April 12, 2006

Published in Wake Forest, NC

            They will be the only high schools in the county without a stadium, and the parents and students will rightly feel shortchanged. Yes, they will cost $2.5 million each now – but parent and community pressure will surely demand the school system go back and build the stadiums later, and at a higher cost.

            I will vote for the bonds because we have two grandchildren in the school system and because we all benefit when the people in our town, county and state are well-educated.

* * * *

            The favored knife in our kitchen was handed down from my grandmother, Susie, and she had it for at least 40 years, using it to such effect that it developed a graceful elongated S-shape. But she did not discard it because Susie was a saver, someone who did more than pinch a nickel. She scraped that bison off, dressed it out and at the end boiled down the hoofs and horns for glue.

            We have been using it for another 40 years, and it has become just a shadow of its former self. An inch of the tip snapped off about 10 years ago and this week another half-inch broke off.

            The knife is like our personal and collective memories: we keep losing some. Or as Spike Lee said when asked if he had Alzheimer’s, “I have sometimers. Sometimes I remember and sometimes I don’t.”

            Our collective memory has many gaps, I was reminded this week while rereading Timothy Tyson’s “Blood Done Sign My Name.”

            What North Carolina child is taught that in 1864 General George E. Pickett, whose men charged across the valley and up the ridge at Gettysburg, hung 22 young men in Kinston because they were loyal to the United States? Who learns about the Heroes of America, also called the Red Strings, about 10,000 Tar Heel men in a secret society that fought guerrilla-style against the Confederacy?

            We honor Zebulon Vance, a Confederate war hero elected governor in 1862, who also took pains to distance himself from the CSA government, quarreling repeatedly with President Jefferson Davis, but we do not hear what Vance said about the war: “The great popular heart [of North Carolina] is not now and never has been in this war. It was a revolution of the politicians and not the people.”

            People who are in an uproar about immigration have conveniently forgotten the bitterness, the hostility, the discrimination and the segregation practiced against almost everyone whose ancestors did not step onto Plymouth Rock seconds after the Pilgrims.

            Why do you imagine the Ku Klux Klan found followers all across the North during the 1920s? Why do you think groups, collectively known as the Know-Nothings because no member would acknowledge knowing anything, were so politically potent in the 1850s, proposing only native-born Americans be eligible for office and a 25-year waiting period for citizenship?

            Why was it so easy for the U.S. government to wrench Japanese-American families from their homes and businesses and keep them locked in internment camps during World War II?

            If everyone whose parents/grandparents/great-grandparents faced discrimination after arriving from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia or China recalled their family’s stories and applied the moral to today’s discussion, it would be much more civilized and humane.

* * * *

            Raleigh is straining to lure homeowners, renters, shoppers, businesses and investment in its downtown.

            There is a solution: remove all the parking meters, dismiss the parking police and invite people to come.

            The parking situation – fines if you are a minute late or park more than 18 inches from the curb – dissuade many of us from even venturing into Raleigh to see what is available. But then, much of the Raleigh mindset is based on the principle of the stick rather than even a curl from a carrot. From here, we certainly see the stick.