Every weekend in good weather, the school playground behind us is used from dawn till dusk by various soccer leagues.

Every weekend, I have to call the Fairfax County Police to ask them to visit the playground/parking lot to get the boom box owners to turn them down to a dull roar. Lots of loud music and drums.

At each call, I ask the police to check whether the various vendors set up have licenses to sell food.

As the year goes on, the playground becomes nothing but dust from the overuse, dust that infiltrates all the houses around. Fairfax County taxpayers get to foot the bill every year as the county repairs this playground.

At the end of every weekend, I clean up my back yard of the cans, plastic bags, food wrappers, etc. the soccer leaguers throw around. The playground is a mess.

I also find used condoms, Mexican beer bottles, and other such items along the back fence of the playground.

Not infrequently, I have to shout at soccer leaguers who are defecating and urinating along the back fence in the bushes, just over the fence from my property. I keep my camera ready so I can get pictures of the perps but so far, I haven’t been able to get one good enough to identify the people who seem to think is is OK to do this in public.

In good weather, the school parking lot is becoming increasingly more popular with people who drive expensive cars, make a lot of engine noise, and seem to show up at very late hours. Hmmmm…I wonder what they are doing out so late on work nights?

A drive down Little River Turnpike in either direction, towards Fairfax City, or towards Alexandria, especially in front of the 7-11’s or shopping malls, is a tour along a street somewhere in Mexico. Hundreds of males in work clothing waiting for someone to hire them as day laborers.

I got a call one night from one of our daughters who was playing tennis at a local Fairfax County tennis court that a group of “ethnic” teenagers were throwing bottles at them over the court fence. When I showed up with camera in hand, they shouted obscenities at me, threw more debris, and retreated back along the path through the woods to the townhouses where apparently they live.

My kids graduated from one of the most ethnically-mixed high schools in Fairfax County. They got along just fine with every ethnic group but the Latinos who, for some reason, seemed to think it was completely acceptable to make lewd and crude remarks to our daughters as they walked from class to class. They had no such problems with the blacks, asians, or any other ethnic group. Why the Latinos? Why do they think this is acceptable?

So, Connolly wants to run on that kind of record? He’s not getting my vote. In fact, he is going to get my active and strenuous opposition. I don’t know where he lives, but I suspect it is not in one of Fairfax County’s rapidly deteriorating neighborhoods.

He’s a true liberal - his immediate interests are not being put at risk by his “welcoming” policies. We don’t need any more like him in Congress. We already have more than this country can bear.

As most folks in this region realize when they actually think it through, we all live at the “seat of government.” There are more federal employees concentrated here than are concentrated anywhere else, because this is where their job is. To work here, as we all know, we live all over the place, from Richmond and beyond to the South, to Baltimore and beyond to the north. Unlike what BRAC is doing in other parts of the country (El Paso is getting 23,000 people in at Fort Bliss, all of whom really are coming from way outside that region, most of ‘em bringing along at least two kids and at least two cars), in THIS region, BRAC is just shuffling jobs around in a giant “shell game.”

One more thing: it’s important to ANY discussion of BRAC impact here to consider that the very same BRAC law REMOVES from this region another 14,500 DOD jobs to places like Texas, Kentucky, Illinois, Ohio, etc. We can’t be concerned with how many kids BRAC will bring TO our schools without also giving equal consideration to what it will take FROM the schools - yet another point that seems to escape some people.

Don Carr, Director of Public Affairs, Fort Belvoir