The weather now is perfect Carolina autumn. Do yourself a favor. Get up, ignore all screens and walk outside. Walk down Franklin Street from Chapel Hill to Carrboro, or Churton Street in Hillsborough.
Absorb the plethora of humanity you walk past, sharing a common space peacefully. Enjoy the cozy feeling of a small town with a vibrant main street offering many things that make life worth living. Find a place of pastoral peace (ice cream on the porch of Maple View Farm, anyone?). End with a musical, theatrical, or intellectual event, from PlayMakers to Cat’s Cradle to any of the multitude of things at UNC.
We live in a changed and shaken United States of America. But we also live in Orange County, N.C. This county nurtures the nation’s oldest public university. We are some of the most passionate activists in the world. We are some of the most decent and courteous neighbors in the world. We are hard striving workers, in school or in industry. We passed bonds to improve our schools and deliver affordable housing even at cost to ourselves.
Many of our businesses, through Orange County Living Wage or independently, commit to pay living wages to vulnerable workers not because of a government mandate, but because it is the moral and ethical thing to do. We are great because we are good.
The shining city on a hill endures tenaciously as a metaphor in American politics. In this darkness, the nation and state need this county to shine.
We must show a desperate and afraid country that plurality, charity, mercy, intellectualism and artistry can come together for a wonderful way of being in the world. Let us do the work that needs to be done.
