I have no idea, but I’ve seen it happen.
My mom is thankfully not a Trumpet.. she’s a centrist Democrat who thinks David Brooks has a point a little more often than I’d like, but she helped a Burmese family get settled in my home town (Grand Rapids, Mi) a few years back through her church. Said church has plenty of Trump fans and some of them have also helped immigrant families get settled. They also pack meals for underprivileged school kids and other good works.
So as much as we’d like to believe that every Trump supporter is all bad, it’s not always the case. They’re all partly bad because he certainly doesn’t have a charitable bone in his body or any redeeming qualities whatsoever. He’s a cancer on the nation and causing massive harm to our democracy. Anyone who supports him is at least partly warped in a bad way because they’re down with that stuff, but some of them aren’t necessarily bad to the core in all aspects of their lives.
Chetan Murthy
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us: With respect, I still can’t forgive them. Sure, they are charitable in their private lives. But their votes destroy the ability of others to be charitable [by impoverishing them] and weaken the most important mechanism we have for helping the less-well-off: our government.
It’s like the really nice guy [he really was very nice to me, and IIRC even had gay friends] who was a RWNJ and eventual Trumper. Doesn’t matter *how* nice to me he was: he voted for people who wanted to see me and mine in camps or dead.
So again, with respect, they can all DIAF.
ETA: I still miss our friendship: I used to say I was Boswell to his Johnson. Or Watson to his Holmes. I’ve cried tears over irremediably-broken friendship. But he can still DIAF.
ETA2: Every one of those Trumpers who helped to settle refugees, voted for a man who cut our refugee acceptance quota to the bone. What those people are, is simple hypocrites: voting for the beatdown, and when the come upon a victim, making a big ruckus about helping them to the hospital.
oatler
Is this the Valachi Papers? Help me, I need a reference.
Chetan Murthy
@oatler: Pandora Papers, maybe?
Another Scott
@Chetan Murthy:
The “we did nothing wrong, this is just normal business” spin machine is already starting up.
Pandora Papers: Secret tax havens of world leaders, celebrities revealed
https://p.dw.com/p/418SW
This is my shocked, shocked face.
Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
Wapiti
@Mike in NC: Fort Belvoir is named for a plantation that was located there, so not named for a traitor. But if they change it, oh well.
Ah, I see upthread that it was named Belvoir so that it wouldn’t be named for an honorable general. It’s still a pretty name for a place.
sdhays
@Chetan Murthy: This is the thing about Trumpism. Before Trump, you could pretend that people who vote for Republicans just don’t pay attention or have different beliefs about the structure of government, but Trump was and is such a viscerally loathsome character, he has clarified things.
If you voted for Donald Trump, there is something deeply broken and evil in your soul. Or you’re just incredibly fucking stupid (I assume there are a few of those people, just like the guy in 2004 who was quoted as considering the environment as his top priority and was therefore going to vote for W.).
Morzer
@Wapiti: Apparently the plantation burned down in 1812 and was never reconstructed, so no connection to the Confederates. That said, it was built by slaves and worked by slaves, so there’s a case for giving the fort a different name. Fort John Brown, maybe.
Chetan Murthy
@sdhays:
100% with both of these thoughts. Before the 2016 Apocalypse (and the 2020 Pandemic), I used to have friends who were RWNJs. B/c they were always decent in their personal lives to all around them (including me), I allowed it. In the case I cited, they guy was really a nutter (“Chet, what’s the big deal about a few stress positions?”) so I had to insist on no political conversations, b/c he was so ….. horrifying, the way he’d talk. But after the Apocalypse, *no more*. No. More.
I’m just trying to live up to Father Niemoller’s teachings.
Divf
@lowtechcyclist: I grew up there in the 60s – Dad was stationed at the Engineer School there for most of the period 1960-1973 when he wasn’t in Korea or Vietnam. Reverting to Fort Humphreys would not such a bad move, except there is a Camp Humphreys in Korea.
brantl
@lowtechcyclist: Named for a plantation and it isn’t an unpleasant association? What have you been smoking? Tires?
brantl
@Steeplejack (phone): They should rename it A.A. Humphrey. That would show the assholes. I hope all of them get renamed for Union generals.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us
@Chetan Murthy: I get it and I’m not saying we should totally forgive or forget. I think of them like mini Darth Vaders… mostly gone but maybe there’s a sliver of something in there still that can be used to turn them from the dark side. Most of them are so addled by misinformation it’s hard to see how to bring them back, and they bear more than a little responsibility for letting themselves be mislead so easily for sure.
Ksmiami
@SpaceUnit: because post Trump, to be a Republican is to be a fully garbage, amoral piece of shit.
Ksmiami
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us: it doesn’t matter if they do some good… Hitler was nice to his dog
Geminid
@brantl: I read that the Corps of Engineers headquarters complex at Ft. Belvoir still bears Humphries’ name. After his Civil War service, Humphries became the Army’s Chief Engineer.
The Corps built a reservoir a few miles up Accotink Creek from the base, Lake Accotink. It was a ten minute bike ride from where I lived as a kid, and I used to fish there.
Steeplejack (phone)
debbie
WaPo’s Annie Linsky needs to work on her comedy stylings:
I’d like to see Jen address at her next press conference.
lowtechcyclist
@brantl:
We’d have to rename about half of everything south of the Mason-Dixon line if that’s your criterion.
And when you have to go digging to even find that connection, put me firmly in the “really, why bother?” school.
A lot of people are really into the Civil War, know all the battles, know all the generals. Their names are still very much alive in people’s minds, and the importance of NOT honoring people whose primary claim to fame is their involvement in that rebellion is clear and obvious.
But there were plantations all over the South, and few of their names ring any bells with people who don’t live in the immediate environs of where they used to be, such as in the localities that carry their names.
It quite frankly seems silly to me to spend a lot of energy purging the collective memory of memories that have already largely faded into oblivion.
AxelFoley
@lowtechcyclist:
You really said this shit.
Citizen Alan
@lowtechcyclist: For some reason, this reminds me of the fact that I was in grad school when I finally found out where the name “Ole Miss” came from. Like 99% of the people who hear it, I’d always assumed it was simply a Southern derivation of “Old Mississippi” instead of the name used by slaves to describe the Master’s wife! Sigh.
AxelFoley
@Wapiti:
It’s named after a fucking plantation. That’s like naming a base after a concentration camp.
eclare
@brantl: I know it will never happen, I want Fort Sherman.
The Thin Black Duke
Slavery really is White America’s rabbit hole. The further you fall down, the more layers there are, and the shit is connected to everything.
Eunicecycle
@Citizen Alan: I was today years old when I learned this.
eclare
@Citizen Alan: I grew up in the south, I knew what it meant long before college. As do most in the south.
eclare
@The Thin Black Duke: What you wrote is so true.
Chetan Murthy
@lowtechcyclist:
So, I’ll related my version of this. About a year ago, it made the news that the SF school district board was going to rename some schools. Schools named after Lincoln and Feinstein (but also some that were obviously objectionable). Let’s skip past whether it happened, b/c not relevant.
And then it hit me: “It’s not about you, is it?” What I think doesn’t and shouldn’t matter. B/c the parents of these children, these families, are people of color, and the way they see history may be different from the way I see it. And now we come to the nub of it: the crux of the biscuit!
The reason people get up-in-arms over these renamings, is that they think their opinion should override. But if we’re actually living in a democracy, then that’s not how it works: everybody’s opinion counts, and that means that sometimes, your and my opinion won’t win. And maybe, just maybe, we should inquire respectfully into why those other people think the way they do.
We might learn something. I sure did.
Chetan Murthy
@AxelFoley:
Word.
eclare
@Chetan Murthy: Very well put.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us
@Ksmiami: Yeah but not every German was Hitler. I’m not saying these people are wholly good or even mostly good, but we’re stuck with them so hopefully some are redeemable.
cain
@Bill Arnold: That whole thing reminds me of the “pro-life” movement where the fetus is the highest most precious life form in all the universe. But as soon as it comes out it is something that must be starved and their parents shamed. So too it seems that Afghanis are precious beyond believe as long as they are in Afghanistan, but lo they come here – they are looked upon with suspicion.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@AxelFoley: Yet another reminder of how ingrained this shit is. Imagine not seeing anything wrong with this. Like the base got named after a fucking amusement park. Damn!!
Chetan Murthy
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us:
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us:
If you read:
Gellately: _Backing Hitler_
Eric A. Johnson: _What We Knew_
(and exp) Goetz Aly: _Hitler’s Beneficiaries_
you may change your opinion. Also
Susan Nieman: _Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil_
and Milton Mayer: _They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45_
Sure, not every German was Hitler. But these books make clear just how complicit basically all “Good Germans” were. The Germany of today arose because the WWII generation started dying-off. When (finally) crazy uncle Heinrich kicked the bucket, finally all the grand-kids could start talking openly about what happened back then, and it is from that freedom, that came the Germany we know today.
ETA: the latter two books make it quite clear just how unwilling any of the surviving Germans were, to admit any sort of complicity or even that the Nazi regime had been bad. Impressive blame-shifting, really. I remember especially a quote from Mayer: “It was the best period of our lives.” SMDH.
cain
I would like to rename all the fort names after popular characters from TV. For instance, Fort Belvoir should be Fort Belvedere or possibly Fort Benson after Benson DuBois. I’m easy.
lowtechcyclist
@AxelFoley:
@The Thin Black Duke:
And that’s the problem. Especially in the Southeast, but the rest of the country isn’t exempt. Belvoir was the seat of the Fairfax family after whom Fairfax County is named. (And obviously they were slaveowners.)
Seriously, I’m trying to think of a rule that would put Belvoir on the ‘change the name’ list without putting so many names on the ‘change the name’ list that you’d be basically destroying the continuity of place names over a good part of the country. Feel free to prove me wrong.
Ksmiami
@The Thin Black Duke: The original sin forever and ever..
Ksmiami
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us: be careful there… most of the decent Germans from that era were killed off as Hitler eliminated any perceived political challengers.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: A good reason to put Fort Belvoir on the name change list is how it got that name. The place started out as Fort Humphries in 1918, and was renamed in 1935 because segregationist Virginia Congressman Smith wanted to erase the Yankee general’s name.
Geminid
@Geminid: Correction. The general’s name was Humphreys, with a y.
phdesmond
@eclare:
i checked in a street atlas to make sure, and found that there is no Sherman Street in Atlanta.
phdesmond
@Chetan Murthy:
you made me think of hot cross buns!
James E Powell
@Chetan Murthy:
There’s a pretty good BBC documentary series called The Nazis: A Warning from History in which many Germans participate. They all talk about what a great time it was. Some were children, some were direct beneficiaries of the Holocaust. The smiles, the glow in their eyes. It’s disgusting.
Mike G
@Chetan Murthy:
Muslim-Americans also used to be a Republican constituency, but switched to Dem due to the (ahem) treatment they received at the hands of GrOPers post-9/11]
I knew Palestinian bodega owners proudly telling me they were voting for Trump before the 2016 election. WTF? They ended up moving back to the Middle East last year (for political or personal reasons I do not know) so I never got a chance to discuss if they regretted it.
Kosh III
“We don’t want the Irish”