Vance: If Not Now, When?
By Roger Vance With the dawn of each day we are all offered a fresh opportunity to chart our course,
Read moreA View from the Gap
Vance: Future-Making History
We are making history on July 1 in Hillsboro. We are also making our future. And that is something to celebrate indeed. But more than that, as we celebrate our nation’s birth and pay tribute to our democracy on this day, we are holding high an example of good governance—when a grassroots vision for the future was perceived and embraced by politicians and officials at the federal, state, regional, county and local levels.
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Vance: A Call for Rural Renewal
Loudoun County is approaching a fork in the road. The path we choose to follow, as we near the end of the second decade of the 21stcentury, will determine the future that awaits generations to come. On the horizon in one direction the outlines of some of the shapes of our future are coming into focus. But what we cannot yet see is what awaits us behind that next curve, beyond that next ridge.
Read moreVance: Diamonds in the Rough
Sometimes we see liabilities when in fact we are looking at real assets. We see something that is old and perhaps worn around the edges as old-fashioned, out of step, not up to snuff, inefficient and thus ineffective. We believe that something new and bigger must be, will be, better. When this happens, we often don’t see the treasures hidden in plain view.
Read moreVance: Recognition is the Foundation for Dialogue
I am glad the silence is in fact not deafening and that my January View From the Gap has prompted much dialogue and discussion in this newspaper and elsewhere. The confluence of recent events that prompted my commentary—anti-immigrant fervor, local Klan activity and the juxtaposition of holidays honoring Confederate heroes and civil rights leader Martin Luther King—seemed to me to beg for some contextual bearings that might help lead us toward reconciliation.
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Vance: When Silence is Deafening
The coincidence and timing of events can sometimes serve to focus our attention, heighten awareness or offer us a different perspective—and challenge us to raise our voice or to be silent.
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Vance: Building Bandwidth
As I sit in Hillsboro’s Town office in the Old Stone School to write this column, I’m marveling at the lightning-fast internet access speeds we are now getting within the landmark’s 143-year-old stone walls. And, I’m feeling confident this level of service will soon be available to all of our residents in town and in the surrounding area. A long time coming and—as with many of the challenges in this small and historic town—the internet solution has arrived with a quixotic twist, helped along by a widening bandwidth of community activism that is driving a series of exciting initiatives about to bear fruit in the New Year.
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Vance: Unburying Our Past
History’s hard reality has a habit of intruding uncomfortably to disrupt our present. Sometimes the disruption is driven intentionally as a means to incite and divide, other times as an effort to educate and reconcile. The events in Charlottesville last month were a horrific example of the former. I recently had the great honor to participate in an event in Purcellville that exemplifies the latter.
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Vance: Context Matters
Those of us living in Loudoun County in the past two decades have been witnesses to and participants in unprecedented change shaped by massive growth in population and wealth. In the face of rapid urbanization and suburban sprawl, we continue to make heroic efforts to preserve Loudoun’s rich history, conserve important landmarks and landscapes and retain a semblance of its heritage. But landmarks and landscapes are merely old buildings or places, or pretty views easily dismissed, torn down or flattened unless succeeding generations have awareness of their significance, contextual meaning and influence on their present.
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Vance: Our Own Hallowed Grounds
For many of us, summertime is the season for family reunions. Mine has gone on without interruption for 61 years, with the first 40 or so at my grandparent’s modest farmhouse, “the old home place,” nestled in a hollow in southeastern West Virginia’s steep mountains.
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