Letter: Will Asheville citizens close their laptops and take action?

Graphic by Lori Deaton

Xpress’ Sustainability series is measured, nicely expressed and crucially informative, precisely the type of information we require in order to help educate the AVL-area citizenry and, with any luck, prompt personal action plans while helping to boost and support those plans already in place. There’s a lot at stake in 2021, in case anyone missed the memo.

Sometimes I fear, however, that upon reading impassioned reports such as yours or encountering them in other media outlets — I’ve worked most of my adult life in print or broadcast media, so there’s an outside chance I know what I’m talking about here — much of the citizenry will still neglect to actually do anything about whatever emotions they feel getting stirred up. Asheville is without a doubt a first-class destination for unreconstructed navel gazers. Complacency, though, can be a deadly sin masquerading as good intentions.

Ultimately, it takes more than simply feeling empathy or entertaining thought exercises to genuinely make a material difference. You have to fold down your laptop screen, drive back from your beloved pooch’s dog park or your own fave java hangout and put some of your perennial “I really gotta get involved with some of these folks and orgs I’ve been hearing about” sentiments into immediate operation.

As late ’60s poet James Morrison once growled somewhat inelegantly from a Miami stage, “What are you gonna do about it?!?”

— Fred Mills
Arden

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One thought on “Letter: Will Asheville citizens close their laptops and take action?

  1. Enlightened Enigma

    In AVL ? nothing… in the AVL we do nuthin about nuthin and it shows!

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