Newspapers / The Brunswick Beacon (Shallotte, … / Oct. 28, 1993, edition 1 / Page 4
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Opinion Page THE BRUNSWKK$ttACON Edward M. Sweatt and Carolyn H. Sweatt Publishers Edward M. Sweatt Editor Lynn S. Carlson Managing Editor Susan Usher News Editor Doug Rutter Sports Editor Eric Carlson Staff Writer Peggy Earwood Office Manager Carolyn H. Sweatt Advertising Director Tlmberley Adams, Cecelia Gore and Linda Cheers Advertising Representatives Dorothy Brennan and Brenda Clemraons Moore . Graphic Artists William Manning Pressman Lonnle Sprinkle Assistant Pressman David White Photo Technician PAGE 4-A, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1993 ? Many Issues Lie Ahead For Communities At Crossroads; Sewer Service Is Just One When candidates in next week's South Brunswick Islands municipal elections say their communities are at a crossroads, it's more than just campaign rhetoric. Start at Calabash and work your way up through Sunset Beach, Ocean Isle, Shallotte and Holden Beach. You'll find com munities tangling with difficult issues, some of which deeply di vide them, others of which have profound implications for the lifestyles and quality of life of the full-time residents whose job it is to choose town boards. Everyone seems to agree on one thing ? the importance of maintaining a "familv-oriented" atmosphere for the residents and vacationers who mean so much to the local economy. But that commitment alone loses some of its punch when you look to our coastal neighbors to the north and south. Grand Strand and Outer Banks candidates still wrap themselves in that flag too, long after small-town boards in those communities opened their arms to wall-to-wall hotels and the multi-lane ocean highways they ne cessitate. In Calabash, Sunset Beach and Holden Beach, citizens and their elected representatives are ever-closer to implementing cen tral sewer systems. There's good reason to believe all these com munities will be sewered in the next few years. There's just as much reason to believe that naysayers in five years will still be crying "you haven't proved the need," when they'd have been better off spending that energy finding other ways to avoid the dense commercial development the great majority of citizens clearly oppose. If the upcoming municipal elections, especially in Calabash and Sunset Beach, pivot around the sew^r issue alone, the towns people will have dealt themselves a bad hand. Again, look north and south. While the Grand Strand was sewering and the Outer Banks was fighting about sewering, other types of growth control measures were left unexplored, whether by design or by over sight. What was left behind was two vacation spots, one sewered and one not, both continually squeezing out family beach cot tages to make way for hotels, condominiums and retail stores. And both still talking about maintaining their family atmosphere. South Brunswick Islanders seem truly committed to control ling developmental density while promoting economic develop ment, and protecting the environment without closing the gates to newcomers. It's a tall order that will require careful deliberation of many issues ? sewers being just one of them ? to fill. Get out and vote on Tuesday. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Halloween ' Evil , Pagan ' Holiday ; Pastor Claims To the editor: This is supposed to be the Age of Knowledge. There is more teaching, and hopefully learning, going on to day than ever before in history. Why is it, then, that so many people still have not learned what Halloween is really all about? For those interested enough to continue to read this letter, here is a brief history of the high satanic holy day called Halloween. The name Halloween means holy evening. It is a pagan holiday which has its roots in ancient Druid and Celtic customs. The Druids and the Celts were a society within a soci ety, with the Druids being the high priests. These pagan customs included animal and human sacrifices to the Druid god Samhain (pronounced SAH-win). Samhain was supposed to have killed the sun at the end of each day and to "hold" the souls of the deceased. Each year the Druids would visit homes asking for suitable gifts for Samhain, sometimes even demand ing a child to be given as a sacrifice. If a family consented, they were to be blessed by Samhain that year. If they refused, the Druids would leave a large hollowed-out turnip on the doorstep of the house. The face of a spirit was carved on the side of the turnip, and a candle made of human fat was left burning inside of it. This was to alert demons to torment this family and to kill one of its mem bers during the same year because they had refused to offer a suitable sacrifice to Samhain. This is where trick-or-treating and jack-o-lanterns came from. Even today Halloween does not attempt to hide its evil. Witches, death's face carved on a pumpkin, skeletons and black cats (which are believed by some to possess reincar nated souls) are its symbols. This Halloween, police depart ments will be forced to stretch their manpower to the limit. Drunk dri vers will have another excuse to par ty and randomly kill on the high ways. Property will be destroyed and children will be poisoned. The headlines and TV news will reflect this on Monday morning. There is nothing good to be found in Halloween. Since I have learned these things, 1 have organized Family Night at our church. Our children are in an atmosphere of love having the time of their lives. This has been a safe, wonderful, Christian alternative to celebrating Halloween, which is a satanic and evil pagan holiday. Christians are instructed to "ab stain from all appearance of evil" in 1 Thessalonians 5:22. I hope that concerned parents will continue to research the history of Halloween and make an informed, responsible decision for their families this year. Rev. Marilyn Inman Calabash (More Letters, Following Page) Write Us We welcome your letters to the editor. Letters must include your address and telephone number. (This information is for verifica tion purposes only; we will not publish your street/mailing ad dress or phone number.) Letters must be typed or written legibly. Address letters to: The Brunswick Beacon P.O. Box 2558 ShaJlotte NC 28459 Anonymous letters will not be published. The War Against 'Language-Leveling' My father-in-law thinks I sound exactly like Brett Butler ? not the baseball player, but the star of the television sitcom "Grace Under Fire" I, of course, know better. My guess is that Butler is from Ala bama, or maybe Mississippi. She has a definite Deep South accent, way different to my ear from the Sandhills South Carolina drawl (al tered some by living many years at the coast and then marrying a Yankee) that comes out when I open my mouth. It's an honest mistake for a Massachusetts native living in Jer sey. There are a couple of vocal sub tleties Butler and 1 have in common that create the association in Alden's mind. Neither the comedienne nor I have any mountain inflections in our accents. Flatlanders have flatter, less nasal accents. We both have especially deep voices for Southern women, and we don't "upspeak," or routinely make declarative sentences that turn up at the ends like questions. It couldn't have anything to do with her being a smart-mouthed New South tough gal or the fact that she refers to people she dislikes in Lynn Carlson terms like"Spam-sucking trash." Could it? There's a professor at N.C. State (cut the tractor jokes, all you insuf ferable Tarheel perma-collegiates) who's working to help people cele brate and preserve their linguistic heritage and to understand the dy namics of dialect. Dr. Walt Wolfram's linguistic journey has begun on Ocracoke Island and will conclude in the mountain hollows of the Blue Ridge, with stops in various lan guage communities along the way. The professor is troubled that nonstandard dialects are often put down and hopes his work will per suade some to hear the rich history, culture and tradition that resonates in "good Southern speech." I hope he succeeds. I can't help remembering an acquaintance in college, a multilingual graduate stu dent who received a wad of fellow ship money to go to the South Carolina Low Country islands and unravel the mystery of the Gullah dialect we called "Geechie" when I was a kid. Six months later, that guy returned to Columbia scratching his head in abject puzzlement. If Dr. Wolfram can do anything to preserve the "Ococker" dialect ? and all hoigh-toider accents, for that matter ? I'm all for it. He's worried about a phenomenon called "lan guage leveling," where traditional brogues vanish through dilution by newcomers or massive exposure to the non-accents of television talking heads hired for their generic speech patterns. I am too. The Outer Banker accent is espe cially beautiful to my ear. It's thick est at Ocracoke and becomes less pronounced and with different nu ances as you travel south along the coast. It includes terms like "win'ard" for moving into the wind; "louard" for moving away from the wind; "quamish" for sick; and "mammick" for hassle. You still hear that maritime accent in Brunswick County, but not as much as ten or 15 years old. It changes to something else at the South Carolina line.ultimately turn ing into the beautiful but entirely baffling Low Country dialects, so mysterious that you can mistake Battery aristocrats from Charleston for Bronx natives. But back to Outer Bankers. Senator Marc Basnight, the presi dent pro tem of the North Carolina Senate, came to visit our office a couple of weeks ago to stump for the statewide boi:d referendums. Eric and I knew Marc way back when, both having worked for a newspaper in Marc's native Manteo. I noticed that his high-toider accent has mellowed, out of necessity no doubt, since these days he has to speak in front of large groups of people from all over the state. They might not have understood the old Marc ? the one that never wore socks. My personal theory is that accents tend to get lost through self-con sciousness ? when something you said has been mocked or pointed out to you one too many times. That's a shame. Go ahead and clean up your usage so you don't sound stupid. But don't lose the accent! It's as beautiful and valuable as a piece of heirloom jew elry. i Bicentennial Of A Great Human Drama Two hundred years ago this Friday, the final chapter in one of history's most telling human dramas came to an end in Portsmouth, England, on the forecastle of the warship H.M.S. Brunswick. Officers crowded the decks and boats from an assembled fleet cir cled to watch as three men were hung by their necks from a yardarm for their roles in the infamous "Mutiny on the Bounty." No fiction writer could conjure a more potent tale than the story of the captain, the crew, the voyage and the mutiny aboard Her Majesty's Ship Bounty. Nor could one imagine an epilogue wrought with more cour age and fortitude, or more deca dence and depravity than the events that swirled its wake. Dozens of scholarly books have been published about the Bounty, mostly based on the diaries of the captain and crew. Yet fiction still dominates our perception of the mutiny. Because each account was authored by participants whose very lives depended on which version came to be believed. We know for a fact that Lt. William Bligh commanded the H.M.S. Bounty on a mission to gath er breadfruit plants in Tahiti. The seedlings were to be planted in the West Indies to provide food for slaves. We know that the Master's Mate was a 22-year-old gentleman naval officer named Fletcher Christian. After ten months at sea and a six month sojourn in Tahiti, the Bounty set sail loaded with healthy young breadfruit plants. Three weeks later the crew, led by Christian, took the ship and set Bligh adrift with 18 oth er men in a 23-foot open boat. In a 41-day voyage that remains one of the most amazing feats of navigation, seamanship and survival in history, Bligh brought his entire crew safely across 3,419 miles of storm-tossed South Pacific Ocean, through the Great Barrier Reef to the island of Timor in the Indian Ocean. All without a single chart or an ac Eric Carlson curate timepiece. Christian and the other mutineers returned to Tahiti, where they re Stocked the ship with provisions and native "wives." After zig-zagging through Polynesia in search of unin habited land, the Bounty dropped an chor for the last time on tiny Pitcairn Island, where an ill-fated "colony" of nine Englishmen, 11 Tahitian women and six Tahitian men was es tablished. The story of the Bounty has in spired three classic movies starring the most popular leading men of the 1930s, 50s and 80s. Each is based on a different theory for the mutiny. In the 1935 version, which won an Academy Award for best picture, Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian was tormented to the point of mu tiny by the excessively harsh disci pline of Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh. This popular interpretation re flects the damage-control efforts of Christian's brother Edward, a skill ful lawyer who filed a civil suit against Bligh, blaming him for the mutiny in order to clear the Chris tian family name. Marlon Brando gave us a more romantic Fletcher Christian, who fell deeply in love with a Tahitian woman. Their desire to remain to gether led Christian to revolt against the stern captain who ordered him back to duty. Some historical accounts support this theory. But most make no men tion of Christian taking a temporary "wife" on Tahiti, as many other crewmen did. Perhaps the motiva tions in this film version mirrored those of Brando, who fell in love with the South Sea islands and even tually married his Tahitian co-star. Both Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins have said their perfor mances as Christian and Bligh in "The Bounty" were among the best of their careers. With an outstanding script, based more closely on the historical record, this is the version to see if you want an idea of the sto ry's richness and complexity. In "The Bounty," Bligh is recog nized for what he was, a remarkable seaman and loyal British Navy offi cer whose major shortcoming was a lack of management skills. The vil lain in this movie (and probably re ality) was not Bligh, but human na ture and the enticements of paradise. Imagine you are a young man in cold, damp, dreary, 18th Century England with a future so bleak that you would gladly sign up for the most dangerous profession available (which seafaring was at the time). After 10 months slaving away on a creaky, wet, vermin-infested stink hole of a ship, you are suddenly turned loose on a lush, tropical is land where nobody works, food grows on trees and the women are very, very friendly. Now imagine being the guy who ? after six months of debauch ery ? has to round all those boys up, stuff them into a floating greenhouse and haul them back to not-so-merry old England. The fact that a mutiny occurred is perhaps less surprising than the fact that it took three weeks to happen. The aftermath of the Bounty mutiny is a compelling morality play in two acts. In the first, you have Captain Bligh and the 18 men who relied on his training, experience and disci pline to save them from almost cer tain death. After reaching England, Bligh successfully defending him self in a court martial, completed his breadfruit mission, went on to a dis tinguished Naval career and died an Admiral at the age of 63. The second act is set on Pitcairn Island, where the basest of human tendencies ? racism, sexism, jeal ousy, greed, drunkenness ? turned the promise of a new beginning into a horrible nightmare for the muti neers. Of the 15 men who went ashore from the Bounty in 1790, on ly four were alive in 1793. Most were murdered in disputes over women or territory. One fell off a cliff in a drunken stupor after dis covering that a potent liquor could be made from a native plant. By the turn of turn of the century, only one member of the Bounty crew re mained alive on the island with 10 women and numerous children. Today, descendants of the Bounty colonists comprise nearly the entire population of Pitcairn Island, where making souvenirs for tourists is the major industry and Christian is a common name. Worth Repeating... ? Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. ? Antoine de Saint-Exupery ? A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of. ? Ogden Nash ? JWiaf plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist up on the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion. ? Herman Melville
The Brunswick Beacon (Shallotte, N.C.)
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Oct. 28, 1993, edition 1
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