It’s on! Zombie tag will invade Ghent on Friday night

I’ve been looking forward to Friday for more reasons than I can count. There’s a full moon; my horoscope says I’ll wow people today and feel sensational; this afternoon I’m closing on a house in Colonial Place; and most importantly, the zombie apocalypse begins tonight.

Everyone surely has heard by now of Survive Norfolk, the gigantic game of zombie tag that will take place in Ghent shortly after sundown. The overwhelming public response to this event has been one of the most heartening signs of civic health I’ve seen in Norfolk since I moved here two years ago. More than seven thousand people signed up on Facebook as attending—so many in fact that the organizer, Whitney Metzger, has had to raise thousands of dollars to pay for security and insurance.

Now that that money has been raised (kudos to Whitney Metzger and everyone who has helped in this endeavor), the event will proceed, albeit with a cap of 1500 participants. But not everyone is happy. Here is my favorite comment on the Pilot’s zombie coverage: “Zombie getting tired of poseur zombies. … Zombie ask what next; maybe people and their tasty brains will want to help society.” And here is my other favorite: “No wonder the Chinese are way ahead of us.”

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli at ODU

Ken Cuccinelli will be at ODU on Friday 5 November, courtesy of the College Republicans. No word on what he’ll be saying or doing, but the Facebook announcement advises that “appropriate semi-formal attire is required.”

I’ve got an inside scoop about the probable reason for his visit. In the recent state of the university address, President John Broderick  announced that “an effort to identify the multi-faceted impact, climate change and rising sea levels will have on our region. Led by former President Jim Koch and oceanography Professor Larry Atkinson, the project will pull together the university and region’s foremost experts to find solutions to the anticipated effects on our economy, housing, ports, and infrastructure.”

There’s a meeting about this on Tuesday 26 October, just ten days before Cuccinelli arrives in town. It’s hard to say what will be more offensive to the attorney general: that professors and administrators here would dare to discuss climate science, or that folks can attend the climate-change meeting without even wearing semi-formal attire. In fact there seems to be no dress code at all: attendees in blue jeans and T-shirts won’t even be turned away.

My initial guess was Cuccinelli will sic his office on anyone who attends, but then I considered that the ODU administration is too smart to fall for that. Now I’m thinking this framework-for-climate-change business must be an intentional salvo aimed at Cuccinelli. One way or another, there’s more here than meets the eye, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea for Whitney Metzger to raise thousands of dollars for security and insurance for the event just in case.

How old will you be when the American war state goes down?

Excellent but depressing essay on the forever war.

Don’t blame me for gay teen suicides

One of the more despicable editorials I’ve read.

Smith chides Scott proposal to scrap Bush tax cuts

It’s cute how a Republican is bothering to run against Bobby Scott.

Efforts to prosecute Blackwater are collapsing

According to a law professor quoted in this Times article, “The battlefield is not a place that lends itself to the preservation of evidence.”

MacArthur Center ban on teens is mixed bag

A relatively reasonable Pilot article on the MacArthur Center’s ban on unsupervised teenage shoppers has led to the ugliest batch of reader comments I’ve ever seen—and that’s saying a lot. The same folks who belittled the Survive Norfolk article above are lurking here too, decrying “kids today” and claiming that we should be able to shop without “that kind of thing.” The average comment boils down to something along these lines: “When I was young, we respected our elders, but these days kids drink, do drugs, steal, and intimidate everyone. Thanks, MacArthur Center, for keeping them at home playing video games.”

The article has been followed up in the Pilot by a Roger Chesley column suggesting the mall will eventually regret the ban. He argues against it partly on an economic basis, and he’s right: once today’s teenagers reach the age of majority, they’ll remember how they were treated by the MacArthur Center and go elsewhere. He also points out the inherent unfairness of the ban, and reports that the mall’s manager claims “that no specific incident led to the policy.” These are a few of many reasons the ban is wrongheaded and malicious.

We live in a town where decades of shortsighted city planning have contributed to a dearth of “third places,” the public spaces where residents can mingle and congregate outside of home, work, or school. Downtown Norfolk is one of the few locations in the region where a whole neighborhood is both walkable and accessible by multiple bus lines. But if one is downtown after dark, there’s the MacArthur Center and little else besides a few bars and restaurants. Teens, whether or not they have cars or can drive, are asked to head ten or twenty miles down the highway to one of the “other malls” that the Pilot’s petulant commenters suggest.

I wasn’t around for the MacArthur Center’s construction, so I’m unfamiliar with the politics of how the deal went down, but just looking at a satellite map of downtown shows that the city gave its developers lots of leeway. The mall takes up nearly a third of downtown Norfolk. Even if it’s owned by the Taubman Company, it’s been and is being subsidized in a number of ways, so the whole city should have a say in how it operates. To date, though, the city hasn’t cared enough to try to stop the ban; in fact many outright support making a de facto gated community out of a third of the downtown grid.

This ban stands out as the epitome of Norfolk’s unwillingness to provide its citizens the basic expectations one has in a major city. Again and again and again it’s been documented that a serious brain drain results in the “best and brightest” leaving Hampton Roads and never wanting to return. The problem is at its most profound in the 18-25 age group: many of the smartest and most educated local residents reject their hometown in favor of cities that are more progressive or “livable.” This is a shame, and I hope we can turn this trend around; still, if I were a teenager in Norfolk, I’d be tallying the days until I could get out, and the public support for this ban would be a main reason why.

It Gets Better: Google Employees

The It Gets Better Project keeps getting, um, better. This link will direct you to a YouTube video of Google employees telling gay youth that after high school life really does improve. Now that It Gets Better has gone viral, hundreds of these videos exist. I can’t imagine they’re not making an important difference. Even Hillary Clinton has filmed one. (Note to Secretary Clinton: it might get better more quickly if your boss quit acting like a Pentagon lackey.)

It’s hard to watch some of the videos without crying tears of joy at the mere existence of these lifelines to gay teenagers from people who have made it through the crucible of adolescence. Thanks to this project, which is one of a million reasons the tectonic plates are shifting toward justice more and more quickly, things are getting better for gay kids who are at risk. They’re getting better despite a Virginia attorney general who encourages discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. They’re getting better despite a state-level defense-of-marriage law so strict that Virginia’s same-sex partners can’t even safely name each other in their wills except as “friends.” And they’re even getting better despite a White House that will stop at nothing to try to halt the gay rights movement in its tracks.