An anthem for a lifetime of passion

Sunday's Observer column:

Fifty-seven years ago, Harriette Thompson walked up to Eugene Craft, the director of music at Myers Park United Methodist Church, and asked to sing in the choir. Thompson and her husband, Sydnor, had joined the church shortly after moving to Charlotte from New York. She had formal training as a singer and pianist, but Craft told her he had no more paid positions on the choir.

“I’ll sing for free,” she remembers telling him, and so she did. Then she did much more.

Harriette and her husband had noticed a dearth of classical music in their new city, so Harriette went to UNC Charlotte and Sydnor to Davidson, where each helped to start the schools’ public radio stations. They also contributed to arts around Charlotte, not only with money and fundraising but with her talents on the piano, which she played for the Charlotte Symphony and others.

All the while, she sang on Sundays in the choir. For 50-plus years. “She is,” says current music director Jimmy Jones, “a force.”

But two years ago, on a visit to the dentist, Harriette learned that parts of her jawbone had deteriorated. By last year, cancer had spread toward her right ear. “I could tell I was on pitch,” she says, “but I couldn’t tell if I was blending with the other voices.” She told Jones she could no longer sing with the choir.

When Jones couldn’t talk her out of it, he talked instead with choir members about how best to honor her. The choir raised money, and Jones made what he calls a “Hail Mary” phone call to Stephen Paulus, a renowned composer who has written for soloists and symphonies around the world. Paulus, hearing her story, agreed to write Harriette an anthem.

“I don’t deserve this,” Harriette told Jones last October, when he called.

“Yes, you do,” Jones said.

She does, choir members say, not only because of her devotion to their music, or to the arts in Charlotte, but because neither waned with a diagnosis of cancer. Instead, she has taken what life allows her, and then some. An example: This June, at age 89, she’ll fly to San Diego with one of her sons to run in the Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon. It’ll be her 14th straight year.

“I come in first every year in my age group,” she says.

A pause. A smile.

“Because I’m the only one.”

This is a choice you make, at some point, on some level. Some hear the word “cancer” and are locked away with the dragon. Some hear the news and decide that the next year or five years or whatever they get will be the best they can make it. So it is with Harriette Thompson. “She’s been an inspiration,” says Jones.

So last Saturday, Harriette sat with Sydnor and their sons and daughters for a private performance of My Help Comes From The Lord, based on Psalm 121 and composed by Paulus, who flew to Charlotte for the debut. The anthem was played again at three Sanctuary services the next day. “It was overwhelming,” she says now. “Beautiful.” And she dabs at her eyes.

Our collective spirit has taken a hard pounding lately. A harsh economy, a competition for resources, and we find ourselves wondering not only where we’re headed, but who we are. This is not an answer, but a reminder: We are capable of kindness that can make you marvel. Not enough to beat cancer, of course, but to share some joy at the edge of its sadness.

That’s what happened last weekend in Charlotte, and again on Friday, when Harriette Thompson signed onto her computer at home to watch a video of the performance.

She wasn’t sure how the replay would sound, but when the organ began, she tilted her good ear toward the screen and nodded. When the choir joined, her heels found a soft rhythm on the carpet. I will lift up my eyes, they sang, and she dabbed at hers again. Her song. Not so much a gift, but a trade. Spirit for spirit.

In a difficult moment, a picture of grace

The picture was taken after the meeting began. David Knoble and Amelia Stinson-Wesley, two candidates for a Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board seat, were seated next to each other. They had met just two days before and had talked only briefly, so when Stinson-Wesley reached for his hand 10 minutes into the meeting, Knoble was surprised.

He’ll even admit he was a little uncomfortable.

But he didn’t let go.

Did you notice the photo? It was published in last Friday’s Charlotte Observer, the day after the CMS Board of Education appointed Stinson-Wesley to fill a vacant District 6 seat. That image, with its gentleness, seemed not to fit with that meeting, at which a Democrat-heavy board bluntly asserted its will by picking another Democrat to represent a majority Republican district. A lot of unhappy words have followed, including in this space, but in the midst of what went wrong that night, one thing didn’t.

Up until that moment, about 10 minutes in, David Knoble thought he had a decent chance at being Mecklenburg County’s next school board member. He and his wife, Kelli, have lived in District 6 for 14 years, and both have been active and well-regarded in the school system. At that Thursday meeting, some people prematurely congratulated Knoble and joked that they might run against him in two years.

Stinson-Wesley was sitting next to him by then. She was quiet, mostly, although the two talked a little and learned they had a mutual friend from Duke Divinity School. Then the board came in, and the nominations began.

Knoble’s nomination, from former District 6 representative Tim Morgan, was expected. But when board member Tom Tate nominated Stinson-Wesley, the room was stunned. She reached for Knoble’s hand. He smiled. He whispered to her: “You know you have the vote.” She whispered back: “You don’t know that yet.”

But she did have it, and inside, Knoble was deflated. He’d spent a couple years thinking about pursuing a school board seat, and he’d been encouraged to do so by people inside CMS. Now his hopes had dried up and blown away, and the job was going to the woman holding his hand.

He considered letting go at this point – and he could’ve diplomatically done so with a pat of the hand and encouraging smile. Instead, he thought of all the things coming Stinson-Wesley’s way. Not only a learning curve that will challenge even a smart woman like her, but the yoke she’ll carry through it as the Democrats’ pick in a conservative district.

Knoble knew this, too: People were watching them right then, watching him, and although no one could possibly be as disappointed as he was, there surely were some who were angry. He wanted to show them, too, that it was OK. “One of the great things about our country is the ability for us to choose who we want to make big choices,” he says now. “I wanted to respect the process.”

So he held on, as did she, appreciatively. “It was a connection,” she says, and when it was over, he gave her a hug and went home, where his son asked if he had won. There was no easy answer, just as there often won’t be in the next two years, in a school system with such disparate needs and populations, each kicking up storms of anger.

So he told his son “yes and no.” He hadn’t been selected for the school board seat, but he had given it his best. It’s there for us to see. A moment of grace in a moment of disappointment. Such a simple, difficult thing to find.

The familiar call of the arrogant

Because we can.

Do you recognize that? It’s the call of the arrogant, the powerful – or at least those who believe themselves to be. It’s the explanation we get from people who don’t think they need to explain themselves, and last week we heard it in words and in deeds from those who’ve forgotten whom they serve.

In Raleigh, House Republicans held an after-midnight veto override vote early Thursday without giving the public notice – unless, possibly, you happened to be on the General Assembly website at 12:15 a.m. It was a vote Republicans could have held on any morning or afternoon and achieved the same result, yet they inexplicably decided to invite criticism by doing it with the stars shining down.

When asked about that vote, House speaker Thom Tillis, normally a savvy guy, said this: “The fact of the matter is we got it done.”

Because we can.

It’s why Democrats on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Board of Education voted to fill a vacant District 6 seat last week with someone who doesn’t represent the district’s conservative demographic. Led by board chair Ericka Ellis-Stewart, a Democrat, the board selected Rev. Amelia Stinson-Wesley, another Democrat, who would likely never win a District 6 election and who, like most everyone else in the room, suspected she wasn’t the most qualified.

Before her at-large election in November, Ellis-Stewart had proclaimed that she could represent the whole district instead of the low-income children for whom she’d previously advocated. But on Thursday, she and the other four Democrats chose one of two Democrats among the 12 District 6 candidates – and only after it was clear the other Democrat would come with too much political baggage.

Because they could, of course, just as Republicans did with a vacant school board seat three years ago. Now, Democrats hold a majority on the board, and Ellis-Stewart got the most votes of any at-large candidate in November. What kind of threat could a small geographic slice of grumbling conservatives pose?

Here’s one: Last month, county commissioner Bill James floated the idea of a Town of Ballantyne, one that would de-annex several South Charlotte communities from the city. While the rest of Charlotte snickered at the notion, officials and others have been making plans about meetings, boundaries and signatures that would make the concept real.

James, who says he is not one of those officials, says that “stage 2” of the plan would be for Ballantyne, along with Mint Hill, Matthews and Pineville, to ask the legislature to form their own South Mecklenburg School System. Is it all a long shot? Yes. But those who roll eyes should remember they are dealing with a population of do-ers who are accustomed to accomplishing what they want.

These suburbanites wouldn’t mind the lower taxes that would come with deannexation. And while they are far from the first citizens to feel this way, they are tired of the disconnect from the leadership of Charlotte. They are tired of those leaders calling them selfish for wanting the good things most parents want for their children. They are tired of the arrogance, which they saw again in a school board that chose politics over public good.

And the thing is – none of us were surprised, no? Not at the school board, nor at Republicans in Raleigh, nor at the latest dysfunction we saw last week in Washington. We’ve come to expect the contempt our elected officials show us, and we too often fulfill their expectation that we’ll shake our docile heads and do little else. But history is also filled with voters who rise together in protest, and with politicians who learn they had less of a mandate than they thought – as Thom Tillis might understand if he someday runs for statewide office.

And if the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board follows last week’s slap with policy that disregards its now-underrepresented district, more citizens might finally feel compelled to do what has only been talked about before. Not because they necessarily want to, and not because it would be good for Charlotte. But because they can.

Finding the lightness on this day

Today's Observer column. Merry Christmas, everyone:

Eight mornings before Christmas, a man walked into the Kmart on Freedom Drive and asked to see a manager. He wanted to pay off some customers’ layaway accounts.

The man had seen stories recently about people receiving that gift – in Indiana, he thinks, but possibly somewhere else. Layaway payoffs have become a heartening trend – with people walking into stores here and across the country to settle an account or two, to surprise someone with a gift from a stranger, to remind us of the spirit this season is supposed to bring.

This man, who lives in Charlotte, wanted to do the same but more. He thought he might pay off $2,000 worth of layaways. He is not a rich man, so this was a gift that would leave a mark on him, as well.

That Kmart that Saturday was crowded and harried and not a particularly joyful place to be – a little like our lives this time of year. It seems harder to find the quiet in Christmas these days, for so many reasons. For some, it’s the battle of managing the message, of accepting that Santa is a big part of it all but hoping to at least keep him away from the manger. For all of us, faithful or not, it’s a struggle to manage everything else – the lists, the time, the heaviness of expectations that are laid upon the season.

Those expectations are more daunting for some in this economy, and it’s those people the man wanted to help. And so he found Kmart store manager Stephanie Williams, who told him she would do whatever he wanted.

He decided on three criteria in paying off layaways: First, the accounts needed to be weeks old, to show that someone was planning and paying off a balance bit by bit. He also wanted no layaways with big ticket items like big-screen TVs, and he wanted to see something in each account that showed purchases for children.

Williams found 19 layaways fairly easily, totaling about $1,700. Processing each took time – the store’s system was set up for commerce, not charity – so our giver went to run an errand, thought about it all, then came back. Let’s do more, he told Williams, and they did, stopping finally at 49 accounts. The new total: just under $5,000.

He left again, this time to find a dollar store, where he bought Christmas cards, one for each of the layaways he had paid. He sat in his car, and on each of the 49 cards he wrote a message: “This Christmas, be kind to strangers, be kind to family, and be kind to yourself.”

It’s that last part – “be kind to yourself” – that he thinks about now.

“I sort of imagine what it would feel like to want to give my family something and have to plan six weeks ahead to pay – and to feel like that was in jeopardy,” he says. “That would feel heavy and painful. It seems exactly the opposite of what Christmas is supposed to feel like.”

This week, Williams has seen her customers come into Kmart and discover their layaways have been paid off. “They have been overjoyed,” she says. What Christmas is supposed to feel like.

It’s something we all can offer, our giver thinks. Not necessarily with money, but with a kind word, with a hand on the shoulder, with time. It’s about making someone feel better, he says. Or perhaps this: Making someone feel lighter. There’s a word for that we share on this day, whether you look gratefully to the heavens, or in wonder at what’s around us: Peace.

At Harding, a protest rings familiar

Shortly before last week's election, a group of Harding High School parents met with Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board chair Eric Davis about concerns they had with their school. The group was small - just a few parents, Davis says - but they came carrying worries from the larger Harding community.

Those concerns touched on safety issues this school year, the first since Harding's magnet program was eliminated while hundreds of students were added from now-closed Waddell High. But the parents' primary worry was academic - many of those new students, who come from low-income minority homes, were below grade level, demanding attention from teachers that inevitably held back the progress of Harding's traditionally higher-achieving students.

The concerns mirrored those that many Harding parents have voiced since CMS contemplated the change to Harding a year ago. Those parents, almost all of them black, predicted then that academics would suffer, and they are rightfully worried now.

And if they were white, they would be called racist for saying so.

For more than 40 years, CMS has struggled with the gap between its best and worst performing students, and for all that time the tug between the two has been splayed against the backdrop of race. It's suburban whites not wanting their kids in classrooms with urban blacks, people say. It's west Charlotte vs. south Charlotte.

But the worries that you hear at Harding? They're the same that many parents expressed when Charlotte decided to bus schoolchildren across town to achieve integration in the 1960s and beyond, and they're the same we've heard each time school officials have considered redrawing districts.

Did some white parents simply not want their child in a school with blacks? Certainly, especially 40 years ago. But for most, and more recently, it's been a simple calculation: their children might suffer from being in schools where students didn't perform as well. When given a choice of a classroom that was surging ahead or one that was catching up, which do you think most parents preferred?

Racist, they've been called.

Can we stop that now?

Harding's parents might argue that their case is different. CMS, they say, has gutted an historically strong program that was a model of how low-income and minority students could thrive. But the argument rings familiar, no matter the color of the anger: We had a good thing going. Then you forced new kids on us.

Know this: The goal here isn't to play gotcha with Harding's parents. They are justifiably mournful about a very real loss, and they rightfully want their children in a place that offers the best chance to excel.

In that, they share common ground with parents across our county - an understanding that children need help to overcome the socioeconomic disadvantages forced upon them, but an awareness that providing that help often comes with consequences to others.

It's not racist - at Harding or anywhere - to worry about those consequences. Is it selfish? Of course. But every good parent is - at least a little.

Last week, voters elected two new members to the CMS school board, including Ericka Ellis-Stewart, who also was one of the parents in that meeting with board chair Davis. Ellis-Stewart, whose son transferred from Harding to the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics, did not return a call last week.

The new board will face the same challenges as the last - providing the best education to all its students, with resources that aren't growing as fast as the student population, and with that achievement gap still glaring back at them.

The differences are real, and the challenges are formidable. Perhaps we can ask together what we're going to do about it.

And maybe this time, at least, we can do so without the labels.

What happens after we send the illegal immigrants away?

For years, we’ve been told how much better our lives would be after we truly cracked down on illegal immigration. There’d be more jobs for Americans, fewer classrooms bogged down by non-English speakers. Our emergency rooms would be free of burden. We wouldn’t have to punch “1” so much for calls in English. A better life, if only we could send the illegals home.

Now we know.

Here’s what you get when you get the Mexicans to leave: Rotting crops, businesses closing, concerned police, children missing school. And, of course, families torn apart.

But at least the lawbreakers are leaving, right?

This is what we’re seeing in Alabama, which this month began enforcing the most rigorous immigration law in the country. There, it’s illegal to knowingly employ, assist or house an undocumented immigrant. The law also compels schools and police to verify the status of immigrants – or at least those who look like one – although a circuit court temporarily blocked the schools provision late Friday.

Georgia and Arizona lawmakers have passed similar laws, and North Carolina is prepping the soil by forming a new legislative committee on immigration issues. Its goal: make North Carolina “unwelcome for any illegal alien,” said Republican Rep. Frank Iler, a co-chair, to a Wilmington reporter last week.

Now we have a preview of what comes next. In Alabama, the new law has jarred cities and rattled communities where Latinos long ago put down roots while tending crops and working in poultry plants. Church pews are emptying. Businesses are scrambling to replace workers. Police are fretting about when and when not to check papers. Superintendents are pleading with Latino parents, assuring them they won’t be grabbed for deportation when they pick up their child. It’s not working – parents have pulled the kids, many of them U.S. citizens, and kept them home.

Above all, immigrants are leaving – some to other states that might be more welcoming, some back to their homeland.

To which many of you out there would say: Great.

Immigration opponents have long declared – with some real justification – that illegal immigrants strain our emergency rooms, slow our classrooms with ESL students, and cost our cities and towns millions in services. And once they’re gone, the thinking goes, more jobs will be available for unemployed American workers.

Except: In Alabama and Georgia, farmers say the law is killing them. The farmers, most of whom live in rural, conservative counties, say the U.S. Guest Worker program is woefully inadequate in supplying workers to tend their fields. What about all those locals needing jobs? “You’re out there in the sun and the rain,” an Alabama farmers representative told the Washington Post. “It’s just not attractive to Americans.”

So crops are going unharvested, with more than half rotting in some places. Farms are floundering, and prices surely will rise. Another casualty: Businesses that serve immigrant communities are suffering and closing their doors. That’s money that helps rev our economies – and jobs going away when we need them most.

It’s why the send-them-home solution has long been antiquated. Our cities and towns have settled into commerce that includes immigrant communities, their labor force, and their dollars. A better solution includes a combination of tightening borders, penalizing illegal immigrants with back taxes and fines, and perhaps making them take English lessons to help them assimilate – all in exchange for a path to U.S. citizenship.

That basic framework happens to be what President George Bush proposed five years ago, but those ideas were trounced in the Senate. Still, his attempt offered more than President Barack Obama and Congress, who occasionally talk immigration – but never risk the danger of an actual proposal.

The reason, of course, is that poll after poll show passionate disapproval of illegal immigrants. But another survey, conducted this year by Raleigh’s Public Policy Polling, showed that 69 percent of Americans were in favor of a solution similar to Bush’s, with both penalties and a path to citizenship. That support included 80 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of Democrats. Surely, numbers like those might help regrow some spines in Washington.

Because what we have otherwise is Alabama and Arizona and, soon enough, North Carolina.

Here’s what we get from those laws: U.S. citizens carrying identification papers because they look a little brown. Legal Latinos going back to their homeland, too, because they rightfully feel unwelcome. We get, most of all, another shameful chapter of Americans struggling to welcome someone different from those already living among them.

That’s OK, some say, so long as the lawbreakers are leaving.

But where is it leaving us?

An enemy's death - and neighbor's loss

What should we say to the Khan family?

They live in northeast Charlotte, in a middle class community, and in the five years before my family moved last year, they were my neighbors. They lived down the road and around the bend, and they had a son who played basketball in the street. I probably drove by him, and I’m sure I’ve waved at his parents driving by my home, but I don’t remember.

In fact, I never had occasion to meet the Khans until a few years back, when I walked down the street to knock on their door and ask, as a newspaper reporter, why their son hated the United States.

They didn’t answer the door then, and they have since been quiet until last week, when they released a statement after Samir Khan was killed Sept. 30 along with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki by a U.S. drone in Yemen.

Samir Khan was 25 years old, a former Central Piedmont Community College student who started writing a radical blog in the basement of his family’s home. By several accounts, his father and others tried to convince him his radicalism was misguided, but Khan moved to Yemen after newspaper reports about that blog. There he produced the al-Qaida magazine “Inspire,” in which he wrote: “I am proud to be a traitor to America.”

So if you’re expecting a defense of Samir Khan here, know this: He declared himself an enemy of the United States, and he died riding in a car with another sworn enemy. We can allow ourselves at least a portion of the satisfaction he would’ve taken if our country were to be attacked again.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t questions we should ask. What should we say to the Khan family, which was contacted by the U.S. government last week only after the family noted in the statement that no U.S. official had called about Samir Khan’s remains, nor offered any condolences? How do we respond when the Khans point to their son’s death, then to the Fifth Amendment, which promises due process to American citizens?

Constitutional scholars have been divided when asked to reconcile the two. Khan’s death sets a precedent in which the U.S. president can authorize the assassination of a U.S. citizen without a formal charge or trial – and without, essentially, any substantial outside checks on the decision. Even if we think this president made no error with this decision, do we move forward believing every president will make the same, right choice for the right reasons, unchecked and in secrecy? If you were troubled by the constitutional overreaches of the post-?9/11 Bush administration, you should be just as unsettled now.

Many won’t be, of course, just as many have responded to the Khan family statement with the predictably shrill voices that paint Samir Khan as representative of the Muslim American population. Some of us, too, struggle with a subtler and quieter discomfort. It’s that anxiety that’s stirred whenever we see a turban on a plane, and although we fight that urge, in difficult moments we give in. We look the other way when we learn that there’s one less terrorist that can threaten us. We don’t admonish our government for being shamed into acknowledging a family’s pain.

We are 10 years past 9/11, and the stain keeps reappearing. Not the extremists who protest mosques and prattle about Sharia law. Not the intolerant who will find fear no matter the color of its skin. It’s the reasonable among us who lose that reason, in subtle and significant ways, then promise we are and will be better than that.

So what do we say to the Khans, our neighbors, who lost a son last week after losing him years ago? Perhaps there’s not anything we can say, but we can start with this:

We’re sorry.