The eyes of America, indeed the eyes of the world, are on Washington as newly re-installed Donald Trump attempts to take Presidential power to new heights by slapping tariffs on friend and foe alike, ceding control to unelected billionaires, and pushing such pressing issues as renaming the Gulf of Mexico. Millions of Americans reel from the speed and audacity of what is unfolding at the highest level of our government.
That said, there is a great deal going on in North Carolina, and our new Governor is off to a solid start. The General Assembly? Not so much.
Josh Stein was sworn in on New Year’s Day and has hit the ground running. His immediate focus has been western North Carolina, hard hit by Hurricane Helene last fall. With many residents still out of their homes and businesses struggling to reopen, Governor Stein has been all about recovery.
A new public-private partnership will provide $30M in grants to help small businesses make it through the winter and head into warmer weather and the tourism that comes with it. In addition, the NC Department of Commerce has expanded an existing jobs recovery program aimed at Helene survivors.
With the General Assembly back in session, Stein is also lasering in on public education, what he calls the “launching pad of our state’s future.” Using a combination of federal, state, and local funds, North Carolina spent more than $17.2B in the 2022-23 school year, the largest slice of the state budget. That eye-popping number is misleading. The General Assembly is actually reducing education funding.
The price of public education, like virtually everything else, has risen over time. The percentage of public resources directed at public education has declined dramatically. Even as North Carolina’s population has more than doubled to 11 million people and counting, the percentage of public education spending declined from more than 52 percent of the state budget in 1970 to a relatively meager 39 percent in 2023-24. In other words, public schools are now expected to do much, much more with much, much less.
Layer on the fact that the General Assembly shifted $6.5B of state education tax dollars to private and religious entities last year under the slyly named Opportunity Scholarships, it is obvious that the legislature put public education on a starvation diet.
The General Assembly has engaged in more hijinks as well.
The 2023-24 state budget decreed that only legislators can decide “whether a record is a public record and whether to turn over to the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, or retain, destroy, sell, loan, or otherwise dispose of, such records.”
In plain English, if legislators do not want you to see something, you will not.
Then there is the General Assembly’s stripping the Governor of appointment power to the NC Board of Elections buried inside a bill dealing with Hurricane Helene relief. It is a sure bet that there is more to come as the legislative session unfolds.
A quick Google of the term “eyes wide shut” yields definitions along these lines—"an idiom to describe someone who intentionally ignores or refuses to acknowledge something that is happening. It can also imply a deliberate choice to remain unaware or uninvolved, even when what is happening is clear and even dangerous.”
It implies being an ostrich who does not want to understand.
We Americans are apparently quite good at that.

(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)