Newspapers / The Brunswick Beacon (Shallotte, … / Dec. 29, 1994, edition 1 / Page 4
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Opinion Page THE BRUNSWKK'<fifftACON Edward M. Sweatt and Carolyn H. Swcatt Publishers Lynn Sweatt Carlson Editor Susan Usher ...News Editor Doug Rutter Sports Editor Eric Carlson I Staff Writer Mary Potts & Peggy Earwood. Office Managers Morrey Thomas Advertising Director | Linda Cheers and Anne Tatum Advertising Representatives Dorothy Brennan & Brenda Clemmons Moore Graphic Artists William Manning .Pressman ? Lonnie Sprinkle Assistant Pressman PAGE 4-A, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 29, 1994 Reasons For Optimism, Room For Improvement Mark Start Of New Year It takes a pretty crusty cynic not to approach the start of a new year with optimism. And although 1994 has brought Brunswick Countians some reasons to become crustier, there are glimmers of hope which shouldn't be ignored. Particularly encouraging is last week's creation of a commit tee charged with improving relations between the county com missioners and the Brunswick County Board of Education. The proposal came from newly sworn Commissioner Leslie Collier, who obviously heard the electorate's mandate for a more positive approach to communication among the county's two most pow erful elective bodies. That one simple measure could mean that, for the first time in three years, a school system budget could be settled upon without bitterness, squabbling or the involvement of professional referees or jurors. Another good sign is the appointment of Dr. Sam Kirtley to the Brunswick County Board of Health after a year without no physician on the board. Brunswick County's public health issues, like its other social problems, have become increasingly complex with profound ramifications for future quality of life along our popular shores. Family physicians, more than any other profes sionals, have a daily window to the roots and results of such grave public health problems as substance abuse, domestic vio lence, infant mortality, teenage pregnancy, illegitimacy, commu nicable disease and substandard sanitation. That perspective is crucial to sound, multi-dimensional public health policy-making. The county's newly elected Sheriff Ronald Hewett swept every precinct in the November election, an indication that voters on the islands and the mainland, from Thomasboro to Leland, share his vision of a department which serves the people and the cause of law enforcement the best it possibly can. Brunswick County's crime problem gets bigger and more serious all the time. We're a rural community with big-city evils, and only a law enforcement team and citizens working hard together can create progress toward better protecting the innocent and catching the crooks. Future progress in all those areas is likely to be dependent on ingenuity, imagination and old-fashioned hard work and commit ment. Brunswick Countians, along with their neighbors through out the state and nation, have begun to realize that local problems require localized solutions, not just a pipeline of tax dollars from Raleigh and Washington. It has all the makings of an interesting year. New Study: More Prisons , Less Crime BY THOM GOOLSBY A recent study by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) concludes what victims' groups in the Tarheel state have been claiming for * ' years ? the N.C. General Assembly's steadfast refusal to build prison cells in order to keep up with rising crime has helped make North Carolina a high crime state. Grand Experiment Was A Flop Starting in the early 1980s, North Carolina lawmak ers decided not to listen to the pleas for more prison space by law enforcement officers, district attorneys, judges and crime victims. Instead, state politicians lis tened to liberal criminologists like Stevens Clarke of UNC-Chapel Hill, who pumped out statistical studies claiming that putting more people in prison failed to cut the crime rate. The answer Clarke and his supporters in the legislature put forward was that the state could prevent crime by spend ing more .and more money on government programs. While the gran^ liberal experiment of prevention, rather than incarcera tion, was played out on our cities' streets starting in the early 1980s, North Carolina went from a low crime state to a crime "hell." In the last decade and-a-half, our historically low violent crime rate has gone up over 50 per cent, making us the 11th worst state in the union. As far as "total crime" goes, North Carolina ranks second-highest in the nation. While our crime rate was growing out of hand, the Tarheel state had the dubious distinction of ranking last in the building of prisons in order to keep pace with rising crime. Not Rocket Science, But Common Sense The results of the ALEC study are clear. Since 1960, the states that have neglected prison construction have seen the largest increases in crime, while the states that have built prisons have had the smallest growth in crime rates. The study just confirms common sense. If you keep crime from paying by locking up the bad buys, things get better. If crime pays, things get worse. It's not rocket science, but why haven't these common sense ideas caught on? Victims Paid The Price Over the past decade and a half, our decidedly left-leaning state legisla ture has been too busy spending our tax money on preventative programs to listen to any touch law-and-order agenda dealing with building adequate prison space. Instead, the simply buried their he*ds in thc sand, claiming that the state could not afford to lock up the criminals. They conveniently forgot that by not locking up the guilty, they would consign tens of thou sands of their constituents to being victims of the criminals they attempted to ignore. New Political Breeze Now the political breeze has changed direction. All of the newly clcctcd legislators ran as tough law-and-order candidates. They know first-hand that the people of North Carolina are tired as usual. The voters want criminals to serve "real time for real crimes." Survey after survey shows that crime is the number-one public concern. Making the right call on providing more prison space and keeping criminals off our streets should not be difficult to do, since the problem is so very ap parent. It's just a shame that tens of thousands of innocent people have had to suffer before common sense kicked in. Thorn Gaolsby is a trial attorney and teaches at Campbell Law School GOOLSBY New Year's Wish For The County Commish "Nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded. " ? Yogi Btrm I'm not much for making New Year's resolutions, since I'm rarely able to follow through on them. But I don't mind suggesting promises for other people to keep. Here's one for the Brunswick County Com missioners: Please, please, please, find some where else? ANYWHERE ELSE? to hold your meetings. I have a cluttered storage room under the house that would provide more empty space than the "com missioners' chambers" do on a typi cal first or third Monday of the month. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of observing your coun ty government in action, let's just say that ? even with nothing contro versial to attract a big crowd ? there isn't enough room in the audience to swing a guppy, never mind a cat. If there's a hoi topic on the agen da ? such as a neighborly dispute over whether to name a road "Billy Bob Boulevard" or "William Robert Way" ? the tiny space designated for the public begins to resemble Times Square on New Year's Eve. Meanwhile, the hall outside fre quently looks like the entrance to a toy store that just announced a Christmas sale on "Power Ranger" action figures. You'd have more chance getting a 50-yard-line seat at the first Carolina Panthers home game than you would at a Bruns wick Commissioners' meeting. The state has strict regulations Eric Carlson about the minimum area that must be provided for convicted felons during their all-too-brief visits to our prisons and county jails. Unfortu nately, no such rules exist for law abiding citizens who want to find out where their tax money is being spent. Brunswick County has an esti mated population of 57,249. Yet there are only 30 seats set aside for the audience at a Brunswick County Board of Commissioners meeting. That means, if more than one out of every 1,908 residents gets an at tack of good citizenship and decides to watch their local government at work, one of them will have to re main standing. Actually four or five people will have to stay on their feet, since three or four reporters usually attend the meetings. We have learned to get there early. If the "teevee news" per sonalities show up, you will have to wait in the hall, sincc they assume the right to claim all standing room for their cameras. This is not (I repeat NOT) the fault of the current commissioners. They have only met in these hal lowed chambers once. Nor can you blame board members of the past IS years. The meeting facilities were de signed back in the 1970s as part of the complex bunker system known as the Brunswick County Govern ment Complex. Back then, govern ment expressed its esteem for the taxpayers who built the complc* by confining them to what we now call the commissioners' "chambers." (Original blueprints describe the space as a "Janitorial Storage Clo set/Smoked Filled Room.") Year after year, new commission ers get elected and take their scats behind the name tags on the arcing formica dais that protects them from the rabble below. From up there, sit ting in their big comfortable chairs, I suspect everything seems fine. But it's not fine, except for those who spent a former life in a cattle stockyard. Unfortunately, the so-called "pub lic assembly" building isn't much better. This is where the commis sioners move for big public hearings and meetings that are expected to draw large crowds. This big. open room is also the cafeteria. It has lots of space for people to sit and eat. But at meet ings, nobody can hear a word of what's going on. Because, like most cafeterias, the public assembly room has the sound qualities of an empty dumpster. The acoustics are so bad that commissioners at one end of the table cannot hear what a fellow board member is saying three chairs down. The clerk requires a show of hands to tally the votes. As a result, the public comment heard most frequently at public hearings is, "What did he say?" Last week, a former county com missioner got a taste of life in the trenches, when more than SO people tried unsuccessfully to occupy the cramped chambers. He never did get a seat and ended up standing for three hours in the doorway to an ad joining office. "I don't know why I never thought of it before," he said later. "But it seems like they could hold their meetings in one of the court rooms." BINGO! GIVE THAT MAN A CIGAR! No matter how busy things get over at the county courthouse, judges like to be home in time for supper. So there is always a spacious room with good acoustics, padded seats and carpet on the floor avail able on the first and third Monday nights of every month. These rooms arc equipped with some nice chairs (even good enough for lawyers) where the commission ers could sit. By turning the rttomey tables around, they would face an area where a couple hundred people could sit comfortably without hav ing their elbows lodged in each oth er's ribcages. If a commissioner wanted to look really important, he could use the big black stuffed chair where the judge usually sits. Then there would be no doubt about which member was the chairman. Happy New Year. Some Odds And Ends From The In-Basket It's dark at 4:30, the phone's not ringing, the staff is happy and there are brownies in the break room. It's the final hour of the last work day before Christmas. In the newspaper world, that's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we get a weekday off, which for most of us is a rare and wonderful thing. On the other hand, the news world as we know it grinds to a halt, leaving us to look for new and cre ative ways to fill the advertising packed publications which precede the big day. It's also a time to start thinking about purging some files, emptying the in-basket and clearing the desk top of a dozen Post-It notes to get ready for a new year ? the Beacon 's 33rd. Along those lines, here are some odds and ends off my desk: ? A1 Granzow has a few choice words for the dwarf nandina thieves who've been preying on the Cala bash Presbyterian Church. (The thieves are not believed to be dwarfs, only the shrubs.): "You've gotten them all now; you can leave us alone." It was A1 who told us several weeks ago about the first and second heist of shrubs from the church grounds. Since then, thieves have hit twice more. He's sure the problem is thieves rather than vandals, since the bushes were very gingerly dug out and taken away. A1 took my advice and checked the area flea markets to see if there were any mysteriously good deals on mature dwarf nandi nas, but found none. Professional thieves who'd steal from a churchyard at Christmastime deserve a swift kick in the....pants. If you know who swiped those shrubs, call the Brunswick County Sheriff's Department at 253-4321 and make a bunch of Presbyterians feel better about human nature. ? Lynn Carlson Edna Polodi of Calabash says if you haven't thrown away your Christmas cards yet, don't. If there's no writing on the left inside panel, you can cut them in half and use the picture side as a Christmas postcard next year. Just use ballpoint or other un-runny ink to draw a vertical line down the center of the blank side. Put the address and stamp on the right and your message on the left. After all, Edna says, you'll keep some paper out of the landfill (or out of your junk drawer) and save a lit tle money. Besides, who generally has more to say in a Christmas card than you can write on a postcard? Edna is resourceful. She is the Beacon reader who last year passed on the suggestion that if you travel, you ought to carry a pair of latex gloves in a 35-mm film canister in your glove compartment to put on in case you are in a position to help someone involved in an accident. That's practical and compassionate. ? Charles R. "Buster" Humphreys' self-published Panthers of the Coastal Plain is back from the print er and will be appearing on local bookshelves soon. The courtly, delightful Mr. Hum phreys, 83, has been tracking sight ings of coastal panthers (cougars, mountain lions, whatever you want to call them) for more than half a century. A bom naturalist, he grew up exploring the Green Swamp with his father, a civil engineer whose name is on an 1894 Corps of Engineers chart of the Lockwood Folly River I was lucky enough to acquire recently. Mr. Humphreys hasn't seen a pan ther himself, but he's talked to everyone he he could find who did or might have, including me. I fall under the category of not-sure-what they-saw. He's absolutely certain of the panther's continued existence and he makes a strong case with his data. Having been on the cutting edge of scientific research during four decades with Dupont, he has the credentials to do so, too. ? One post-Christmas postscript: Eric and 1 ended a wonderfully quiet Christmas day with a walk on Hol dcn Bcach at low tide with clouds squeezing a zipper of golden sunset from the horizon to infinity. We were alone at the end of the fishing pier watching the cormorants on the water when three dolphins started arcing our way, coming close enough that we could see their eyes and hear them slice through the wa ter. Two headed toward shore and kept playing on into the breakers. The third swam right out to the cor morant party and sent them flapping like maniacs. You have to live in a pretty spe cial place to watch a Christmas show like that. Worth Repeating... 0 Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries ? stand that man upon his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.. ..Meditation and water are wedded forever. ? Herman Melville m If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. ? Fedor MikhailovLsh Dostoevski ? The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedom, where they could not only enjoy their own reli gion, but could prevent everybody else from enjoying his. ? Artemus Ward m We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it ? and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again ? and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more. ? Mark Twain m We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.... Nothing we ever do it, in strict sci entific literalness, wiped out. ? William James
The Brunswick Beacon (Shallotte, N.C.)
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Dec. 29, 1994, edition 1
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