Duncan Murrell's blog

Last Sunday in the Chapel Hill Herald's letters column, the Community Action Network's Fred Black took issue with a column by Dan Coleman, which took issue with the Community Action Network. Surprise, surprise. The roots of the animus between CAN and Coleman (and, it should be said, the Sierra Club the Greens, and most of the town's New Left) are long, and not worth describing here. Let's just say they have a difference of opinion.

In Black's letter he went on to impugn Coleman's ethics as a columnist this way:

"Mr. Coleman alleges that CAN has not clarified its policy interests and endorsement procedures; we have. What hasn't been clarified is Mr. Coleman's tap dancing on the line of endorsing candidates in his columns, his active endeavors in support of "his" candidates, and his ethical standards as a columnist. He needs to clearly disclose these things to the readers of The Chapel Hill Herald."

People around here love the word "smart." We're "smart." We have "smart" kids. We drink "smart" juice. We believe in "smart" growth. And now we want a smart-growth high school in Carrboro.

The smart-growth high school may represent the unified theory of folks who have escaped the city, embraced the space and beauty of our landscape and the pace of our lifestyles, but are still nostalgic for the days when they attended schools that began with "P.S." Establishing an urban neighborhood school in a non-urban environment would represent the overcoming of the last great obstacle to this marriage of fire and water we've been noodling with for the better part of a decade. That is, how to live a life as charged and overflowing and creative and convenient as life in Brooklyn (or Wicker Park, or Cambridge), while dispensing with the smell, and the crowds, and the dirt, and the attenuation of the natural world. Maybe in Carrboro, we think, we can just wish it into being.