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A common book for Tech and Blacksburg

By Christian Trejbal

Trejbal is an editorial writer. He works out of the paper's New River Valley bureau in Christiansburg.

Heading off to college for the first time often is a stressful experience. Unless some of your buddies from high school are going and land in the same dorm, freshmen dive headlong into a sea of mysterious strangers.

Virginia Tech tries to ease that transition as much as it can, and one innovative way it does so is by giving all new students something to share — a book. Think of it as newbie initiation but with fewer paddles, less verbal abuse and binge drinking, and more intellectual stimulation.

Read more.

Fascinating story in Monday's Washington Post on remnants of Cold War enriched uranium.

David Hoffman writes, "This was an extraordinary mission, one country secretly swooping in to another to remove the danger of nuclear materials that had been all but abandoned."

The stockpiles remain, though, supposedly better secured. Still...

We're writing our NRV Current editorial today about the polling place for Montgomery County's E1 Precinct. That's the precinct that stretches from the New River to the Virginia Tech campus and includes many dorms. Last November, voters in the precinct headed to St. Michael's Lutheran Church on Merrimac Road only to find parking problems and long lines. In hopes of alleviating such problems, voting this November will take place at Kipps Elementary School.

We'll applaud this move, especially because it will bring voting almost a mile closer to Tech students. If it works, we urge the county to continue requesting to use the new site until a permanent change can be made after the redistricting following the 2010 U.S. Census. And in the meantime, officials should look even closer to campus for a site, where the thousands of new voters reside, many with no easy access to a vehicle.

We'll also remind students who have moved out the dorms that if they are registered to vote here and want to vote in November, they need to update their addresses with the registrar's office.

This Sept. 11, I learned what it must be like for all those Baby Boomers. I remember people my parents' age often saying how they remembered exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard that JFK and MLK had been shot.  They lived through those events.  They were  immediate, traumatic things in their lives.  For me, they were always history. Important and interesting, but detached.

The Washington Post today has a story about how that is already happening with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Many teenage students today were too young then to recall much of that day and its immediate aftermath. What six year old is going to remember that the planes didn't fly for days and the nation came to a halt? As even younger people, those not yet born in 2001, grow up and attend school, the attacks will move into history. Maybe that's a good thing.  It's certainly inevitable.

But I'll be there, telling young people how I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I learned what had happened. I was sleeping in my apartment in Oregon. My phone rang, and my mother was on the line.  "You need to turn the television on now.  Then you need to get to work," she told me.  I tuned in before the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

"You're going to have a lot to write about," my mother said.

She was right.

Time to change I-81 approach

John D. Hutchinson
Hutchinson is a certified land-use planner in Staunton and a planning consultant for the Shenandoah Valley Network.

After a string of recent accidents in the Shenandoah Valley, truck traffic on Interstate 81 has been headline news throughout the corridor. The Roanoke Times ran an Aug. 1 Washington Post article ("On accident-plagued Interstate 81 in Va., fear becomes a traveling companion") that described the dangers posed by tractor-trailers. I-81 serves as a link in the NAFTA highway, a freight corridor that reaches from New York to Texas, and long-haul trucks make up an increasing share of the traffic.
Read more.

I realize by the passion in which you all have argued at length over health care reform that you have your minds made up. Not so, for many Americans, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll.

The poll found: Sixty-three percent of the public say they are “hopeful” about reform, 41 percent are “afraid” and 46 percent are simply “confused.”

Since there's an overlap , I wondered who is confused more: "hopeful" or "afraid" It seems they are equally split. The key findings of the poll are worth taking a look as it tracks the same questions from the start of the debate and since the misinformation and ad campaigns.

Virginia's plan to keep state employees, caught in a cash crunch, from heading to the corner pay-day or car-title lender appears to be helping many.

Gov. Kaine in an e-mail press release said during the first month of the pilot program, 1,310 state employees have taken out short-term loans valued at $641,657.

The process also allows for financial counseling.

The numbers show that there is -- as the predatory lenders say -- a need by people for short-term loans. And that there can be alternative programs that help people without trapping them in a cycle of debt.

Read Monday's letters here.

Nathan T. Hansard

Hansard teaches mathematics at William Fleming High School.

There have been some pretty serious charges in the media of late about goings on at William Fleming High School. Whether there is anything to them remains to be seen, and I would urge everyone to refrain from leaping to judgment before the investigation is concluded.

That said, there are three groups that should not be allowed to have their reputations sullied by this, regardless of the outcome: the central office, teachers and, most important, students.

Read here.

J.O. Ra

Ra is a professor and chairman of the Department of Political Science at Hollins University and is an adjunct professor in political science at Virginia Tech.

North Korea's Kim Jong-Il has again embarked on what appears to be his chronic course of addiction to the game of brinkmanship, this time with much higher stakes, what with nuclear tests in Kilju and a series of successive missile launches, the claim of an ICBM analog and the incarceration of the two captured American journalists. Why is Kim doing it again?

Read here.