Protesters shamefully shut down speech

Shameful! The university that 45 years ago defied an unconstitutional infringement of free speech has now allowed the silencing of a former congressman who had dared to discuss his opposition to state and federal legislation granting in-state tuition to illegal immigrants. Former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo had been invited to speak in a small auditorium at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but protesters first drowned him out and stretched a protest banner ("No one is illegal") in front of him and then broke out a window in the Bingham Hall auditorium. Campus police determined the violence and destruction of public property to warrant clearing the auditorium.

When the state legislature in 1963 passed the Speaker Ban Law, prohibiting any member of the Communist Party or anyone who had exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination from speaking on university property, students and faculty rose up in protest against the restrictions on free speech. A communist speaker who had been barred from campus set up a microphone on the Franklin Street sidewalk and had his say before a respectful audience of students and faculty. After negative court rulings and the threat of loss of the university's accreditation, the legislature repealed the law.

A generation later, protesters shouted down Tancredo who, despite his extreme views about illegal immigration, was calm, polite and rational. His opinions were the same ones he had expressed in last year's Republican presidential debates, but at Chapel Hill he was shouted down, often profanely, by those accusing him of "hate speech." After campus police hustled the invited speaker out of the building, according to the News and Observer, about 200 protesters gathered outside and chanted, "We shut him down; no racists in our town" and "Yes, racists, we will fight, we know where you sleep at night."

If that chant doesn't scare you, it should. It's a clear threat to anyone who disagrees with the protesters. Accusing Tancredo of "hate speech" also should give you pause. At a time when the state legislature is considering criminalizing "bullying" by public school students and the state university system is pondering punishment for "hate speech," Tancredo's reception shows just how broadly "hate speech" can be defined. Any opinion with which you disagree can be called "hate speech." Tancredo did not express hatred of anyone, nor did he utter racially discriminatory opinions. His position has been that the United States should enforce its immigration laws and squelch any policies that undermine those laws. But the shouting, stomping, window-breaking protesters remind him, "we know where you sleep at night." I would take that as a threat of more violence, perhaps even murder.

The First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech does not categorize speech as "good" or "bad," as "loving" or "hateful." It guarantees free speech, the freedom to express opinions, even unpopular ones. Tuesday night's shouting-down of Tancredo is a shameful event anywhere, but especially on a university campus where, once, unpopular free speech was defended.

A retirement announcement, finally

District Attorney Howard Boney, who has been in charge of prosecutions in Wilson, Nash and Edgecombe counties for 30 years, is going to retire. Hallelujah! Boney, who was appointed to fill the unexpired term of Frank Brown (who moved up to a judgeship), might be former Gov. Jim Hunt's worst appointment.

Not that you'd know that by his success at the ballot box. Boney cruised to re-election every four years, often with no opposition. While other judicial districts have featured lively, hard-fought elections for district attorney, Boney was never seriously challenged. Occasionally, an ambitious young attorney would test the waters but would back away. Observers suspected that Boney made sure that any criminal defense attorneys who dared to challenge him would find their ability to make a living sharply curtailed. District attorneys in North Carolina set the court calendar and can decide pretty much arbitrarily whether charges should be reduced or dropped.

In 1984, Boney decided he was ready to leap to the big time and announced that he would run for attorney general. He held an announcement at the Angus Barn in Raleigh and invited the press. I sent a reporter to cover the event, and she returned with her eyes glazed. This guy thinks he should be running law enforcement in North Carolina? A few days later, the Tarboro newspaper took a look at Boney's wife's divorce filing, in which she characterized him as a womanizer. The spicy details kicked the air out of Boney's balloon.

But his scuttled foray into statewide politics didn't hurt his electability in the 7th Judicial District. He kept getting re-elected, despite a very low-profile persona. He rarely prosecuted cases himself, and crime reporters quickly learned that it was useless to try to get a quote from Boney. He was almost never available.

Boney made one more appearance in the news several years ago when he landed in a Tarboro hospital after a traffic accident. He was the passenger in a car driven by another court official when the car went off the road and crashed. The driver was charged with DWI and, if memory serves, had a blood alcohol content in the 0.20s. The joke around the newsroom at the time was that if the "designated driver" was that drunk, imagine what the passenger's blood alcohol must have been. Boney left word at the hospital that no information on his condition was to be released to the public.

Many Wilson residents will associate Boney with the Brittany Willis murder case. Two years after the murder, one of the suspects was still sitting in Wilson County jail awaiting trial. Such a long delay was not unheard of during Boney's tenure, but the state NAACP and others brought pressure on Boney to turn the case over to the attorney general, which he finally agreed to do. The case had become too hot for Boney, and the long delays in the case could not be justifiably explained away.

A couple of years ago Boney announced he was being treated for some health problems. If his retirement plans are predicated on ill health, he has my sympathy, but I'll still be glad to see him retire.

When Gov. Bev Perdue appoints a replacement for Boney, it will be a new day in 7th Judicial District prosecutions. If Perdue chooses wisely, it could be a brighter day for criminal justice.

Amazing rescue in a difficult situation

The bold and dramatic rescue of U.S. merchant ship Capt. Richard Phillips Sunday brings an extraordinary end to an international crime that has become far too ordinary. Navy SEAL snipers picked off three pirates who were holding Phillips in a lifeboat being towed by the USS Bainbridge. The Bainbridge's captain, determining Phillips' life to be in imminent danger from the pirates aiming AK-47 assault rifles at him, ordered the snipers to pick off the pirates. President Obama had approved the action if it became necessary.

Consider the difficulty of those three shots: The snipers were firing from a rolling ship in heavy seas, aiming at men about 100 feet away in a small boat bobbing on the waves. They had to perfectly time their shots to the rise and fall of their own ship and the rise and fall of the small boat, and they had to synchronize their shots so that all three pirates would be hit simultaneously so that no pirate could shoot Phillips in retaliation. A fourth pirate, who was engaged in negotiations over the piracy of the Maersk Alabama, is in U.S. custody.

Last week's seizure of the Maersk Alabama is merely the latest episode in an epidemic of piracy off the coast of Somalia, which has been a lawless country since the early 1990s. Merchant ships and private vessels have been held for ransoms of millions of dollars. Piracy is driving the coastal economy of the region, and trading nations, including American, European and Asian powers, seem unable to do anything about the pirates, who are welcomed in Somali ports.

Sunday's U.S. actions, along with an earlier French commando rescue of a private yacht that had been hijacked, should mark the beginning of the end of this lawless piracy. The United States, which has a handful of ships patrolling off the Somali coast, has most of its naval assets tied down supplying and supporting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the United States and other world powers must take firm, coordinated action to end the pirates' rule of the high seas. The area where the pirates operate is a huge area, described as three times the size of Texas. A handful of pirates — just four captured the Maersk Alabama — operating off of small, speedy boats can seize multi-million-dollar cargo ships.

But if the United States could win the Battle of the North Atlantic at the beginning of World War II, escorting and protecting cargo ships against a determined onslaught of German submarines, it should be able to foil a few lightly armed Somali pirates. A real concerted effort will be necessary. Convoys, like those used in World War II, might be necessary. But the United States and other naval powers have the assets to patrol the Indian Ocean/Gulf of Aden area where the pirates operate. Combat ships can deploy fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters and unmanned aircraft to identify the pirates' small vessels and destroy them.

Fighting pirates is a dangerous business. A young United States sent its Navy to North Africa to fight two wars (1801-1805 and 1815) against the Barbary Pirates, who were disrupting international trade 200 years ago in the same way the Somali pirates are today. The May 1975 attempt to rescue the crew of the merchant ship Mayaguez, which had been seized by the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, shows the hazards of combating piracy. Eighteen U.S. servicemen died in the attempt to retake the Mayaguez and rescue the crew, but the American crew had already been released before the rescue assault began.

Piracy can be a lucrative business when the pirates have a safe haven, as they do in Somalia. Ridding the Horn of Africa of piracy will take a coordinated effort by the international community, but failing to confront the pirates will only make matters worse.

Easter Monday is not a holiday

Easter Monday, which used to be a state holiday, arrives cool and cloud-masked after a glorious but slightly chilly Easter Sunday. At sunrise service, worshippers huddled and shivered in the faint light with a quarter moon gliding toward the western horizon. I wondered at the church organist's ability to keep her frigid fingers flexed and nimble on the electric keyboard that had been hauled outside for the service.

After a hearty breakfast in the church fellowship hall, my wife and I went home to read the paper and enjoy more coffee. Another joyful church service at 11 punctuated a day of quiet, sleepy reading, a brisk walk and gardening in the yard, where flowers and weeds are both springing to life. And, oh yes, I clicked on the television to see who won the Masters golf tournament, remembering that a year ago the final round of the Masters was the last time our television was turned on for nearly two months. Just nothing worth watching or other things to do.

Although Monday is no longer a state holiday, the city of Wilson has canceled garbage pickup, and many workers can't get used to the idea of a Friday holiday instead of a Monday holiday. Since the 1960s, most federal holidays, including President's Day, Memorial Day and Martin Luther King Holiday, fall on Mondays, giving federal workers a much-desired three-day weekend. But now Good Friday, which is not a federal holiday, is a state holiday.

Although I am neither trudging off to work nor savoring a three-day weekend on this Monday, I do have a long to-do list, including a job application to complete, some volunteer work for a nonprofit organization, errands to run and preparations to make. It's a Monday like most Mondays these past six months.

Good Friday 2009

It is Good Friday, and the forecast is for a warm spring day. Last night, my wife and I attended the somber Maundy Thursday service, receiving communion before the stripping of the altar and the covering of the sanctuary cross with a black shroud. The rubrics say the congregation "departs in silence," which we did, exiting into the cool dark night. Tonight, the Good Friday service will be conducted in mournful shadows.

This Holy Week, I've been reading Marcus Borg's "Reading the Bible Again For the First Time," an intriguing approach to the Bible that advocates seeing the Bible as largely metaphorical rather than historical (in the modern sense). Borg, who spoke last year in Barton College's Sprinkle Lecture series, distinguishes between what is actually true and what is factually true. Parables, allegories, poetry and fiction can be actually true; that is, they can convey lessons that are entirely true, without being factually true. When such literary devices contain such truth, it doesn't matter whether they are factually true. Was Jesus' Parable of the Good Samaritan based on an actual incident, on historical fact? It doesn't matter (and we have no reason to think it was) because the parable conveys the truth Jesus intended, the truthful answer to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" Borg's approach renders irrelevant arguments over the six-day creation of the world or the biblical miracles. I had previously read Borg's "The Heart of Christianity," which has a similar theme. Whether you agree with him or not, Borg's perspective (he counts himself a Christian and sees Jesus of Nazareth as truly the son of God, though he has doubts about many of the supernatural feats the Gospels attribute to Jesus) is interesting and enlightening.

This Good Friday is also my mother's birthday. Had she lived, she would have been 91 today. She died three years ago the day after her birthday. I clearly recall her explanation, when I was 8 or 10 years old, why the day of Jesus' execution would be called "good." April 10 and April 11 shall never pass without my remembering her.

The Internet can be a nasty place

There's a lot of nastiness out there, a relentless tide of vicious insults and negativity borne across cyberspace on the magic carpet of anonymity. The irrational anger this week prompted me to stop "following" a blog that had initially intrigued me a few weeks ago. A friend tipped me off to the McClatchy Watch blog, and I began following it. I read the e-mails and explanations for all the layoffs at McClatchy papers across the country and about the continuing fall of McClatchy stock, which had gone from more than $50 a share when the California company bought Knight-Ridder's newspaper chain in 2006 to less than 50 cents a share.

With thousands of layoffs in the company, I expected some anger and bitterness, but the most vindictive comments (nearly all anonymous) were not about newspaper layoffs but about alleged bias in news coverage. Comments accused the Miami Herald (a former Knight-Ridder flagship) of being a communist organ. Others accused newspapers in general of promoting a socialist or communist agenda. Several comments relished the thought that newspapers would go out of business, leaving thousands and thousands more journalists out of work.

The final straw, after I had tolerated these misinformed rants while seeking the occasional news about McClatchy papers, was an attack on an ad created by the N.C. Press Association. NCPA and its member papers (of which I used to be a part) have been waging a campaign against a bill in the General Assembly that would eliminate the requirement for public notices to be published in general circulation newspapers, allowing governments to post notices on web sites instead. The ad that McClatchy Watch found offensive depicted an older woman who complained that she didn't surf the net for notices about zoning or public meetings. She wanted the notices to remain in her newspaper, and she reminded legislators that she and her friends voted. The blog post ridiculed NCPA for stereotyping senior citizens, for attempting to hang onto profitable public notices and for standing in the way of progress.

I responded to the blog with a comment (using my Erstwhile Editor nom de guerre), saying that I thought the blogger was being too harsh. The ad was politically savvy because older Americans are more likely to vote, and it was only one of four ads NCPA had designed and the only one that addressed the older readers aspect.

Well! Anonymous commenters accused me of being a McClatchy toady, of owning worthless McClatchy stock, of discriminating against the elderly, of being stupid, of being part of the leftist conspiracy to overthrow America, of being part of the dead trees plutocracy, etc., etc. I could have responded that I own no McClatchy stock (and never did)  and never worked for a McClatchy newspaper, but what would be the point?

I just quit following the blog. A generation schooled on cable televisions screamfests have forgotten how to listen to other opinions and how to show respect to those who disagree with them. Political discourse may never recover.

Class sizes turn into state budget battle

The state Senate is challenging Gov. Beverly Perdue, the N.C. Association of Educators and conventional wisdom with  its budget bill. While closing a $3 billion hole in the state budget, Perdue increased state spending on education, and she pointedly said the state shouldn't save money by increasing class size. The Senate said "not so fast."

Increasing class size by just two students, to 20 children in kindergarten through third grade and to 22 students in fourth through 12th grade would save the state $320 million. Senate Democrats (in the same party as Perdue) decided that was a good way to save $320 million. The state has been reducing class size for more than a decade. Smaller classes were a favorite promise of Govs. Mike Easley and Jim Hunt. It seems reasonable that smaller classes would mean better learning because teachers could give each child more attention, but research shows that reducing class size has little impact on student achievement. The primary beneficiaries of smaller class sizes are teachers. Smaller classes require more teachers to teach them, so it's no surprise that the NCAE, which derives member income from teachers, strongly supports smaller classes. And NCAE has been a major supporter of Perdue.

Local school systems, on the other hand, have borne the burden of implementing reduced class sizes. The state provided additional funding for teachers but not additional funding for classrooms. So local school boards had to find the money to add onto schools, which might shift from 50 classrooms of 22 students each to 55 classrooms of 20 students each. Where are you going to put those extra classes? In a closet? In a corner of the gym? Or in a costly mobile unit?

If the Senate's plan to temporarily increase class sizes goes through, school superintendents won't be particularly relieved. They've already expanded facilities to accommodate the added classrooms as smaller class sizes were mandated over the past decade. The state will save on the salaries of  an estimated 6,200 teachers, but it's the local principals who'll have to tell teachers they're being laid off.