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Would you invest in Downtown Fayetteville?

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Tuesday, 07 May 2024

Written by Ron Brewington

Ron Brewington, Fayetteville native, husband, father, entrepreneur and successful businessman has been my friend for over four decades. Below is the second article he has submitted to Up & Coming Weekly in 28 years.
I know this because he was the first to write for this newspaper when I created it in 1996, 28 years ago. He loved the idea of a publication promoting and showcasing the Fayetteville community. His article immediately captured the hearts and minds of the entire Fayetteville community, catapulting him to near-celebrity status, resulting in interviews and guest appearances on local radio shows.
His topic? Fayetteville is NOT FayetteNam. In his article, he effectively articulated the many reasons the Fayetteville community needed to actively initiate an aggressive awareness campaign to eliminate the negative FayetteNam moniker so it would not be detrimental or impair the progress, development, and growth of the Fayetteville community.
I credit Brewington for bringing that invaluable awareness to the forefront of community leaders. Fast forward 28 years: Mission accomplished. We need many more concerned and courageous citizens like Ron Brewington who are willing to speak up for the community they love, if for no other reason than to let our city and county elected officials know that we are aware of their actions and they are not operating with impunity.
Thank you for reading Up & Coming Weekly.
— Bill Bowman

I saw a sign in front of a building on Village Drive: "Coming Soon — Lumbee Bank."
I've heard that Lumbee Bank would be vacating their downtown location. This may confirm that rumor.
This is not good for downtown. Small start-ups come and go, but losing banks on high-profile corners is unsuitable for anyone in the downtown community.
Mayor Mitch Colvin's rooftop restaurant atop Lumbee Bank took forever and a day to open and was only open a few months before closing. Not good.
Huske Hardware House Restaurant has shut down. They'd been there for quite a while. To lose one of downtown’s longest-tenured and significant businesses is devastating.
Across the street, the Prince Charles property is again for sale. Fayetteville City's parking deck next door took over five years to build, and still isn't complete. It isn't ADA-compliant, and the building has no elevator. In addition, there was supposed to be a hotel on top. What's up with that?
And where is the high-end steak house that is supposed to be at the Prince Charles? How do a baseball stadium, a museum and a performing arts center function and succeed without a hotel, bank and sufficient parking?
The success of downtown communities depends on the success of other merchants and businesses. Companies don't locate where parking decks aren't finished or where corporate visitors have no place to stay. It is a lousy location when their staff has to leave the downtown community to get lunch.
Our financial security with the baseball stadium was that the Astros had a long-term lease to pay off the note. I haven't read it, but I bet the city has violated many parts of that lease, giving the Astros the right to walk away.
We need a vibrant downtown. It is essential to the entire city and county. Downtown is a city's image. Downtown Fayetteville has more tenants leaving than entering. The only industry that is growing in downtown Fayetteville is the homeless. A few blocks away is a multi-million-dollar investment to build a resource center for the homeless, while just a few blocks in the other direction is the Department of Social Services. DSS is responsible for that population. Insist that they do their job.
What's the problem? I don't think there's a community commitment to a master plan. I don't even think there is a plan. We're throwing pasta onto the wall, hoping something sticks even if it conflicts with other plans.
Except for Up & Coming Weekly, newspapers and objective journalism no longer exist in a way that holds our elected official's feet to the fire. For the most part, local radio no longer exists, and with over 330,000 residents, Fayetteville community has no local TV station.
No one is asking questions, and our leaders are all too happy to tell us nothing. They have gerrymandered city council districts that give us just one person to hold accountable. I don't know the answer to this BS, but I do know that, Fayetteville should be the third or fourth largest market in North Carolina. Our demographics could make us a desirable and entertaining city with great earning potential. We've squandered many opportunities.
When our young people leave for school, they don't come back. Is there any wonder?
We have a huge investment in our downtown. It is OK to make mistakes, but our leaders need to identify and acknowledge them and get them back on track.
WE CANNOT AFFORD TO FAIL. If we fail now, the decay of downtown Fayetteville will be inevitable.

— Ron Brewington
Fayetteville, NC

(Photo: An aerial photo shows the businesses of Downtown Fayetteville. File photo)

Politics should be less important

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Tuesday, 30 April 2024

Written by John Hood

It might sound odd to hear this from someone who’s been writing a syndicated column on politics for nearly four decades, but politics has become vastly more important in our lives than it should be.
Virtually every decision we make in our ostensibly free society is now subject to review, refinement, and reversal by some government agency. We can’t buy or consume what we want, hire whom we want on mutually agreeable terms, inhabit and dispense with our property as we want, or make critical decisions about our families’ education, health care, and financial planning without the intrusion of governmental “helpers.”
I’m not an anarchist. Modern civilization and human progress are impossible without governmental structures.
When administered effectively and constitutionally, governments promote law and order, adjudicate disputes, and ensure the provision of certain public goods that for technical reasons can’t be delivered purely by voluntary means.
That’s not to say human beings can’t live without government. For most of the history of the species, humans lived in small hunter-gatherer bands, consisting largely of relatives, that came together only occasionally to swap, socialize, and find mates. In some places, these social bonds developed into tribal confederations and, later, into chiefdoms.
But not until a few thousand years ago did true states appear in an anthropological sense — social institutions that established a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory,” as Max Weber famously put it.
The invention of the state and the invention of cities were interrelated events. The word political comes from the Greek polis, for city-state. Civilization both creates and requires politics in the sense we use the term today.
Humanity can live without government, as I said — but not long or well. Hunter-gatherers may have had more free time than we do, but they starved, shivered, and died early and violent deaths at far higher rates, too.
Tribes and chiefdoms weren’t much more conducive to human flourishing. Even early civilizations, built around cities and states, increased the total population and scope of human communities without necessarily raising the standard of living for the average person very much for very long.
What ultimately did the trick was the marriage of industrial capitalism and constitutional, liberalizing government during the 18th and 19th centuries, beginning in Northwestern Europe and North America and then spreading elsewhere. The public sector played a critical role in this gigantic and unprecedented leap forward in human wellbeing.
But it did so precisely because its power was constrained by law and custom.
In the American context, at least, modern conservatives should be understood as conserving a set of truly revolutionary ideas and practices. One such idea is that government is both necessary and dangerous. As James Madison put it in a post-presidency speech in Virginia, “the essence of government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.”
By “power” here, Madison and other Founders meant coercive power — the capacity of government to force people at the point of a gun to comply with its commands. Whether republican or tyrannical, all governments possess such power. Again, it’s necessary. But it ought to be used sparingly, only for tasks that can’t be accomplished through market transactions, charitable activity, or simple persuasion.
That’s the case that my colleagues and I at the John Locke Foundation, and at other like-minded organizations in North Carolina and beyond, seek to make every day in our programs, articles, interviews, and public appearances. Our work is usually devoted to specific applications.
We advocate liberating North Carolinians to make choices for themselves about how best to educate their children, improve their health, pursue economic opportunity, and build the families and communities within which they live their lives.
Whether the stakes in a particular dispute we discuss seem big or small to you, keep mind that the broader principle couldn’t be more momentous: everything need not be political. Minimize government. Maximize freedom.

Editor’s Note: John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His latest books, Mountain Folk and Forest Folk, combine epic fantasy with early American history (FolkloreCycle.com).

This, that, and the other: Clean water and the happiness of the U.S.

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Tuesday, 30 April 2024

Written by Margaret Dickson

It really is a big deal.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Michael Regan, and Brenda Mallory, Chair of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, made it their business to come to Fayetteville earlier this month to announce the “first-ever national, legally enforceable drinking water standard.”
The new enforceable standard comes in part because of the enormous outcry from southeastern North Carolina. That outcry comes largely from Fayetteville and south along the Cape Fear River, contaminated by DuPont and its successor company, Chemours.
They discharged PFASs, an acronym for an unpronounceable chemical cocktail, into the river for decades, contaminating the drinking water of thousands of North Carolinians with a product they called GenX.
Southeastern North Carolinians, however, are hardly the only people affected by PFASs, commonly called “forever chemicals,” because unlike other substances, they do not break down easily or quickly. They are associated with negative health effects such as low birth-weight babies, increased cancer risks, and high cholesterol levels. PFASs have been found beyond the Cape Fear River, including in Jones and Chatham Counties as well as in many other parts of the nation.
Regan is well-versed in the forever chemical issue, as his stepping stone job to the EPA was as North Carolina’s Secretary of Environmental Quality. In an interview with the Raleigh News and Observer, he stressed that dealing with PFASs is just getting started.
In addition to an enforceable drinking water standard, the EPA is looking at a national testing strategy to determine what levels are clean enough to protect human health, and ways to force polluters to pay for cleanup.
This is part of what our federal government is supposed to do—look out for our well-being. These are not just forever chemicals. They are forever ours.
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At first blush, it sounds a bit wacky—the World Happiness Report, published since 2012 and including more than 140 nations. What does it mean if a country is “happy” and how can we tell? Does it matter if citizens are “happy” if their country is at peace and they have what they need?
Whatever national “happiness” means, we in the United States are apparently not so happy. Our country fell out of the top 20 happiest nations, now ranking 23rd. Our neighbor, Canada stayed in the top 20, but both North American first-world countries had dramatically lower happiness scores for younger people than for those 60 and over. That cannot bode well.
John Helliwell, a founding editor of the World Happiness Report, says their lack of happiness is “not a matter of education, income, or health."
It’s what they think about their lives so it’s a mood question. They’re hearing news that makes them unhappy and they may be sharing it…”
Let’s make today a “Cheer Up a Young Person Day.”

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Baby Boomers, including this one, have seen a lot in our increasingly long lives. Remember the shocking and sometimes violent social upheavals of the 1960s? Remember Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon and his unforgettable words, “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind?”
Life before the Internet that put information—and disinformation—at our fingertips?
All of that notwithstanding, never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine we would be watching a former United States President face trial on felony charges with more felony trials in courtroom queues.
Holy moly!
No wonder we dropped out of the happiness Top 20.

The real story of Snow White

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Tuesday, 23 April 2024

Written by Pitt Dickey

Both of my readers have seen Disney’s Snow White. Today, we rip the lid off Disney’s prettified version. The original Snow White story by Grimm is actually grim. The real story has it all: wicked step mother, fried animal entrails, dwarves, attempted cannibalism, stereotypical women’s work, necrophilia, and red-hot iron dancing shoes. Let us begin.
Once upon a time, a beautiful Queen gazed out her window at falling snow. The windowsill was painted black, the white snow glistened, and the Queen pricked her finger causing three drops of bright red blood to fall on the snow. The Queen had a sudden desire to have “a child as white as the snow, as red as blood, and black as the window frame.” She soon became pregnant, delivering a little girl she named Snow White. The Queen died in childbirth as was the custom in those days. Her King remarried a beautiful woman who became Snow White’s wicked stepmother.
The new Queen had a Magic Mirror into which she daily chanted: “Mirror, mirror on the wall/ Who is the fairest of them all?” The Mirror said the Queen was the prettiest until Snow White turned seven. The Mirror answered, “Your Majesty, you are still lovely, it's true/ But Snow White is a thousand times fairer than you.” This sent Queenie into a major tizzy. She ordered her Huntsman to take Snow White into the forest to kill her. Huntsman had to bring back Snow’s liver and lungs as proof of death.
Huntsman couldn’t bring himself to kill Snow. He let her run away into the deep woods hoping a wild animal would eat her.
He killed a boar instead, delivering pig lungs and liver to Queenie. Queenie, believing the guts to be Snow’s; breaded them, fried them, and ate them with fava beans and a nice Chianti.
Snow wandered through the forest, finally finding the cottage of the seven dwarves. She fell asleep in a bed. The dwarves found her when they came home from working in Mr. Peabody’s coal mine.
When Snow woke up, she told them the Huntsman story and begged to stay. The dwarves agreed to let her stay if she kept house, swept, cleaned, cooked, made the beds, washed the linen, and darned their socks. Women’s lib did not exist in Medieval times in the Dark Forest.
The Mirror blabbed to Queenie that Snow was still living. This freaked out Queenie to no end. She began a series of attempted murders of Snow. She disguised herself as a peddler selling lace. When Snow let her in, Queenie tied the lace so tightly around Snow that she could not breathe.
When the dwarves came home, they loosened the lace allowing Snow to recover. Queenie then poisoned a comb and in a new disguise knocked on the cottage door. Snow was smitten with the beautiful comb. Despite the dwarves warning, she let Queenie in. Queenie combed Snow’s hair which caused her to collapse.
Queenie said, “Let’s see how lovely you are when you start to rot!” This statement is harsh even for the Dark Ages. When the dwarves returned, they pulled the comb out of Snow’s hair which revived her.
Finally, Queenie came up with oldest trick in the book—the poisoned apple. One side of the apple was white and one side was red. There was no poison on the white side, which Queenie bit into to show Snow it was safe. Snow ate the poisoned right side of the apple and died. The dwarves were unable to revive her.
They made her a glass coffin to admire her corpse, like Lenin’s in the Mausoleum in Red Square. Months passed and Snow did not decay. One day a Handsome Prince of Necrophilia Province came by and saw Snow’s casket. He fell in love with her corpse and offered to buy her body from the dwarves. They refused to sell her but when the Prince professed his love, they gave her body to the Prince.
The Prince had his lackeys haul the coffin to his kingdom. A clumsy lacky stumbled, dropping the coffin which dislodged the poisoned apple from Snow’s throat. She immediately revived and fell in love with the Prince.
The Prince threw a grand wedding to celebrate, inviting the Kingdom to party down. Queenie showed up but Snow was ready for her. Queenie was made to put on iron shoes that had been heated red hot in a fireplace. Queenie was forced to wear the shoes and dance until she died. Snow and Prince Charming Necrophilia lived happily ever after.
So, what have we learned today? Don’t let strangers in your house. Women can trade their household labor for dwarf-insured security. Not every apple a day will keep the doctor away. Red hot iron shoes can cure the silent tragedy of toe fungus if you can’t find Fungi-Nail.