Dear Members of the Legislature:

Again, for the second time in three years, you have produced utter, total, complete and miserable failure in the matter of adopting a state budget. Yours is a sorry record of ineptitude unmatched in the history of Virginia.

We want our money back. Not just the few dollars you’re spending during this extension of the legislative session. We want it all back.

Please refund your session pay and per diem immediately. You sold us an empty bill of goods. Under no pretext have you earned your pay. Please refund it forthwith.

Your performance is an embarrassment, and your manners are just as bad.

You asked for our trust, our confidence, but betrayed them both.

You should apologize.

You are irresponsible. You swore duty and fealty to our constitution, then shirked that duty and forgot that fealty.

You are arrogant and deceitful. You are two-faced. The Republicans among you are holding the state hostage to ideology. You swore ‘no-taxes-to-the-death’ but put in $8 billion dollars in new spending bills.

You owe an apology to every school child in Virginia.

You owe an apology to tens of thousands of state employees.

You owe an apology to tens of thousands of our educators.

You owe an apology to every fireman, to every law officer in Virginia. What ‘ideology’ condones pay rates for our state troopers that qualifies some of them for food stamps?

You owe an apology to the tens of thousands of folks who so ably manage our local governments. You have left them swinging. Apologize.

You owe an apology to every senior citizen, to every sick, elderly and infirm person in this commonwealth. What is the ‘ideology’ that condones the neglect of this segment of our population?

You owe an apology to every voter in Virginia.

You owe an apology to all of us, to every man, woman and child through whose veins course the sweet thrills of Virginia. Your petty gamesmanship, your pigheadedness, your pathetic ‘ideology’ is an embarrassment to all of us.

We sent you to do the business of the Commonwealth and what did you give us? You gave us a game. And strife. And back-biting.

We yearned for statesmen and parlance, and dialogue and reasonableness and we got cackling and dust fluffing and tiny-eyed, manufactured fury usually found in a poultry house.

We wanted intellect and you gave us small-mindedness that would be dwarfed by a butterbean.

We deserve better. This state deserves better.

We want to get on with our lives. We want a sense of well-being in our jobs, and in our schools, and in our neighborhoods, and in the places we call home. And we want representatives who will help us find these senses. You told us to send you, we did, and you behaved disgracefully. Now we want our money back.

We thought we were sending proud Virginians. Have you no shame?

And your so-called ‘leaders,’ those little strutting, crowing roosters? Ha! You call that ‘leadership?’

There is not one among them that would even rate a sigh or second look from the homeliest wattle-headed hen!

Now give that money back.

Barnie Day
604 Braswell Drive
Meadows of Dan, Va. 24120