We’ve got trouble with a capital, “T,” Right here in River City. Yes, we have trouble in this great community of old and new neighborhoods. This great community founded on the banks of the Catawba River is being hustled by the real estate grifters that frequent the hallways and backrooms of our formerly beloved, City of Charlotte.
I say your young men’ll be frittering! Frittering away their noontime, suppertime, chore time, too.”
We’ve got trouble with a capital, “T,” because we are not being treated equally by said beloved city. They aren’t listening to us as we complain about snarled traffic, discarded homes, and crime. There was a time when what is happening to us was called “taxation without representation”. Trouble. Trouble. Trouble.
We’ve got taxes with a capital “T,” property values are now so high that those who own a few acres of land are being faced with hard choices about their lives and their land. Not to mention, we are still paying for a new arena that was voted down on our side of town… I learned this was taxation without representation in an elementary school history class.
Each day we fight traffic to get where we are going…as cars creep along our main traffic arteries: Mt. Holly-Huntersville Rd, Belhaven Blvd., Brookshire Blvd., and Rozzelles Ferry Road are like a gigantic centipede with crossed legs. We’ve got traffic with a capital “T.” And, the city has assured us that there is no solution to this problem in sight; especially with the opening of I-485 and the Mountain Island Promenade to be built on the east corner of the crossroads of Mt. Holly-Huntersville Rd. Trouble. Trouble.
We’ve got crime. Crime with a capital, “C.” A member of Cook’s Memorial Church told me last week that if you put flowers on a grave in the graveyard behind the church they will be quickly destroyed or sitting on someone’s dinner table by sunset.
We suddenly have a community of idle young men with too much time on their hands. Harold, the con-artist in the play/movie called, “The Music Man,” said it best:
I say your young men’ll be frittering! Frittering away their noontime, suppertime, chore time, too.”
These young men that fritter their lives away have taken up transgressions of vandalism and burglary upon their neighbors. There is a whole lot of frittering going on in this area.
Crime is so blatant here that the other day, one of our merchants watched from his office window as a young man parked a low-slung dark car beside his truck. The young man opened his back car door and then opened the door to the trunk. Just as the young man began to pilfer from the truck, the owner stepped outside and asked, “What you doing, son?”
“Son” reached in his pocket as if he was about to pull out a gun, but the owner already had a 12-gauge aimed towards the black car. “You ought to just get back in your car and leave peaceably,” the owner suggested. “Son” took his suggestion and backed out of his yard at a high speed.
