Dear Friends:

The short session of the North Carolina General Assembly will convene on Wednesday, May 12, 2010, at noon.  Budget discussions are underway among legislators and representatives of the Governor’s office, and we expect to hit the ground running in just a few weeks.

In the meantime, North Carolinians continue to wrestle with the fallout from our national economic climate. Too many people in Cumberland and Bladen Counties and across North Carolina are having trouble paying their mortgages or are already coping with foreclosure actions. My colleagues and I continue to work to create programs and enact laws that help protect homeowners during these tough times and prevent predatory lending practices.  For most of us, our home is not only our shelter and our refuge but also our most valuable financial asset, and I want to share with you these resources that could help you or someone you know:

HELPING HOMEOWNERS FACING FORECLOSURE

The budget we passed last year protects funding for the Home Protection Program which helps laid-off workers keep from losing their homes. Those eligible can qualify for a loan to pay the mortgage while they look for a job or train for a new one, and receive counseling to help them understand options and plan the next step. The North Carolina Housing Finance Agency oversees the Home Protection Program: http://www.nchfa.com/homebuyers/HOhomeprotectionpilot.aspx

The state Office of the Commissioner of Banks continues to offer a free program to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. People seeking help can call 1-866-234-4857 to be connected with a HUD-approved counseling agency that can help you over the phone or provide face-to-face counseling.

I also supported $10 million in funds for the Housing Trust Fund, which provides housing and housing assistance for those most in need, such as homeless persons, individuals with physical and/or developmental disabilities, survivors of domestic violence, and the elderly.

Unfortunately, there are many scams out there preying upon homeowners facing foreclosure.  I have supported new laws to crack down on these crooks.  Call the Attorney General’s hotline to report any scams: 1-877-5-NO-SCAM.

Visit this website for more information on foreclosure assistance: www.fightNCforeclosure.org

REFINANCE AND LOWER YOUR PAYMENT

At the federal government level, the Making Home Affordable initiative can help homeowners take advantage of today’s lower interest rates, even if you are not facing foreclosure.  It includes opportunities to modify or refinance your mortgage to make your monthly payments more affordable.  Many banks and mortgage-holders can provide information; you may visit this website, which includes an online tool to see if you are among the 7 to 9 million Americans eligible:

http://www.makinghomeaffordable.gov/

or call 1-888-995-HOPE

Please do not hesitate to let me know your thoughts on these initiatives or any other issue you feel is important.  My assistant, Brenda Lee, and I welcome your input—our door is always open.

The legislative “short session” is just around the corner.  We will convene in Raleigh on May 12, and my top goal will continue to be working to create jobs for the middle class and working families through economic development and entrepreneurial initiatives.  We all know unemployment is too high, and we are going through tough times.  We in North Carolina did not cause this global recession, but I am committed to doing everything we can to help us keep weathering it and make us even stronger in the slow recovery.

My colleagues and I want to see that every person in North Carolina who wants a job can go to work.  I would like to take a moment to tell you about several initiatives that I have supported that are helping create jobs and improve our economy right now.

HELPING THE UNEMPLOYED FIND WORK

North Carolina State Government has set up a one-stop shop for federal and state job openings, job fairs, Employment Security assistance, and career-building resources:

Go to: http://www.jobsnow.nc.gov/findJobs.aspx

ATTRACTING NEW EMPLOYERS

We have an excellent, highly-skilled workforce that can compete globally and, more than ever, we must be aggressive in our efforts. Incentives are not the only answer, but as long as other states are offering them, they are a necessary tool in our toolbox, and I have supported the One North Carolina Fund and the Job Development Investment Grant program (JDIG).  This year alone, these initiatives have attracted almost 3,000 new jobs across our state. That is why North Carolina has been ranked as the #1 state for businesses to locate, as Site Selection magazine has recognized for seven of the last eight years.

SUPPORTING SMALL BUSINESSES

I have been a strong supporter of the One North Carolina Small Business Fund, which helps small businesses leverage federal grants. The state Department of Commerce has more information: http://www.nccommerce.com/en/BusinessServices/

I also have supported the Small Business Center Network, comprised of 58 Small Business Centers throughout North Carolina, which supports the development of new businesses and the growth of existing businesses by being a community-based provider of training, counseling, and resource information.  For more information on one in our area, go to: http://www.sbcn.nc.gov/localSBC/

Governor Perdue recently unveiled a small business lending initiative to help more small businesses get the loans they need to grow or stay in business.  The effort will help more North Carolina small businesses get access to credit in two ways: by increasing participation in Small Business Administration (SBA) loans and other federally-backed loan programs by North Carolina banks and by helping North Carolina small businesses strengthen their loan applications.  For more information on state help in financing your small business, go to: http://jobsnow.nc.gov/financing.aspx

The General Assembly’s Fiscal Research Division has compiled a full list of state resources to assist small businesses:

http://www.ncleg.net/fiscalresearch/frd_reports/frd_reports_pdfs/area_overviews/Resources_for_Small_Businesses_in_NC-KEL-2010-2-18.pdf

As I have visited with people throughout Bladen and Cumberland Counties, I constantly hear their concerns about our economy.  The economists at the General Assembly tell us that the economic recovery will be long and difficult.  They also noted that North Carolina’s conservative budgeting means we are in better shape than most states to address this at the state government level.  Rest assured that we will continue working to keep North Carolina moving forward during these tough times. Please remember as well that North Carolina continues to nurture assets that other states have not.  We have not mortgaged our state parks or our highway system, and we continue to have AAA bond rating, the envy of most other states.

Please do not hesitate to let me know your thoughts on these initiatives or any other issue you feel is important—my door is always open. My legislative assistant, Brenda Lee, and I welcome your ideas at any time.

Thank you for the opportunity to serve you in the Senate, and I wish you and your family a safe and peaceful weekend.

Cordially,

We have all seen and heard them.

We have all known one or two or more.

We may even have been one of them on occasion.

Bullies.

They come in all shapes, sizes, and colors.  They are boys and girls, men and women. They are the people who try to embarrass, frighten, humiliate, intimidate, terrorize, control, extort, and generally make miserable the lives of others whom they have singled out for reasons that are sometimes obvious and sometimes not. They do their low, painful, and dirty work on playgrounds, in schools, in offices and other workplaces, in churches, in social settings, and anywhere else they can get away with it. The tools of bullying may be words designed to wound and scar, but in too many instances those tools morph into physical actions that can escalate from a playground shove to beatings and murder.

Think Matthew Shepard.

Bullies may say their purpose is to point out the failings of another person, but at its core the purpose is to bring another down in order to make themselves appear better than they really are.  It is all around despicable behavior, but it is very real and all around us. Whether they are used or not, laws exist to protect Americans from this bullying behavior in the workplace, but schools have historically been more tolerant with a “kids will be kids” attitude. Educators and parents have turned a blind eye toward school house bullying, hoping perhaps that the bully would grow out of it and the victim would somehow be able to throw off or heal from the wounds the bully has inflicted.

In recent years, though, adults including educators, parents, and legislators have realized that bullying really is a serious issue, one damages both the bully and the victim and that the damage goes forward with them into adulthood.

That is why anti-bullying programs have proliferated in American schools and why states, including North Carolina, have passed anti-bullying legislation intended to spell out for parents, educators, and students exactly what behavior is not to be tolerated and to provide the legal teeth to go after schoolhouse bullies.

And, Glory Be! Those programs and laws seem to be working!

A recent study funded by the US Department of Justice has found that over the five years between 2003 and 2008, the percentage of children who reported being physically bullied dropped from 22 percent to less than 15 percent. Percent is a sterile word, but remember that each and every percentage point represents children whose lives are safer, more peaceful, and more conducive to learning.

This is very good news for both potential victims and potential bullies and for the rest of us as well.

David Finkelhor, a professor and director of the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center and the lead author of the study, says he is “very encouraged.”

And why is that?

“Bullying is the foundation on which a lot of subsequent aggressive behavior gets built,” Finkelhor says. “If it’s going down, we will reap benefits in the future in the form of lower rates of violent crime and spousal assault.” Others are encouraged as well.

Marlene Snyder at Clemson University’s Institute on Family Life who works with a national anti-bullying initiative cautions that the good news is not everywhere and that adults must remain vigilant in working again bullying.

“You have to keep at it, training new teachers every year—not just training one time and you’re done,” Snyder says.  She goes on to caution that when budgets get tight, as is the case in almost every state, programs like anti-bullying efforts often hit the chopping block.

She is right, of course, which is one reason North Carolina and other states have chosen to spell out our anti-bullying intentions in statute.

When I was a student at Haymount Elementary School which was where Haymount 700 now stands, we had a schoolyard bully in our class. Blessedly, he grew up to become a pharmacist and a perfectly nice man.

When I was a student at Alexander Graham Junior High School, on the site of today’s Highsmith Rainey Hospital, I witnessed the cruelty of adolescence, especially among young girls, and hope my participation in it was minimal and forgiven.

At Terry Sanford High School, I saw the loneliness and pain of those whose fellow students had somehow decided did not fit in.

We all know, of course, that no laws can ever control or correct human behavior when individuals are determined to be hurtful or worse, but what we can do is help people understand what is acceptable behavior and what it not.  The fact that children themselves are reporting less victimization and less violence is an indication that the message on bullying is getting through.

Says Professor Finkelhor, “There is evidence these programs are effective.  I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re seeing the fruits of that.”

Hallelujah and keep the faith!



Have you ever “googled” yourself?

No need to ‘fess up, of course, but human curiosity being what it is, chances are you have. One of the Dicksons just purchased a new laptop, which occasioned much experimenting with the new toy. In the process, I googled each member of our family and found information on each of us, even those who have not had much time to build professional or career experience. What popped up included wedding parties they had been members of and the like, not much substance, but we are all on the Internet in some way nevertheless.

Then, we played around a little more, and found not only home addresses of people we know, but photographs of their homes. These included friends and family members of all ages, in different places around the country. It did not work well, however, for my Austrian relatives, whom we could locate generally but not specifically and without photographs of their homes. Apparently, photographs taken by American tax assessors often wind up on the Internet, but this is not necessarily true elsewhere in the world.

While I have long been aware that privacy is a compromised reality in this age of instant communication and increasingly global culture, I was still a bit taken aback at how easy it is to get this information. We Dicksons are ordinary computer users as well, which gives me pause to think what someone who is really good at Internet searching could find out about any one of us or all of us.

We have all heard stories of Internet predators who stalk children, thieves who steal lifesavings electronically, and other dangers of the Internet. What we may be less aware of, though, are the more ordinary, seemingly less sinister, aspects of what the global net has wrought in what seems like the blink of an eye.

Think, for example, about how many times a day all of us are on camera somewhere—the bank, the convenience store checkout line, browsing in the department store—and not even know it. We have all seen grainy but recognizable photos on television as law enforcement officials search for a bank robber or a child or senior citizen who is missing, but what we may be less aware of is that the rest of us are on camera as well. All that is needed is an occasion to dig our photos out for public display.

Photos we are aware of may be on the Internet as well.

Anyone who has ever visited a social networking website has seen pictures of family and friends of the person who posted them, and many of those folks probably have no clue their faces and perhaps other identifying information are on worldwide display. My antennae first rose on this issue when one of the younger Dicksons’ school required a course on what to post online and what not to post. The intent was to save students from posting inappropriate photos and information that could come back to bite them when they enter the real world of work and professional standards. It was a positive effort and I am glad the school made the effort.

Maybe none of this really matters, but then again, maybe it does.

If you google the word “privacy,” what comes up is page after page of privacy statements for all kinds of companies and institutions, all efforts to assist us in controlling access to our private information. There is also information on the growing body of law dealing with Internet use and misuse and references to learned articles on the issue of Internet privacy, a concept that some experts believe no longer exists. Internet security guru, Steve Rambam,  famously said “privacy is dead—get over it and use it.” You can watch him say this and more by googling him on—what else?—YouTube.

I would not go quite as far as Mr. Rambam, but there is no question that the privacy enjoyed by my family when I was growing up and did not even realize we had, is not enjoyed by my family today or by yours. Our children and their children may not even understand the concept of privacy as we once knew it.

We are way too far down the Internet road to go back, so it seems to me that the lesson here is to be careful. We must learn to use the Internet for our purposes before it—or someone we may never know—uses us. That means learning how to be careful with our personal information including our photographs so that we control their usage and not the other way around, which is exactly what Steve Rambam says clearly and graphically.

Most of us have learned how to protect our information over the telephone and now we must learn this.

And, yes, Google the noun for an Internet search engine, has indeed morphed into “google,” the verb meaning to search online.



Hello.  My name is Margaret and I am a news junkie.

I can remember debating issues and current events with my 7^th grade friends at “Teen Club,” a weekly occasion on Friday evenings in the lower level of the Lyons Club on Rowan Street in downtown Fayetteville. I suspect we knew very little about what we were talking about, but we were earnest and  passionate in our conversations.  My discussions may be a bit more informed these days, but my interest in our common life and how we approach our challenges remains strong.

Among my early jobs was radio news reporter, a job with crazy hours and many surprises, and one which I adored.

Newspapers, magazines, and other news programming are the wallpaper of my life, so much so that my daughter once informed me that I needed to know more about popular culture in television programming.  As an afterthought, she stuck her head back in the room to add that “watching CNN does not count!”

It is probably too late to teach this old dog new tricks on that score, and I continue to read and watch most anything that crosses my path.  This month, 2 stories caught my interest particularly, both stories which resonate within our community.

The first is one we know instinctively and well—the stress felt by military spouses when their partners are deployed to war zones, often for longer periods then the families had expected and often on multiple tours.  We all know these spouses.  They are our friends and neighbors, our co-workers, our fellow church members, and their children are our children’s friends.

The real news is the numbers.

They come from a dissertation written by Alyssa J. Mansfield at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health and published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. Mansfield’s work looked at the electronic medical records of more than 250,000 military wives whose husbands were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan at least once between 2003 and 2006. Her study did not include husbands of deployed women.

Not surprisingly, the wives’ records showed significantly higher diagnoses of mental health conditions than those of women whose husbands have not been deployed, about 37 percent to 30 percent.  The disorders included depression, sleep disorders, and anxiety.

All of us hear and read about and some of us know soldiers who have returned from war zones suffering the effects of their service, both physically and mentally.  Unlike in past conflicts, most soldiers today are married, but the effects of their service on their spouses are less documented.  Alyssa Mansfield’s work has given us additional insight into war’s toll on spouses.

It can help us look differently and more compassionately at our friends who are going it alone while their husbands offer the ultimate sacrifice for all of us.

The issue of obesity is certainly no secret, and certainly not in the southeastern United States which has some of the highest rates of obesity in our nation.

I was flabbergasted nevertheless to read that North Carolina’s own Rowan County, a county whose largest town is Salisbury, lists obesity as its top health concern.  In its health assessment to state officials done every 4 years, Rowan County health workers listed obesity ahead of other serious health concerns such as access to health care and pre-natal care, minority health disparities, and access to dental care, tobacco use, and teenage pregnancy—all issues of significance throughout North Carolina.         Rowan County health officials report that one third of children and as many as three-fourths of the county’s adults are either overweight or obese.  If Rowan County officials are assessing accurately, they should be concerned, and so should the rest of us.  The state obesity rate for teenagers was 29.9-percent in 2007, but it was a less startling 26.5-percent only 4 years earlier in 2003.

Reasons Rowan officials list for the growing hefty population include unhealthy eating habits passed generation to generation (think families who eat no vegetables and who believe fruit comes in cans), large portions in fast-food restaurants (think supersize), a culture of “Southern cooking” (think fried chicken, cornbread, and sticky sweet iced tea), and a busy lifestyle (think about our own).

None of us can control anyone’s behavior but our own, of course, but we can set examples. If our children see us enjoying a green salad or even a stalk of broccoli, maybe they will try them as well. If we nix an office outing for pizza, maybe our co-workers will think about healthier options. If dessert is berries or an apple instead of ice cream with chocolate sauce, maybe someone will get the message.

What I have learned about good health over a life time of positives and negatives is that achieving it is a process not an event, and that we can always do better.

So much for this news junkie’s take on what is going on with all of us in this New Year.

A new year always makes me feel fresh, clean, and renewed.

I love the holidays, of course, and I can hardly wait to pull out the Dicksons’ traditional decorations and to festoon available surfaces and corners with them. First among them is the tree, hung with everything from glittering glass balls and shiny White House ornaments to clothespin reindeer fashioned in a long ago Sunday School class.

And, I can hardly wait to take them down when January starts breathing down our necks.

I look now at the living room corner where the tree stood and am pleased with its clean emptiness and at the dining room table, bare except for a bowl my grandmother painted nearly a century ago. True, there are several lingering poinsettias, but I try to think of them as spots of color.

Otherwise, our house looks like it does most of the year. It just seems clean and fresh because the excess has been taken down and stored.  Also refreshed is our sense of ourselves. Most of us probably make some new year’s resolutions, whether we announce them to the world or keep them to ourselves. Mine always include being as healthy as I can and doing the best I can for those around me.  I know I could always do better on both counts, but I do have them as conscious goals, as I suspect you have yours.

Shortly before the new year, I met a new friend who has a new son, his first child, now just over 2 weeks old. He and his wife are thrilled and sleepy, and I told him how many adventures they have ahead including moments of great joy and moments of sheer terror. He smiled the smile of the uninitiated, but soon he will understand.

Wisdom comes from all around us and hides in the most unexpected nooks and crannies of our lives, and the best child-raising advice I have ever read popped up about the time I met my new friend.

The News and Observer, Raleigh’s daily newspaper and some would contend our state’s newspaper of record, anoints a Tar Heel of the Week every Sunday and, at year end, a Tar Heel of the Year.   For 2009, that person so honored was Phil Freelon, a Durham architect with a shining career and a national reputation. It is a glowing article and includes this quote from his wife, Nnenna, herself a Grammy-award nominated jazz singer, about her husband’s role as the father of their 3 children.              It is simple, true, and profound. Says Nnenna of Phil, “I think he builds children. Not in the same way you build buildings, but you do build them. The time you spend, the things you model, the way you behave. Just the same way your partners, your employees watch you, your children watch you.  And at some point, the walk becomes more important than the talk.”

Whoa!

Anyone who has ever been a parent or who has taken care of children knows how true that statement is. Children, and especially adolescents, may seem lost in their own worlds that parents can barely fathom, but they are still sponges, taking in everything that happens around them, and regardless of what parents think children think of them, those same children are actually absorbing and processing every word and action of their parents, for good or ill. That does not mean, of course, that every word and action must be perfect—an impossible standard, but it does mean exactly what Nnenna Freelon says, that “the walk becomes more important than the talk.”

A visit to any school in America provides a pretty good indication of which parents are modeling well and which are too busy doing their own things. Our children are reflections of us, as exhilarating or as painful as that may be.

I am well aware of my failings as a parent, and I expect most parents feel the same way. I also know I failed in ways I am not aware of, and I probably succeeded on occasion in the same fashion, known and unknown. Parenting, it seems to me, is a process and a journey, not a series of highly significant events, although those exist as well.

Sometimes, when I step back and observe my 3 precious jewels, now young adults, I imagine that I can see my lapses and my mistakes, and I suffer for them. Other times, it is unimaginably gratifying to hear my thoughts and my words come from their mouths, and I do not think they even know it.

I hope my new friend reads this column, not for my words, but for Nnenna Freelon’s. He and his wife can make no better or more important resolution than to hold her words close to their hearts as life with their new son unfolds in this brand new year.