Friday from the Archives: “A Moment on Hooper Lane: How We See, How We Are Seen”
an essay by Bland Simpson in NCLR 2018
[Digital Editor’s Note: I don’t normally post entire passages from older pieces. But I think Simpson’s writing here speaks for itself.]
“Perhaps Mr. Friday did not see the worst of the decade: the challenging of women’s right to
privacy; the continuing denial of a federal insurance program – Medicaid expansion – that would
have provided health care to half a million of our brothers and sisters; the suppression of both the
vote and the effectiveness of certain voters; the notorious bathroom bill that cost us further loss of
respect for our state, as well as half a billion dollars; and the tax giveaways that take three billion dollars
a year of the people’s revenues and put it into the pockets of corporations and high-end earners,
even as public school teachers and public schools go wanting. Education Week recently declared us
fortieth in education in the nation, and we should be ashamed.
Mr. Friday foresaw what was coming, all right. He felt it: that the Old North State’s noble motto –
To Be, Rather Than to Seem – was for quite some time going to be shamelessly and abjectly reversed.
As our Hooper Lane conversation about water carried on, we turned to the population growth
that state demographers had predicted, advising us all that we should expect a North Carolina of
twelve million people by the year 2030.
“We really need to be prepared for it,” Mr. Friday said, as he grew increasingly animated. “And it’s not just water – it’ll affect everything. Our schools, roads, agriculture, health care, environment, you name it!” After he spoke about each of these areas, and more, the clouds gliding by above as the wind rose, at last he looked past me (he was facing east) and shook his index finger vigorously toward Raleigh, saying, “How are we ever going to provide for the twelve million in the future when we are not even taking care of the nine million we have today? Where is the vision?”
We must leave these lost years behind lest they become a lost decade or, even worse, two lost decades. We must answer President Friday’s questions – spoken six years ago, yet as germane today as they were then – in ways we know from his great life he would have us answer them.
This is hard work and, in the political arena, it is contentious work. But it is good and necessary work, and we must do it. The vision to do so is all across North Carolina, if only we can once again apply it toward a progressive public life for all North Carolinians, the ones here now, and the ones yet to come. Would
that we could greet each and every one of these millions of newcomers, whether they are born here or come from away, like the original native Americans, the first peoples twelve millennia ago.
Would that we could give them each a few grains of sand from a seabeach or a pinch of poquosin peat, a bit of red clay from a Piedmont field or a rounded stone from some Blue Ridge stream, so they might touch and be touched by “the goodliest land.” And then tell the stories of our gains, our losses, our many identities and our big, deep culture so compellingly that everyone – new-comers and old-timers alike – truly understands what it means to say, with deep feeling and pride:
“I am a North Carolinian.”
Read Simpson’s essay on ProQuest. Add the 2018 issue to your collection today!
