Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Together N.C. holds send-off party for North Carolina's progress
Cloaked in Hawaiian T-shirts with tongues planted firmly in cheeks, leis around necks, cone-shaped party hats on scalps and noisemakers in mouths, members of the progressive Together N.C. coalition threw a send-off party to North Carolina on Wednesday morning on the Halifax Mall, bidding adieu to the state’s ability to thrive, they said.
- Photo by Joe Schwartz
- Together N.C.'s Rob Thompson apologizes to South Carolina for mocking the state's level of public education funding and says with the North Carolina budget now, "The joke is on us."
“We’re here to say what makes this state great is ask risk,” said Louisa Warren, co-coordinator of Together N.C. and a policy advocate at the N.C. Justice Center.
The group handed out “pink slips” and offered cake and lemonade.
Rep. Earline Parmon, D-Forsyth, stopped by to sign an oversized greeting card that read, “We’ll miss the good times, N.C.”
“Farewell to progress in public education, health care and justice,” she wrote. “The penny that would have kept us going in the right direction is in the corner, leaving thousands of North Carolina’s citizens hurting.’
Others wrote about how they will miss pre-K education and “progress for workers and services for working families,”
The coalition also offered a new take on the state toast, jabbing at the lofty claims by adding in editorial commentary. For instance, “Here’s to the land where the galax grows, where the rhododendron’s rosette glows,” was supplemented with the line, “But now that the Air Toxics Program is gone, I wouldn’t go breathing that rhododendron air if I were you.”
Organizer Rob Thompson, a co-coordinator of Together NC and executive director of the Covenant with North Carolina's Children, said though “the deals have already been made” on this year’s budget, events such as Wednesday’s are important to show the public what can happen if they don’t stay vigilant.
“We’re abandoning our commitment to education to health care to public safety all in favor of ideology,” he said. “We thought it was appropriate when you are saying goodbye to anything to have a party.”
He’s hopeful that public outcry will mean the budget is “just a blip in an arc of longer progress,” but he warned that, “if it marks a trend, it’s going to do permanent damage that’s going to take decades to recover from.”
Cautioned Warren, “It’s really easy to shut something down and make it crumple. It’s harder to build it back up.”
Comments (1)
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Outrageous! The Republican and Tea Party zealots, many of them naive newbies, are concentrating on hastening the destruction our reputation as a progressive state in one huge wave of "conservative" votes, undoing much of the decency which until now had characterized the "New South."
Where are the people? Where are the students?
In the mideast, people are rising up and rejecting wrongful government policies. In the UK, students are in the streets protesting tuition increases and loss of public services of all kinds.
Not much activity like that happening here.
Have we become sheep, watching these cretins destroy our quality of life and insuring a worse situation for our children, then claiming "
this is why we were elected," and the citizens are hardly protesting?
It seems mass public outcry, more than simply voting after the damage is done, has been discarded. Before the advent of social media,public protest served our country and state well during the civil rights and anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s.
I wonder why our current students, just reported as pathetically lacking in knowledge of history, are so docile. Texting and tweeting don't seem to play the role in our supposedly advanced society that they apparently do in the nascent democracies, where people are struggling for basic human values, instead of concerning themselves with trivia like making NASCAR the state sport, or painting themselves blue for basketball games.
And this is just the beginning. As our battered middle class sees what effects these new outrages engender, it'll be largely too late.
Damn!
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