NewCore Uproar
All About Democracy
Did whoever wrote the March 31 editorial, “NewCore Placed Back on Course,” note the irony in the following statement (castigating the audience in the Pinehurst town meeting): “A few people in the crowd came prepared to raise hell...”)?
Eight inches above this sentence is The Pilot’s own motto: “.... to print the news and raise hell.”
I guess very little hell gets raised at The Pilot anymore. Hell barely cracks her head above the dutiful sod. The Pilot has tamped down lately, these past few years. Come on now. Live a little.
Do not take this “No Hell Allowed” pose for an excessive gentility. It is merely an attachment to the status quo, and the three things that preserve it: conservatism, the catbird seat, and an overwhelming respect for authority.
Which leads me to the second half of the editorial sentence above: “... but the council adroitly took the wind out of their sails by announcing that the unwelcome parking structure ... (would be tabled, etc.)”
No one took anyone’s anything. The voters are supposed to raise hell, and the council is supposed to listen and respond appropriately.
Both these things happened, and it was all about democracy — a thing we rarely get to experience now.
Tia Wallman
Pinehurst
It Really Ain’t Heaven
In the April 12 article about the effort to save the Walter Hines Page house for historical reasons (a project that now seems unlikely), Commissioner Donna Shannon is quoted: “We’re now in heaven — we have Panera Bread and Starbucks.”
Some of us see the arrival of Starbucks and Panera Bread as the end of the heaven we found here. These chains do not go to quaint, rural, off-the-beaten-path locations. There’s no money in that.
They show up only when the population has reached a point that makes it profitable for them. That means the area most people living here have come to love is either already destroyed or about to be.
I lived nearly 25 years near New Hope in Bucks County, Pa., a rural area that was an hour from Philadelphia and only an hour and a half from Manhattan. There were Amish plowing fields with horses when I came.
When I left, almost every farm had been sold to developers. The very atmosphere that had drawn in all the new development was destroyed by it.
About five years before what I considered the end, Starbucks moved into an old historical building in the nearby county seat.
I have nothing against Starbucks, I make it every morning from beans I buy at Lowes Foods.
In the same issue of The Pilot is the article about widening N.C. 211 into Pinehurst, basically to handle all the development in Seven Lakes and Foxfire. We’ve heard the mayor of Pinehurst and the council talking about the NewCore and a parking garage within the village proper.
Folks, the future is staring us in the face and, believe me, it ain’t heaven.
Peter Mulcahy
Pinehurst
