It was good to hear that our installed government has finally gotten around to allocating $1M in repairs to the Sandburg Dam.

What the article failed to mention is that the dam failed two years ago and since that tragic occurance, caused by a failed water control drain pipe, the once beautiful Sandberg Lake has turned into an ugly, dry and desolate swamp that is disgraceful to Sandburg’s memory.

If the timeline is correct, it will take over three years to repair the 40-foot long concrete (Sandburg) dam. (Hoover Dam was completed in five years.)

About the same time of the dam failure, another fiasco occurred and, like the Sandburg debacle, has yet to be completed. I am talking about the one-mile-long Highland Lake Road project.

This NCDOT project broke ground on March 2021, when some large-growth trees were cut down in the adjacent park and utilities relocated.  They are widening and repaving the road to accommodate 18-wheelers and upgrading the culvert at Highland Lake. 

The just-over-one-mile road has been closed for over three years with no end in sight and remains shutdown. 

This is a disaster but nothing can be done. 

Why? 

Because Govt no longer answers to the people that pay their salaries and are on the hook for the debt they ring up to increase their power and influence. Worse, nobody gets fired. They serve themselves first. 

The USA of old managed to build over 40,000 miles of interstate highways in 40 years.

Ironically, if they did the job with today’s DOT, using more productive machinery, it would take over 3,000 years to complete, extrapolating from current project timelines.

A cynic might say that the real reason for these projects is not primarily to improve our infrastructure, but to make sure big rigs can travel our once-rural roads to deliver building materials for more housing density — and, maybe, to keep people employed as long as possible in a terrible economy.

Welcome to the new Soviet Union.

Israelis? Horrific... What about the dreams of the Palestinians?

Rachel Corrie was a young American peace activist who, 21 years ago, was crushed to death in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to protect the home of the family where she was staying.  

In an interview two days before her death, she asserted, “In the time I’ve been here, children have been shot and killed.  I feel like what I’m witnessing here is a very systematic destruction of people’s ability to survive.  And that is incredibly horrifying.”

Gazans name their children after her, and there’s a Rachel Corrie Street in Ramallah in the West Bank.  Nour Nasrallah, one of the daughters in Corrie’s host family, has written and illustrated a children’s book about Corrie titled “I’d Rather Be Dancing!”

According to Nasrallah, “We are hoping for a million Rachel Corries to be our fearless lifeline.”

Corrie’s father, Craig, a Vietnam War veteran, cherishes the values his daughter taught him: “They are us. We are them. They dream our dreams. We dream theirs.”

It’s incumbent upon all of us to ask, “What about the dreams of the Palestinians?”