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Welcome to summer: Is it hot enough for you?

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Tuesday, 01 July 2025

Written by Pitt Dickey

Some of you may have noticed the weather of late has been entirely too prominent. Colorful mega heat waves, tornados, hail stones the size of muskrats. Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
When Willard Scott oversaw the weather on the Today Show, we did not have to endure these atmospheric scuffles. Willard kept things under control. Willard crossed over the great atmospheric divide in 2021. He can’t help us with the weather anymore.
Hell is accepted by many people as being hot.
With summer’s heat dome nestled lovingly over North Carolina, it is not too large a stretch to associate our weather with some approximation of the conditions in Hell.
We don’t have a lake of fire, yet. If, for an unfathomable reason, you walk barefoot at 3 p.m. on asphalt, you will experience on the soles of your feet what condemned souls suffer in Hell. Pro tip: If it is too hot to put your hand on the road, kindly do not subject your dog’s sensitive paws to the asphalt inferno. Burned puppy toes are a sign of a bad dog owner. But I digress.
Back to today’s topic.
What is Hell like? Do I want to go there? Once there, can I change my mind? Is Hell like the Hotel California? You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave? Will they accept major credit cards? With due respect to our heat waves, let us examine what Hell might be like.
Major religions each have their own views of Hell. In the interest of not being burned at the stake as a heretic, I will not attempt to summarize any religion’s beliefs about Hell. Joan of Arc was accused of being a heretic. At age 19, she was burned at the stake by the English in 1431. I hereby cite Ernest T. Bass of the Andy Griffith Show, who did not like Englishters. For any Englishter owners of a stake, charcoal, and a book of matches, please take note: I do not purport to hear voices and I do not speak French.
On a less theological note, consider what mere mortals have said about what Hell is like. Our old pal Mark Twain had some thoughts about Hell. One was “I would go to Heaven for the climate and to Hell for the company.” Huckleberry Finn was confronted with going to Hell due to his religious teachings if he helped Jim escape slavery.
Huck pondered the danger to his immortal soul. He ultimately determined to help Jim escape, saying: “All right then, I’ll go to Hell.” Davy Crockett said, “You may all go to Hell, and I will go to Texas.”
The cheerfully effervescent Friedrich Nietzsche opined: “One must not let oneself be misled: They say, ‘Judge Not’ but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.” Plato taught that Hell wasn’t a place where people were stuck forever, but where they could redeem themselves to escape Hell and go to Heaven.
It is a bit murky what kind of good stuff the dead could do in Plato’s Hell to improve themselves, but who am I to dispute Plato? The French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote a play about Hell called No Exit. Several people who have died are in a room waiting to be told if they are going to Hell or Heaven. They get on each other’s nerves by various unattractive character traits. By the end of the play, they don’t care whether they go to Heaven or Hell, they just want to get out of the room and away from each other. In a Twilight Zone turn of events, it turns out they are going to be stuck in that room with each other for eternity. Sartre ends the play advising: “There is no Hell. Hell is other people.”
If you have ever been caught in a conversation with a Long Talker whom you could not escape, Sartre is your man.
Victor Hugo did not see Hell as the worst place to be. He might have been trapped by a Long Talker himself. Vic said, “An intelligent Hell would be better than a stupid paradise.” It is unclear if he was referring to Myrtle Beach.
Winston Churchill had some words of advice about Hell: “If you are going through Hell, keep going.” Winston’s quote was incorporated into a country song by Rodney Atkins with the immortal lines: “If you’re going through Hell, keep on going/ Don’t slow down if you are scared/ Don’t show it/ You might get out before the Devil knows you are there.”
Bill Shakespeare, who also had a way with words, chimed in on Hell. His character Ariel in The Tempest reported: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.” Bill, like Nostradamus, may have been gifted with the ability to foretell the future, as his quote clearly describes the US Congress.
Have we learned anything today? Sorry, not much. Rodney Atkins might owe Winston Churchill royalties on his hit country song. To mangle Macbeth, this column “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.”
Wear sunblock. It will finally cool off here in mid-November.

(Illustration by Pitt Dickey)

School vouchers: Our tax dollars at work—or not

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Tuesday, 24 June 2025

Written by Margaret Dickson

It has been a long time since school routines, calendars, activities, and issues registered with me—certainly since my own days in the long-gone Fayetteville City Schools or my children’s years in the Cumberland County School System. What I do remember, though, is what all those years in local schools meant to us as individuals and as a family in terms of educational quality, socialization, safety, and caring.
They meant the world—and still do in the lives of the now grown Dicksons.
Which is why what has happened to our state’s public schools for almost two decades is heartbreaking to millions of North Carolinians. It has been a long, step by painful step journey to the educational bottom.
The most recent and ongoing outrage is the transfer of our tax dollars, yours and mine, away from public schools to private institutions, many of them religious. An innocuous-sounding voucher system called Opportunity Scholarships is available to all North Carolina families whether they have incomes of $50K or $500K. The General Assembly budgeted $432M in tax dollars that came from my pocketbook and yours to move public funds into private hands. Our most populous counties, Mecklenburg and Wake, received the most, of course, with more than $39M and almost $51M, respectively. Cumberland received more than $23M for 3850 students’ tuition to private schools. Smaller, more rural counties receive far less and sometimes no voucher money, because they have fewer private schools and some have none at all.
Those millions are tax dollars that without such vouchers would likely have gone into North Carolina’s public schools.
But if that is not enough to make your blood boil, process this.
Of the students who received a tuition for private school, more than 90-percent of them—yes, you read that correctly, more than 90-percent, were already in private schools! In other words, their families were already paying tuition, so the state---that would be you and I—just gave them a freebie on their tuition bills. For the school years that just ended, it was a $432M break. Hardly chump change and to no one’s great surprise, many of these private schools raised their tuition this year, an average of 15-percent, far above inflation level.
While vouchers are a very hard hit to public education, state neglect of public education has been ongoing for years. David Rice, executive director of Public Education Works, wrote recently that the North Carolina General Assembly no longer cares about public education and, what’s more, does not care what we taxpayers think about that. Wrote Rice, legislators “don’t care that a judge ordered them decades ago to do right by schools in funding.
They don’t care how it looks for them to lavish more than half-a billion dollars on private school vouchers, even for well-off-families, as public schools begin to wither on the vine.”
“They don’t care that North Carolina now ranks 43rd in the nation for average teacher pay, down five spots from the previous year,…behind Georgia (23), Alabama (33), South Carolina (36), Tennessee (38), and Kentucky (42)."
Rice goes on to make the case that not only do legislators not care about public education. Apparently neither do we taxpayers, the supposed adults in the room. Given the fact that about 80-percent of school age North Carolinians attend public school, this is a dangerous and shortsighted approach.
Rice supports public education for the same reasons I and many other concerned North Carolinians do, even people who do not have school age children.
“They help promote economic development and job growth by enriching the quality of the labor pool.
“They attract new residents. They help lift children out of poverty and keep them away from crime. And they enrich the cultural fabric of their communities.”
Maybe we all agree with a certain First Lady who visited migrant children wearing a jacket emblazoned with, “I really don’t care Do you”

AI will aid transit, not transform it

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Tuesday, 01 July 2025

Written by John Hood

Artificial intelligence is coming to public transit. In fact, in some functions and places, it’s already here. But can AI elevate transit into a major mode of daily travel in North Carolina cities and towns? Sorry, the answer remains no.
You don’t have to be a techno-optimist to recognize that autonomous vehicles are inevitable. Self-driving cars get the most headlines, for understandable reasons, but I’m persuaded that automating truck, bus, and train routes will happen faster, in a manner that saves time and money while also satisfying safety concerns.
AVs cannot, as yet, consistently navigate pedestrian-heavy street grids. Their initial deployment to scale will likely occur along fixed routes, including intercity passenger and freight service.
Writing in City Journal, economics editor Jordan McGillis observed that such uses won’t eliminate driving as an occupation. Instead, humans will handle operations near origins and destinations “where the irregularities of tight city streets, loading docks, and warehousing demand a flexible mind,” he wrote. “In practice, this will mean men who previously would have been isolated on the highway for hours on end are instead able to move freight closer to home.”
Some transit vehicles will become autonomous, as well, and future iterations may well include Waymo-style vans and shuttles. More immediate are AI applications that optimize routes, signals, and back-office support for human-operated buses. Some transit systems are already using them.
We should welcome such innovations in North Carolina. They’ll save money and improve service. But I remain doubtful their effects will include significant increases in the share of North Carolinians who regularly use transit for commuting or other daily tasks.
Charlotte has by far the state’s most elaborate and costly transit system, including rail and streetcar lines. A bill filed this year in the General Assembly would place a one-cent hike in the sales tax on the Mecklenburg County ballot this fall. Public transportation would get 60% of the revenue. Even so, its buses and trains are already running well below current capacity, with ridership only 65% of what it was before COVID and about half what it was in 2013.
In Raleigh, transit accounted for 2% of daily commutes in 2019. Four years later, it was just 1.2%. Yes, many fewer people commuted alone in their cars in 2023 (64%) than in 2019 (78%), but that’s because a quarter now “commuted” virtually, by working from home, compared to 9% in 2019. Heck, more Raleigh residents now walk to work than take a bus.
Transit trends differ across other North Carolina communities. From 2019 to 2023, total passenger miles traveled were up slightly in Greensboro, down moderately in Asheville and Durham, and down dramatically in Winston-Salem and Wilmington. In no place other than college towns did transit play more than a modest role in overall commuting patterns.
Although technology-driven improvements in transit service may budge these numbers a little bit, the blunt truth is that the vast majority of us will always choose personal automobility (or work flexibility, if applicable) over riding in groups on someone else’s schedule.
“COVID and technologies have changed travel,” wrote Arizona State University professor Steven Polzin in a recent Reason Foundation study, “but it’s important to recognize that many attributes of travel are very resilient to change.”
After analyzing decades of transit investment and ridership data, Polzin concluded that claims “public transportation can be ubiquitously viable at attractive levels of service over broad swaths of urban America are not supported by empirical data or by evidence of a public willingness or financial capacity to redesign and reconfigure urban areas to optimize transit use.”
That doesn’t mean transit will or should disappear, however. Outside of a few highly dense markets such as New York and Washington, transit’s primary function is to provide essential mobility services for those who cannot drive or afford their own vehicles. AVs and AI applications will help us better and more economically meet their needs. That’s fantastic news — and no fantasy.

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

Publisher's Pen: Is the Civic Center Commission relevant?

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Tuesday, 24 June 2025

Written by Bill Bowman

Last week I attended the board meeting of Cumberland County's Civic Center Commission. This is the organization that governs the Crown Coliseum Complex, and members of the board are appointed by the County Commissioners. I attended specifically to hear their comments, insights, and reactions to the June 4, 5 to 2 decision by the County Commissioners to reject the downtown Event Center proposal. Chairman Kirk deViere, Henry Tyson, Marshall Faircloth, Pavan Patel, and Jeannette Council voted in the affirmative to reject the proposed $152 million downtown Event Center.
Commissioners Glenn Adams and Veronica Jones opposed it. Adding substance, confidence, and credibility to this decision was that Faircloth and Council were both strong advocates of the downtown project from the beginning until the final vetting of the project, which was initiated under the leadership deViere.
The board meeting was an eye-opening and disappointing experience. To her credit, Board Chair Jami McLaughlin opened the meeting with a statement to the five attending Civic Board members that Cumberland County would be renovating the existing theater and arena. This news was no surprise to them as they collectively sat motionless, stone-faced, and silent, an apathetic and discerning posture that they maintained throughout the entire meeting, even through Crown Complex General Manager Seth Benalt's impressive and enthusiastic presentation about future event bookings and programs coming to the Crown Coliseum Complex in the coming months.
Equally impressive was John Raynders, Oak View Group's Food and Beverage Hospitality manager, update on the new innovative catering services they were offering, along with a creative, diverse, and upscale menu. The atmosphere in that room was surreal. No excitement, questions, or comments from those who are charged with the Crown’s oversight. Only apathetic silence.
Finally, out of desperation and in an unorthodox media move to keep the afternoon from becoming a total waste of time, CityView reporter Bill Kirby posed a question directly to Seth Benalt, asking if the rehabilitation and remodeling of the theatre and arena were feasible. Benalt responded with an emphatic and enthusiastic yes. He went on to say that absolutely both facilities could be renovated successfully and he and staff at the Crown were ready, willing, and able to make it a reality. He made it clear that he and his staff are there to serve the people of Cumberland County and they will make it work. Benalt, who has been with the Crown for nearly a decade, is excited about the future of the Crown Complex, and this was reflected in his optimistic attitude, which was an obvious juxtaposition to others in the room. Even Benalt’s enthusiastic response failed to solicit any response from the nearly comatose board. Newly sworn-in board member Vernon L. Spruill, Principal of Cape Fear High School, had a look on his face like he was thinking, “What have I got myself into?” At least Spruill showed up to the meeting. Local attorney Allen Rogers, who was appointed to the board by Commissioner Glenn Adams, has missed two meetings and he hasn’t even been sworn in yet. Go figure!
Everyone remained silent until the very end of the meeting when Chairwoman Jami McLaughlin asked if there were any final comments. Yes. There was. Without heeding the advice of Samual L Clemmons, famed Mark Twain, who said, “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it, and remove all doubt,” Peter Pappas went on a diatribe of commentary full of false and misleading information, innuendos, and a critical lack of facts. He made his point several times that he was not at all pleased with the decision made by the Board of Commissioners, specifically Board Chair Kirk deViere, Henry Tyson, Marshall Faircloth, Jeannette Council, and Pavan Patel. He, like Commissioners Glenn Adams and Veronica Jones, advocated to have it built in downtown Fayetteville. Pappas was also upset that the Civic Center Commission was not actively involved in the ongoing discussions about the Event Center and stated he was “…shocked at the cancellation…”. If the Civic Center Commission is not involved, Pappas wants to know … why we’re here.”
Well, after observing their meeting, I’m asking the same question.
Pappas' sentiments were echoed by local attorney Ken Burns, who agreed it was a bad decision to abandon the project. However, to me, the most revealing and ridiculous aspect of the Pappas/Burns tirade was the reference that they were “kept in the dark” about the details of the project. Well, not only have deViere, Tyson and Patel campaigned on their commitment to government transparency, but it indicates again that Pappas wants to be a master at misinformation, or he is too lazy to stay abreast of the issues. This Event Center proposal has been discussed at open meetings, been the topic of at least two radio talk shows, and written about ad nauseam by Troy Williams, CityView, Fayetteville Observer, and the Up & Coming Weekly newspaper. In addition, the documents that ultimately led to the final decision are all linked and available online. And, don’t forget the mountain of dribble on social media. If these folks were kept in the dark, they had their eyes closed.
I’ll conclude by saying that being appointed to a board of Cumberland County is an honor. Members are expected to support that entity and provide the time and talents to oversee the mission, goals, and mandates that serve the best interest of Cumberland County. If this commitment is not evident, those board members should be removed or the board should be disbanded.
The decision has been made to renovate, remodel, and rehabilitate the theatre and arena, and now we move forward. Seth Benalt and his team are excited, ready, willing, and able to meet the challenges that will positively carry out the County’s mandates for the betterment of the entire community. A good board member is committed and engaged with a passion for the organization's purpose and mission. They must be dedicated and willing to put forth the time, effort, and resources beyond just attending meetings.
A strong board cannot exist without members with these characteristics. I spent six years on the Coliseum Board and watched it being built from the first shovel of dirt. I don’t want to see it go away, so it has to become relevant and supportive of the county’s mission. If it cannot accomplish this, it needs to be disbanded. Just Sayin!
Thank you for reading the Up & Coming Weekly newspaper.