Olympic champion LaShawn Merritt of Portsmouth may earn enough gold medals to fill Fort Knox. Those medals won’t carry more value than the message he imparted to Elizabeth D. Redd Elementary School students about the value of hard work. Despite how we like to think of ourselves, the U.S. work ethic is endangered. Economic insecurity and lingering job losses have delivered a body blow that undermines the American dream. Criminals—from dope slingers to white-collar schemers—have further undermined that dream by taking financial shortcuts at other folks’ expense.

From the rear of her Libby Terrace home, Cathy Hayden can see the James River view that named our city, the dock where slaves disembarked and the landing where President Abraham Lincoln came ashore days after Richmond fell to Union forces. “The people who live here feel like they are guardians of MICHAEL
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this view,“ Hayden said. To drive that point home, they invited Cynthia I. Newbille to drink in the setting during her campaign for the 7th District seat on the Richmond City Council.

No one anticipates a fleet of moving vans rolling up again on City Hall at nightfall. Still, the relationship between Mayor Dwight C. Jones and the Richmond School Board has taken a turn for the Wilder. Jones recently unveiled an aggressive school-construc tion plan that calls for an $81 million replacement for Huguenot High School, as well as money for two elementary schools and a middle school.

Columnist Michael Paul Williams’ column will resume Tuesday.

Few sights are sadder, or less attractive, than the decaying remains of a dead shopping center. Malls don’t leave a good-looking corpse. While handsome architecture, prime location or nostalgia helped facilitate the rebirth and reuse of the former Thalhimers, Miller & Rhoads and Berry-Burk department stores, the sites of two former shopping malls at Richmond gateways languish.

Federal recognition for six Virginia Indian tribes is tantalizingly closer to reality than ever. Two bills that have passed the House were approved Thursday by the U.S. Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee and sent to the full Senate, where Virginians Jim Webb and Mark R. Warner support them. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine also backs the effort and enjoys a close relationship with President Barack Obama.

Richmond, which has stopped running and hiding from a fundamental facet of its history, is poised to give birth to a slavery museum that never should have been shopped elsewhere. The Richmond Slave Trail Commission unveiled plans Monday for a slave heritage site in Shockoe Bottom that would include a slavery museum. It’s hard not to examine what has been proposed by the commission, led by Del. Delores L. McQuinn, D-Richmond, and not sense that we’re at the portal of something transformative.

Columnist Michael Paul Williams is out of the office. His column will resume when he returns.

Not all the vestiges of hate had been scrubbed away in Forest Hill Park. Uphill from where workers removed silt from the park’s lake, a crude swastika had been drawn in the center of a pathway. Nearby, a message that mixed anti-black and anti Arab racism was scribbled on a boulder. Last Saturday night, the vandals sprayed their messages—some vile, at least one incomprehensible—on backhoes and other construction equipment. One message still visible earlier this week had something to do with soap. I guess you have to speak the demented language of these folks to get the meaning.

Even if everyone had done the right thing, Loucendia Reed Lambert still might have been hit and killed by a GRTC bus. But people failed to act properly in several instances, which makes Lambert’s death all the more painful. Bus driver Teresa L. Jones did not follow GRTC policy by reporting to her employer that she had been charged with reckless driving and a seat-belt violation while driving in a private car in May.

The candidates in Virginia’s gubernatorial race keep talking about investing in education and transportation. How about investing in the health and well-being of the state’s most vulnerable residents? Virginia ranks 48th nationally in per-capita Medicaid expenditures. Our eligibility standards are among the most stringent in the nation, providing coverage to parents whose incomes after deductions are at 30 percent or lower of the federal poverty standard—less than $6,000 per year for a family of three. The national Medicaid eligibility limit is 65 percent of the poverty level.

Jokers don’t get any wilder than the one draped on the wall of a Shockoe Bottom strip club. A banner of President Barack Obama as The Joker hangs across Main Street from the Slave Trade Reconciliation Triangle, where human figures lock in a melting embrace. Reconciliation is not what MICHAEL
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comes to mind when you see Obama’s powder-white face grotesquely smeared with lipstick.

Michael Paul Williams’ column will resume Thursday.

For R. Creigh Deeds, the latest setback in his campaign for governor wasn’t so much a plot twist as a rerun. Four years ago in his bid for attorney general, Deeds failed to receive an endorsement from fellow Democrat L. Douglas Wilder. He eventually lost to Republican Bob McDonnell by a mere 360 votes. Now comes Act II of Deeds-McDonnell, and you’d think Deeds would have spent the past four years rehabbing his relationship with Wilder. But Thursday, Wilder again declined to back him.

The public housing resident received a letter in May saying she’d been picked to receive a rent-subsidy voucher. She’d been on the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority’s voucher waiting list since at least 2000 and was living with her mom. “I was glad to receive it so I could have my own place, finally,“ said the woman, who did not want her name published for fear of retaliation.