Awake, good North Carolina, from the reign of the zombie kings [View all]

[KamaAina]

http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article72096872.html

These should be pretty good times for North Carolina, which has always been a hard-scrabble state. For sure, the recession still hurts, the manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back fast enough and the small towns need help. But the cities are doing fine....

Somehow, we didn’t take care of that system, and it died. These times, which should be pretty good, have proved to be a spring, summer, fall and winter of discontent. Our current Republican leaders, unlike the old ones, have no interest in working with anybody. Passage of the anti-LGBT, intolerant, repressive bill called HB2 illustrates this full on. Like some big karma payback, bad government now drags us down. Incredibly, Republicans criticize “job killing” regulations and then pass a bill that costs 400 jobs in Charlotte and 250 in Cary, threatens hundreds in Durham, hammers the High Point Furniture Market, kills concerts in Greensboro and scraps movie shoots in Asheville and Wilmington.

These Republicans force people into boxes and silence ideas. Their predecessors would never put personal opinion ahead of sustainable prosperity. They understood that a state’s good reputation was hard to win and easy to lose. Sen. Jesse Helms, on his worst day, would not sponsor an anti-LGBT bill that cost North Carolina jobs. He wanted to raise cain in Nicaragua, not Mecklenburg County.

No one studies us now except as a case of dysfunction. It all began when these Republicans obtained a computer and drew districts to elect themselves. Ninety percent of the legislators who voted for HB2 run in the fall either unopposed or without meaningful opposition. These Republicans have chosen their own voters, which is not the way it’s supposed to work.

Zombie kings? I thought The Walking Dead was filmed in Georgia!