Carrboro's Mural Scandal

Carrboro, NC is a tiny little town on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, and while I'm technically a resident of Chapel Hill, I find that all my hanging-out time is spent in Carrboro. Carrboro is known for it's live-and-let-live attitude, community spirit, and good karma all around. But this past week we've been embroiled in a mini-drama that shows all the signs of a good soap opera.

The controversy has to do with a mural that was pained on the side of the Jade Palace Chinese restaurant in 2002. The location is in the heart of Carrboro, next to the community center, and across the street from the Weaver Street Market, the local food coop. The original mural was built as a community building exercise and fund raiser for a Club Nova, a halfway house for mentally challenged adults.

Here's a picture of the mural, shortly after it's completion which I took from the carrboro.com web site.

Shortly after the mural was completed, the city alderman deemed the mural in violation of the Town ordinances which prohibited painting business names on walls of buildings. As you can see from this picture, there are several businesses logos and names on the wall. This put the aldermen in a sticky situation because they had routinely cited other businesses for similar violations and so they risked looking like inconsistent enforcers of the law. On the other hand, the mural was wildly popular and had broad community support because, well, it had been intended as a community building project all along.

Eventually, a compromised was reached. Carrboro's "poet laureate" was commissioned to write a poem about the community spirit and it's verses were strategically painted on the mural to cover up the offending logos. So it seemed that everyone was happy.

So last Tuesday, Carrboro citizens were shocked to discover that their beloved mural had been completely painted over in a nice post-office lime green and interestingly enough, no one seems to be able to find the person responsible for it.

This much is known. A man driving a rented Suburu (you can rent a Subarus?) went to the local homeless shelter and hired a bunch of guys for day labor. This is a very common occurrence in the area. The man then proceeded to a local store to buy paint and supplies for the project and then set the homeless men up to paint over the wall.

Francis Chan, owner of the Jade Palace discovered the work crew just as they were finishing up and began asking the work crew who had authorized the covering up of the mural. The man who'd hired them had left to get rid of the supplies. As the story goes, the man had come back to the scene but turned around and left when he saw Mr. Chan talking to the work crew.

The identity of this man, so far, has not been determined. But there is some suspicion and anecdotes to indicate that perhaps it was a certain Mr. Larry Hayes was involved. Mr. Hayes was reported to have borrowed a ladder for the work crew earlier in the day from a local business owner. Mr. Hayes had a confrontation with the city alderman a few year back about a painted sign on a building advertising his Broad Street Cafe. Eventually, after facing fines and citations, he painted over his sign. So perhaps there was motive on Mr Hayes part, but it's unclear what his role was in the recent mural cover up was. Police have not yet been able to identify the driver of the Suburu.

Here's a picture of the wall as it currently is.

This ugly incident raises some interesting variations on the tragedy of the commons problem. It has sparked a fierce debate in Carrboro over who owns the right to decide what should be painted in it's place. Ranging anywhere from embracing the wall as an outlet for graffiti artists to another community based project. No one, it seems, seems to think that Mr. Chan has any say over what gets painted on his restaurant's wall.

And finally, can a blank wall be considered graffiti? Can the absence or removal of something be substituted for the thing itself? If not, how can the perpetrator, once found, be charged?

I tell ya, this is the most exciting scandal to hit Carrboro in years. Stay tuned.......

updated: corrected "buy pain" to "buy paint" :-)

On Immigration Reform

When I travel outside the country on business, it's always interesting to me to see the procedures for coming back into the United States. By far, the United States has a more rigorous bureaucracy at immigration control than other countries. For US citizens, it's not too bad. But I have noticed that we put foreign visitors through quite a lengthy process to let them in. Foreign visitors have to fill out paper work saying where they are gong, where they are staying, how long they are going to be in the country, etc. We also require them to give us finger prints and submit to being photographed. And then of course they are subject to the additional bureaucracy that everyone, citizens and non-citizens have to go through, customs inspections, etc.

That's the process I think of every time I hear people talking about immigration reform in the United States. We talk about giving amnesty to illegal aliens and letting them stay in the United States simply by virtue of the fact that they successfully snuck in, bypassing our border security. If we're going to do that, why do we even bother imposing immigration controls at our airports and sea ports? If we're going to give amnesty to illegal immigrants, why do we even bother with passports?

If it's important that we photograph and fingerprint every non-citizen coming into the United States via an airport, then why isn't it equally important that we photograph and fingerprint every non-citizen coming into the country by foot? Or put it another way, suppose a non-citizen arrived into the JFK airport and when he got off the plane, he somehow managed to bypass all the immigration security and get into New York city without having to go through any of the usual immigration checks. Would you be in favor of granting this guy citizenship? Would you want him arrested and sent back home? Or at bar minimum, would you want to at least haul him back to immigration control and make him go through the same process everyone else does?

Suppose this guy who snuck past airport security lives in NYC for a couple of years, working odd jobs at employers who don't do background checks. Suppose he falls in love. Suppose he has a kid. Do these things grant him the right to expect citizenship? I don't think so.

So that puts me into the "border security first" camp on the immigration reform. That is issue number one for me. Yes it's partly driven by a fear of bad guys in black hats getting into the country planning nefarious terrorist schemes. But that's only part of the issue. The biggest part of the issue is that I expect everyone to have to go through the same process for coming into the United States regardless of where/how they are crossing the border. It's simply a matter of fairness. It bugs the hell out of me that we would set up a system in which people who break the law are rewarded with any kind of legal status. In every other criminal activity, when we catch the criminal and convict the criminal, we take away the criminal's rights, not give them more.

So count me as a hard core supporters of enforcing physical border security and as a hard core supporter for requiring everyone to go through the same process when coming into the country. This is especially true for people who want to come to the country to live permanently and who want to become US citizens.

I part company with the "border security first" folks in that I'm also in favor of a very liberal policy about letting folks into the country. I am not afraid of the country being flooded by immigrants. I'm not afraid of other ethnic cultures establishing themselves in the US. I actually kinda like it. Immigrants energize the country in countless little ways just by trying to make a better life. I too sometimes worry about our social support system being over burdened with floods of penniless, lost, scared economic and political refugees. But this is a manageable problem. With the help of both government and private organizations, such as faith based charities and other sorts of charitable organizations, we can collectively handle the integration of struggling immigrants into the country.

But this is all the more reason, to strictly enforce border security, so that we know who is coming in, so that we know what they need, so that we can use the border crossing as a point of contact for helping those who need it. And, frankly, we can also use border security for what it's supposed to be for, which is a control point for intercepting known criminals and people on the run from the law in their home countries.

As part of a liberal immigration policy, I would support multiple types of programs for folks. I fully support all of the various types of guest worker programs in which citizens of other countries work and live here for extended periods of time but without being part of a process to eventually become citizens. As I understand these programs today, they are primarily targeted to high skilled workers who already have sponsorships from employers, but I don't see why the guest worker concept can't be extended to all types of workers.

And what of the people who have already snuck into the country and have been living here? I feel sorry for them, I really do. It's really sad for people whose lives have been so full of hardship that they risked everything to get into the US. It's heart breaking to have to uproot them again and send them back. But these folks are simply the most visible folks in a sad situation. The folks we don't see are the ones who are equally desperate to get into the United States and who are nonetheless following the law, following the rules and procedures for getting in the right way. To let illegal immigrants stay in this country and to confer on them legal status, is simply unfair to all of the law abiding people still trying to get in. So although it's going to be heart wrenching to send illegal immigrants back to their home country, it's the only fair and just thing to do. It's the only policy that's fair and just to everybody.