Waynesboro is on the verge of voting itself out of existence if its voters put election-denying MAGA extremist Jim Wood on their City Council on Tuesday.
It’s bad enough that this Wood person is yet another do-nothing Republican who will keep our K-12 schools on the path to nowhere and doesn’t want to invest in our streets, water and public services.
The kicker is that we’d have ourselves a guy on our City Council who would view his seat on that body as a platform to play Fox News host on his weekly Facebook show.
Nobody with a dollar to invest in new business or industry is going to want to have anything to do with a city that would put a guy who thinks it’s funny that the husband of a top Democrat had his skull broken by a MAGA with a hammer on its City Council.
“The best dad joke I’ve heard in a while has been floating around today, said right before that incident, you know, Nancy Pelosi, she texted Paul to say, I hope you’re not drinking and driving. And the reply was, No, I’m just staying at home getting hammered,” Wood said on his Facebook show last week.
If you need any evidence of what kind of impact this kind of thing has on business, look at Twitter, which was recently purchased by the world’s soon-to-be-former wealthiest man, Elon Musk, who within a day of taking over the platform had run off scores of its advertisers after a single careless, tasteless tweet casting doubt on the official story of the attack on Paul Pelosi.
Wood has also used his Fox News-styled Facebook show to cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election and to indicate his support for the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump insurrectionists, which a day after the attack he then said was “fake news” and “a complete set-up.”
Companies looking to expand operations or locate regional offices have literally endless choices in terms of locations to choose from, and most have either stockholders to answer to, or at the least they want to find a hospitable place for their employees to be able to live while they do business.
Waynesboro already faces challenges in terms of the quality of life that it can offer to prospective business and industry suitors. Our K-12 education system has, for decades, languished from lack of commitment from a long line of do-nothing Republican city leaders, and we have a similar issue with a lack of commitment to our infrastructure, which is crumbling around us, and the police force, which is having to make do without a third of its workforce because we can’t figure out a way to pay people enough to want to work here.
The one advantage that we have is proximity to the burgeoning Charlottesville-Albemarle County economic engine, which gets us to the main problem with having a guy going on Facebook Live each week to joke about a guy hitting Democrats in the head with a hammer: the people wanting to be able to locate business and industry proximate to the Charlottesville-Albemarle area aren’t the kind of people who want to be in business with a guy who thinks it’s appropriate to joke about a guy hitting Democrats in the head with a hammer.
And yet here we are, on the precipice of waking up Wednesday morning with this carnie on our City Council.
I sure hope and pray that this isn’t what happens, because unlike this Jim Wood character, I actually love Waynesboro, and want to see the tiny steps in the right direction being taken the past couple of years to get us moving forward continue and grow.
We can do better than Jim Wood.
We could vote in a sentient rotten banana peel and do better than Jim Wood.
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Chris Graham
