Havelock Scoop

Not everyone minds being shepherded through a receipt checking blockade in supermarkets and retail stores. Many folks, in fact, will gladly turn their receipts and the contents of their shopping carts over for inspection, according to a recent Havelock Scoop poll.

Eight of 19 respondents said they “gladly” show their receipts when asked. Another eight said they participate, but don’t like to do so. Just one said he or she refuses all bag and receipt checks — an answer more people should give.

Blogger David Pelfrey wrote an excellent essay on receipt checking — a growing practice among retail stores. A portion of it is excerpted below; click here to read the full post.

Here’s a scenario that is familiar to anyone who has ever set foot in Wal-Mart, CVS, Rite-Aid, or any of a dozen other major retailers. After you have made a purchase, collected your bags, or packed everything into a shopping cart, you head for the exit. Just as you approach freedom an alarm sounds (usually a sequence of ugly, electronic grunts) and a robotic voice (always female) announces: “Please return to the checkout.” Other customers immediately look in your direction, and an employee begins to approach you. What’s your next move?

If you possess an ounce of personal pride or perhaps two ounces of fortitude, then the 100 percent correct move is to proceed immediately out the door. Why? There are many reasons, chief among them being that rational adults should not instantly obey mechanical voices (unless that voice instructs us to exit a burning aircraft). Also, if you haven’t stolen anything and therefore do not require interrogation, there is absolutely nothing that should compel you to linger post-transaction. It’s depressing enough simply being there in the first place.

 Another good reason to make a quick exit is that you aren’t being paid to assist some giant retailer with its security measures. You aren’t part of the team, and you didn’t clock in. The clearest reason for leaving the store, however, is that there exists absolutely no legal obligation to remain there, and the store has no right to detain you.

Pain and pride. Embarrassment and elation. Reluctance and resolve. A night of contrasts bled into morning as I staggered off the quarter-mile track.

The blister forming on my left heel landed with a sore thud, my calves ached, my legs chafed. I had just walked 26.2 miles in the Craven County Relay for Life, an overnight team walk that raised nearly $335,000 for the American Cancer Society.

In these pages, I pledged to walk a marathon in exchange for your donations. I kept my word April 25 and 26, completing the last of my 105 laps in the pre-dawn stillness. Because of your support, I was able to give relay organizers $547 in cash and checks.

(more…)

As a terse warning to an amnesiac world, “history repeats itself” is clever. Applied to an individual lifetime, the old axiom is as false as it would be fantastic.

 We live without the benefit of cosmic second chances, do-overs, fresh starts. Each decision we make is frighteningly final; without the ability to rewind time’s relentless spool, we must choose and discern without comparative wisdom. Once we’ve made a choice, we can’t take a mulligan and test alternate outcomes — Robert Frost’s “road less traveled” may take form in the rearview mirror as an eight-lane interstate of regret.
 
That’s the premise of Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” a neat bit of philosophical fiction that left its imprint on at least one more addled mind this month. The theme of whimsy’s painful permanence resonates here at the intersection of roads not taken, paths unmapped and forbidden freeways where the fortunate cruise contentedly.

(more…)

West Craven High will be the first county high school to make its students wear uniforms if the school board approves the request as expected Thursday evening.

A request from the school administration to adopt a uniform policy is included on the Craven County Board of Education’s consent agenda, Chairman Carr Ipock said today. Consent agenda items are usually approved in a single vote with little discussion.

I’ve always opposed student uniforms in public schools because they stifle expression and creativity. It was heartening, however, to see that this compulsory conformity was confined to elementary and middle schools. Now, the same rules that apply to children will be foisted on young adults with driver’s licenses and jobs.

But, to quote comic and social commentator George Carlin, “it’s not a new idea.”

“I first saw it in old newsreels from the 1930s,” Carlin said in his act. “But it was hard to understand because the narration was in German.”

UPDATE (April 21, 10:05 a.m.) — The school board postponed its vote on the West Craven uniform policy Thursday, according to the Sun Journal’s coverage. Uniforms have not (yet?) been adopted for the 2008-09 school year.

A small wedge is missing from the grille. It gives my new car the giddy grin of a champion boxer whose front teeth were bashed out.

The faded silver paint is speckled with worn-in gunk that no car wash could remove. The right side sports two chrome hubcaps, but the left-side tires have no ornamentation.

I’m proud of the cracked leather seats and sagging roof. My car may not have a CD player — or more than one working speaker. But, it has character.

I bought the 1989 Buick Park Avenue for $600 cash. My friend had owned the aging sedan for about a year and wanted to sell it so he could buy a car from his father. Three weeks prior, my green Chrysler Concorde had sputtered to an unceremonious stop on the roadside, and my mechanics couldn’t revive the engine.

(more…)

Hood Richardson, a Beaufort County commissioner who mounted an unsuccessful run for the N.C. General Assembly in 2006, has pleaded no contest to a disorderly conduct charge that resulted from his 2006 arrest for passing out campaign fliers during a high school football game, the Beaufort Observer reported.

A school board policy that prevents politicking on school grounds will now be enforced fairly, according to the story, but Richardson passed on a tremendous opportunity to fight for freedom of speech.

Political speech is among the most protected under the Constitution, and it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a First Amendment exemption for Friday night football. The Beaufort County ban on schoolhouse campaigning is wrongheaded and should be overturned.

Richardson had an opportunity to make that point in court recently. He didn’t.

A Furniture Fair store in New Bern is threatening to sue a customer over fliers she’s passing out in a protest against the business, the Sun Journal reported today.

Tessie Adams is picketing the store because it refused to exchange furniture she said is warped and overworn, according to the story. The store has offered her a full refund, but is requiring her to return the furniture at her expense.

She’s not satisfied, so she decided to protest Furniture Fair by holding a picket sign and handing out fliers outside the Neuse Boulevard store. The company’s lawyer has written her a snotty cease-and-desist letter, claiming the fliers contain “false and damaging” information.

Because I haven’t seen the fliers, I can’t tell you whether the information is false, but I doubt sincerely that an angry customer’s constitutionally protected expression of opinion is legally actionable. This has a strong whiff of Goliath flexing his muscles to shut David up.

If Furniture Fair takes this dissatisfied customer to court, I’d boycott the store and encourage everyone I know to do the same. Whether or not the fliers are false, the road to resolution for this dispute shouldn’t run through a courtroom.

There’s no right to freedom from offense. There’s no right to freedom from offense. There’s no right to freedom from offense. There’s no right to freedom from offense. There’s no r…
 
If that’s a smidgen repetitive for you, you’re probably not in government. Can’t say it enough times to penetrate the ponderous skulls of the well-meaning lunkheads we put in office.
 
A Missouri teen hanged herself last year after receiving insulting MySpace messages purportedly from a teen boy. Earlier messages from the profile, which had been created by a neighborhood woman and accessed by the girl’s classmates and at least one mother, suggested the fake boy had a crush on the teen.

(more…)

I wrote the following essay last year for the first incarnation of the Havelock Scoop blog. I’m reposting it here because it seems especially timely as city elections edge closer.

Whatever the outcome of November’s elections, one result is certain: Poll workers, candidates and network news anchors will bemoan voter turnout.

If poll numbers don’t take another vertiginous plunge, they’ll simply be stagnant. And even if more Americans vote this year than in the 2004 presidential race, election officials still will say it’s not enough.

Voting is our most underappreciated democratic right; and it’s one that more of us should exercise more often. But forget for a moment how we go about picking our senators and representatives, our commissioners and councilmen, our judges and sheriffs.

In some form or another, every American votes every day. You can’t avoid it.

(more…)

U.S. senators adopted an amendment to a defense bill today that adds federal penalties for so-called hate crimes, according to a news release from Rep. Walter B. Jones, a Republican representing our District 3.

The amendment to the new fiscal year’s Defense Authorization Act stiffens penalties for certain crimes based on gender, disability and sexual orientation, Jones said in the release, which was faxed to us here at the Havelock News.

Jones criticized the inclusion of an “extraneous measure” into a military bill and said the Senate should place such legislation into freestanding bills. The congressman is an opponent of such legislation and voted against a hate crime bill that passed the House in May, he said in the release.

Jones is spot-on. Prosecuting hate crimes is unconstitutional because it punishes someone for acting on a prejudice — an opinion that he or she is entitled to have and to express, no matter how wrongheaded it may be.

If it’s perfectly legal to express an irrational bias against race, gender or sexual orientation, how can we penalize someone for doing just that?