3/6: On Billy Graham; Watershed political year; Behaving

NOW UNDERWAY IN GWINNETT is the Great American Cleanup, where volunteers throughout the county help beautify the countryside and roads by collecting trash. During the 2017 cleanup, a total of 60,640 pounds of recyclables were collected, keeping this glut of trash out of the landfills. For more details on the 2018 Gwinnett Great American Cleanup, see Notable below.

TODAY’S FOCUS: Dr. Billy Graham: Humanitarian or Unrepentant Capitalist (or Both)?

EEB PERSPECTIVE: Looking Back to the Political Watershed Year of 1984 in Gwinnett

ANOTHER VIEW: Let’s All Behave Like Grown-ups and Teach Our Children Well

SPOTLIGHT:  Heaven and Associates, P.C.

FEEDBACK: Many Gun Owners Come into Them as Inheritance from Relatives

McLEMORE’S WORLD: Illegal Immigrants

UPCOMING: Gwinnett Unveils Countywide Trails Master Plan of 320 Total Miles

NOTABLE: Eight Students Graduate from First Career Online High School

RECOMMENDED: Alexander The Great by Phillip Freeman

GEORGIA TIDBIT: Poet Natasha Trethewey of Emory University Wins Pulitzer Prize

MYSTERY PHOTO: Distinctive Building is This Edition’s Mystery Photo

CALENDAR: Norcross Bicentennial Program is March 11 at 3 p.m.

The Rev. Billy Graham: Humanitarian or unrepentant capitalist (or both)?

“One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven”-Mark, 10:17-25

By Jack Bernard, contributing columnist  |  Having lived in small Southern towns for most of my life, I believe that the preachers are almost universally good people, modest folks who care much less about themselves than their flock. There are some exceptions…for example former Winder Pastor Jody Hice, now Rep. Hice, who preached hate as a right-wing radio show host.

However, I don’t feel as positively about televangelists. I am not a religious scholar, but is the inference in the above quote that Billy Graham will be poor in heaven?

But, Brother Billy was not even the richest preacher in the USA, much less the world. Here is a listing of the six wealthiest American preachers (net worth, from Beliefnet):

1. Kenneth Copeland: $760 million;
2. Pat Robertson:  $100 million;
3. Benny Hinn: $42 million;
4. Joel Osteen: $40 million;
5. Creflo Dollar: $27 million; and
6. Billy Graham: $25 million.

Graham in 1966

Graham was “preacher to the presidents.” He was a big Nixon supporter right down to the bitter end. He also told Nixon regarding Jews that:  “They don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country.” Would Jesus, a Jew, have approved of Graham’s documented anti-Semitism?

According to the conservative pundit George Will (WP, 2-22-18): “Graham frequently vowed to abstain from partisan politics and almost as frequently slipped this self-imposed leash, almost always on behalf of Republicans.” For example, an older Graham placed a Washington Post advertisement in November 2012, urging religious people to vote Biblical values such as “support the Biblical definition of marriage between a man and a woman.”

Did this set the tone for today’s evangelicals, 80 percent of whom approve of a president who has been married three times and has had numerous salacious affairs while married? A man who epitomizes the moral opposite of nearly everything that evangelicals believe?

When the missionary Stanley Jones asked Gandhi about Jesus, his response was “I love Christ. It’s just that so many of you Christians are so unlike Christ.”

This column is not intended to negate the good works of Billy Graham. For example, to his credit, he pushed desegregation at a time when it was not popular.

However, the mainstream media seems much more interested in dwelling on Billy’s Graham fame than evaluating his legacy. This is intended to balance the scales.

• Have a comment? Send to:  elliott@brack.net

Looking back to the political watershed year of 1984 in Gwinnett

By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | If you moved to Gwinnett after 1984, you may not realize the significance of that year politically for the county. You would not be alone. The county’s population in 1984 was 226,100, while today it’s estimated to be 960,000. So a great majority of residents, 733,100, have moved here since 1984. You are in good company.

Back in 1984, the county was still composed of mainly white residents, more than 95 percent. Today that’s no longer the case, with the white population in 2018 in a minority, and with African-Americans, Hispanic and Asians being together a majority of the county.

The year 1984 was a watershed year in politics. Up until 1984, Gwinnett had elected mostly Democratic officials, though Louise Radloff had won a school board post in 1973. But until then, she was the key Republican to hold office in Gwinnett.  (Ironically, Mrs. Radloff is still on the school board, but when Republicans gerrymandered her district, she ran for office as a Democrat, won, and still sits on the School Board, with 45 years of service.)

What happened in 1984 in Gwinnett startled both the Democrats and the Republicans. There were 17 contested races for county commission, school board and legislative races on the ballot that year, while only one Democrat (Probate Judge Alton Tucker) had no opposition.

When the voted were counted, all 17 Republicans won, sweeping out the surprised Democrats (and Republicans).

We bring this up in 2018, after 34 years of Republican control of most offices in Gwinnett, as qualifying begins today to run for political office in the May primaries.

With the change in Gwinnett’s population make-up, today showing more diversity, it could happen that 2018 might be the best chance for the Democratic Party to gain more positions in Gwinnett. After all, in the 2016 primary, several Republican office-holders came close to losing to a Democrat. In addition, one new Democrat won election over Republicans in 2016, as Samuel Park won a legislative seat, defeating Valerie Clark.

This is complicated by several Gwinnett Republicans deciding that they will not keep the post to which they were elected in 2016. That includes State Senator David Shafer, running for lieutenant governor; and Rep. Buzz Brockway seeking the office of Secretary of State. Add to that three Republican state representatives folding their tent and not planning to run (Reps. Brooks Coleman, Joyce Chandler and David Casas). That makes   five Republicans giving up their posts.

Another factor needs to be included: the fact that in the 2016 presidential election, Gwinnett went for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.  That was the first time in years that Gwinnett did not vote for a Republican presidential candidate, and the candidate that they voted for in that year was a Georgian, Jimmy Carter.

Meanwhile, where for many years the Republican Party has been far more organized than the Democrats, this, too, is changing. There is a much stronger Democratic Party in Gwinnett now, with the party having organized training sessions, in addition to seeking people to run for office. Whether it will bode well for success, at least the Democrats are about equally organized as are the Republicans.

All this add up to anticipating that the political year 2018 will be far more competitive than in the past. It might just well be a year that will be remembered as also being a bellwether year.

• Have a comment? Send to:  elliott@brack.net

Let’s all behave like grown-ups and teach our children well

By Debra Houston, contributing columnist  |  In a Letter-to-the-Editor, Don Lundy wrote the Gwinnett Forum (January 19) of a philosophy professor who called him a racist because, “You were born and raised in a racist society.” Don asked our readers, “So do I have some racist residue that cannot be completely removed?”

Don, your leftist professor was shamefully manipulating you. The residual racism remark was intended to impose “white guilt” on you. Don’t fall for it. You can no more take blame for your ancestors’ offences than take credit for their altruisms. Former President Jimmy Carter grew up in Georgia and has dedicated his life to human rights. What of him?

I don’t think you’re a racist. Racists would never search their souls for residual racism. They know their souls are dark and dirty. However, I like the idea of examining our beliefs, particularly about race.

Racism is taught, not inherited. I’ll give you a personal example. It was 1963 and Dad announced after church he was visiting a sick brother at the Veterans Administration Hospital (VA) on Clairemont Avenue in Decatur. We kids tagged along, still dressed in our Sunday best.

We arrived at the VA and entered an elevator. Before the door closed, Dad noticed a black family hurrying to board. He held the button until they stepped inside. And then he did something I’d never seen a white man do. He spoke to a black man as an equal.

On the ride up, those two men chatted in relaxed tones. I stared at the man’s daughter – a girl my age in a colorful dress. I guessed her family had gone to church that morning, too.

What struck me most was how normal the dads acted. Both families were nearly a mirror image of the other, except for the color of our skin. The elevator rose and opened. Dad motioned for the black family to exit first. The little girl’s dad said thanks.

This scene could happen in any elevator today, but this was 1963. If you were not yet born, or your memory is fuzzy, let me break down some of that year’s events. In January, the new governor of Alabama, George Wallace, announced, “Segregation Forever.”  In April, the Birmingham police used dogs and cattle prods on civil rights demonstrators. Medgar Evers, a member of the NAACP, was shot in front of his home. The KKK were the murderers.

On September 15 1963, four little black girls died in the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. I’m sure those girls wore colorful dresses that morning like my mirror image and me in the elevator.

A black man and a white man speaking cordially dad-to-dad in an elevator was an object lesson for me and maybe my mirror image. Both dads exhibited a kind of brotherly love unheard of if you watched television news. Today we continue to work toward equality, against a backdrop of polarization, with a refusal to acknowledge we’ve come a long way. Our last president was black. And he was a dad of two little girls who grew up before our eyes in the White House.

Despite our race, politics, or religion, we need to remember that the kids are listening. Let’s behave like grownups and teach our children well.

• Have a comment? Send to:  elliott@brack.net

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Many gun owners come into them as inheritance from relatives

Editor, the Forum:

How do you reign in guns already out there? Parents pass away, next of kin get possession of the firearms and no registration happens. Grandkids get access, but there is no record.

How do you control kids on the fringe who might take action? Who do you call if you suspect? Is there a central phone number and what action is taken? In other words, if a troubled student tells someone else that they might get back at the school, who exactly does the student call, and can the authorities confiscate all household guns without legal recourse?

I see many times that felons are caught with firearms. But I see little to nothing done to prosecute the family member or girl/boyfriend who let them get the gun.

When someone dies and has a registered firearm, how do you track what happens to that weapon?

What do we do about the many people who have guns and mental issues who don’t seek mental help? They just spiral down and decide to take out others with them.

How about people who reach the end of their rope financially, lose their job and feel going postal is their answer?

Raising the age of gun ownership does nothing if relatives or friends have guns that the unstable person can access.

— George Graf, Palmyra, Va.

Figures that one letter writer has very short memory

Editor, the Forum:

In a recent letter, it turns out that Mr. Sullivan of Buford also has a very short memory.

The Republicans in Congress had a publicly stated policy — repeat publicly stated policy, no secret — of opposing anything, anything, that the Obama Administration proposed.  This was not hearsay, but was in the media, even on Fox News.  I’m surprised he didn’t hear about it.

Also, it is not necessary to have a majority in Congress to stonewall legislation, as I certain Mr. Sullivan knows.

— Robert H. Hanson, Loganville

Tends to disagree with previous scenario about arming teachers

Editor, the Forum:

Whoever wrote this (“Read this possible scenario and question, do we arm teachers”)

is a political hack and not very good at fiction.

— Alan Crowell, Duluth

Send us your thoughts:  We encourage you to send us your letters and thoughts on issues raised in GwinnettForum.  Please limit comments to 300 words.  We reserve the right to edit for clarity and length.  Send feedback and letters to:    elliott@brack.net

Illegal immigrants

• For more of Bill McLemore’s cartoons, see his page on Facebook.
• Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net

Gwinnett unveils Countywide Trails Master Plan of 320 total miles

A draft Gwinnett Countywide Trails Master Plan unveiled on February 21 envisions a network of county trails tying in with trails of cities and community improvement districts to create a seamless, interconnected web of bike and pedestrian pathways for recreation, commuting or running errands.

As part of the 320-mile network of trails, the study proposes nine “Signature Trails,” or regionally significant trails. These will have amenities, connectivity between destinations and other defining features that will set the standard for the county and the region. Some, such as the Sugar Hill Greenway, are being built by cities. Some will stretch across multiple cities and connect to adjacent jurisdictions. The long-term goal, which may take decades to implement depending on funding, will be realized incrementally.

Many of the Signature Trails were included in the plan’s Core Trail Network, a series of trails that are envisioned to be built by 2040. The plan recommended some quick-win projects, such as the Western Gwinnett Bikeway, a proposed 18-mile trail located along Peachtree Industrial Boulevard from Suwanee to Peachtree Corners, and part of the Harbins Greenway, a 17.4-mile trail connecting Harbins Park to Bay Creek Park to Tribble Mill Park to Loganville.

One major project discussed is the Chattahoochee Trail Network, a potential 100-mile, regional trail along the river from Buford Dam to Newnan that would require partnerships among multiple agencies. Gwinnett officials have already met with the National Park Service and surrounding cities to explore ways to help build the trail.

The trails master plan, which was the result of a Board of Commissioners strategy session, was developed with public input as well as buy-in from multiple county agencies working in tandem with cities and community improvement districts.

The study settled on two types of trails – the off-road trail, a concrete path up to 14 feet wide that follows its own alignment or possibly a stream or utility corridor and costs between $3.2 million and $3.5 million per mile, and a side path, an asphalt trail that runs adjacent to roadways with a buffer between users and traffic and costs between $2.4 million and $2.5 million per mile.

Possible revenue sources would include SPLOST, cities, CIDs, state and federal funds, nonprofits, institutions and private entities, such as developers.

The plan will be reviewed by the Board of Commissioners for approval.

Upgrading of CSX railroad crossing has begun in Gwinnett

CSX Transportation will replace the railroad ties on their tracks through Gwinnett County, which started  March 5. CSX is working to make the public aware of the project and to ask for motorists’ patience as the company seeks to make the crossings safer.

The work is expected to last six weeks, weather permitting, and will impact almost all at-grade crossings on the rail line, which somewhat parallels U.S. Highway 29. Two teams will start work on both ends of Gwinnett County. One team will start close to the DeKalb County line and the other will begin in Dacula.

CSX Transportation representative Ray Porter says that each crossing could be closed for several days and multiple crossings may be closed at the same time. Some of the crossings have two to three tracks, which may increase the time required at those locations.

Great American Cleanup offers prizes for best Gwinnett projects

Great American Cleanup is celebrating its 20th anniversary in Gwinnett as the nation’s largest community improvement program. Launched by Keep America Beautiful in 1999, Gwinnett Clean and Beautiful (GCB) anticipates making this year’s event bigger and better right here at home.

During the Great American Cleanup local residents, schools, organizations, civic groups and businesses are encouraged to take part in a variety of community improvement projects. Ranging from starting a community garden to creating a video about sustainability, projects must be completed between March 1 and May 31, 2018. Project submissions are due by June 8, 2018. The three most outstanding submissions will win a prize of $500 each.

• To get started, participants will select a category from the Great American Cleanup Page on the Gwinnett Clean & Beautiful website at www.gwinnettcb.org, complete the project, report their results, share their photos and cross their fingers in the hopes that their project will be selected as one of the winners.

Eight students graduate from first Career Online High School

Gwinnett County Public Library (GCPL) celebrated the first class of Career Online High School graduates at the Lilburn Branch Saturday afternoon.

Eight community members who completed an accredited high school diploma and credentialed career certificate participated in the ceremony. Career Online High School, a program brought to public libraries by Gale, a Cengage company, is part of the world’s first accredited, private online school district. The program is specifically designed to reengage adults into the education system and prepare them for entry into postsecondary career education or the workforce.

Clyde Strickland, whose donation helped launch Career Online High School at the library, shared words of encouragement with the graduates. “This program can put people on a path that they’ve never dreamed of,” said Strickland. “You can not even imagine where you are going.”

Career Online High School scholarships are supported through private funding and donations. To support the program, please contact GCPL Development Manager Shelly Schwerzler at schwerzler@gwinnettpl.org or visit gwinnettpl.org/foundation.

Mill Creek teacher wins DAR’s Outstanding History Teacher Award

Summerlin

Mrs. Elizabeth Summerlin has been named the 2018 Outstanding Teacher of American History winner by the Philadelphia Winn Daughters of the American Revolution chapter. She is an American history teacher at Mill Creek High School. The chapter presented Mrs. Summerlin with a $500 check.

A graduate of both Georgia College and State University and University of Georgia, Mrs. Summerlin has made it her life’s mission to intersect the significant moments of the past with the respective interests of her students.  Discouraged by the observation that history is filled with “dead people and dates,” Mrs. Summerlin works both inside and outside of the classroom to change that perspective in her students, the community, and fellow teachers.

Outside the classroom, Mrs. Summerlin has served as a docent at the Old Governor’s Mansion in Georgia.  At Georgia State College and University, Mrs. Summerlin served as History Club president, where she hosted some of the nation’s most respected historians.  Mrs. Summerlin is also involved in the National History Bee and History Bowl – academic competitions that reward students across the nation for studying history.

Reviewed by Karen Burnette Garner, Dacula: Most scholars of military strategies will single out Alexander the Great as having the greatest influence on warfare for over 2,000 years.  Though his life was relatively short (he died at 33), he was revered and feared across much of the Western world.  Through his conquests, ranging from Greece to Egypt, across the Persian Empire, and over the mountains of Pakistan, he spread Greek culture that continues to influence societies today.  As part of this Macedonian domination, he successfully incorporated local customs and laws that held his subjects to his command.  This book gives the reader a detailed insight into what guided a master of the known world, his early studies with Aristotle, his ruthless family life, his dreams for the future, and his human frailties.  This is a balanced look at a very complex man who left his mark.

• An invitation: what books, restaurants, movies or web sites have you enjoyed recently? Send us your recent selection, along with a short paragraph (100 words) as to why you liked this, plus what you plan to visit or read next.  Send to:  elliott@brack.net

GEORGIA ENCYCLOPEDIA TIDBIT

Poet Natasha Trethewey of Emory University wins Pulitzer Prize

Natasha Trethewey, an English professor at Emory University in Atlanta, served as poet laureate of the United States from 2012 to 2014. Her collection Native Guard won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 2007.

Trethewey

Trethewey’s works forge a rich intersection between the historical and autobiographical. In poems that are polished, controlled, and often based on traditional forms, Trethewey grapples with the dualities and oppositions that define her personal history: black and white, native and outsider, rural and urban, the memorialized and the forgotten. The daughter of a black mother and a white father, Trethewey grew up in a South still segregated by custom, if not by law, and her life astride the color line has inspired her recovery of lost histories, public and private.

Trethewey has spent much of her life in Georgia.  She maintains deep roots in her native Mississippi, where she was born on April 26, 1966, in her mother’s hometown of Gulfport. Her parents, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, a social worker, and Eric Trethewey, a poet and Canadian emigrant, met as students at Kentucky State College in Frankfort and later crossed the state line into Ohio to marry—a situation whose ironies and implications the poet deftly explores in “Miscegenation.”

After her parents’ divorce, six-year-old Trethewey moved with her mother to Atlanta, returning every summer to the Gulf Coast. Here she began to discover the complexities of her essential duality—when she was with her father she could pass for white and be treated more equally than when she was among her mother’s people. Trethewey also began to write during these years, at her father’s urging.

Trethewey’s young adulthood was ruptured by violence and tragedy. In 1984 her mother divorced her second husband, Joel Grimmette; a year later, Grimmette shot his ex-wife to death. Nineteen-year-old Trethewey, who was finishing her freshman year at the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, where she was an English major and a varsity cheerleader, turned to writing poetry to deal with her grief.

She completed her B.A. degree at UGA in 1989, and in 1991 she earned an M.A. degree in English and creative writing at Hollins College in Roanoke, Va., where she studied with her father, a professor there. By the time she earned her M.F.A. degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1995, Trethewey was starting to publish, and her work has since appeared in the country’s most prestigious literary journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry in both 2000 and 2003.

Trethewey took her first teaching job as an assistant professor of English at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama, in 1997. In 2001 she joined the faculty at Emory University, where she is a professor of English and the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry. In 2005-6 she served as the Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Duke University in Durham, N.C. Trethewey was the fourth African American poet, and UGA’s first graduate outside of journalism, to win a Pulitzer Prize. In early 2008 she received the Mississippi Governor’s Award for literary excellence, and later that year she was named Georgia Woman of the Year by the Georgia Commission on Women. In 2011 she was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

Mississippi named Trethewey state poet laureate in 2012, and that same year she began her tenure as U.S. poet laureate, dividing her time between her home in Decatur and Washington, D.C. During her second term she launched a feature called “Where Poetry Lives” on the PBS NewsHour Poetry Series.

Trethewey is married to Brett Gadsden, a historian and assistant professor of African American studies at Emory.

• To view the Georgia Encyclopedia online, go to http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org

Distinctive building is this edition’s Mystery Photo

This edition’s mystery photo is a beautiful building, which someone snapped during the holiday season. Figure out where this building is, and send your answer to elliott@brack.net, and be sure to include your hometown.

The mystery Photo in the last edition was very local, and stumped some people. Joseph Hopkins of Norcross saw it immediately: “Yes, this is none other than the fountain in Lillian Webb Park in our Norcross, A Place To Imagine.”  The photo came from newly-elected Norcross City Commissioner Chuck Paul.

Jim Savelelis of Duluth sent in the correct answer, as did Bob Foreman of Grayson: “The mystery photo looks like the stairway water fountain feature at Lillian Webb Park in Norcross, Georgia.  I thought you might be too obvious with this one and trying to trick us, so I looked it up to be sure. You would never try to trick us, would you?”

George Graf of Palmyra, Va. told us this about the photo: “Named after the city’s mayor emeritus, Lillian Webb, the new five acre park is a dramatic engineering feat as well as a spectacular venue.  Over 72,000 brick layers, 1667 cubic yards of concrete, 130 tons of steel, and 650 tons of stone veneer were used to create this seemingly effortless flow of water over stone, and to create adjacent platforms offering places to relax and enjoy the view of the park.”

(NEW) Norcross Bicentennial Stories: Sunday, March 11 at 3 p.m. at the Norcross Cultural and Community Center. Authors Edith Holbrook Riehm, Gene Ramsay, and Cate Kitchen have come together with historical stories of local city in their book, Images of America:  Norcross, which tells of the town’s founders, residents, and visitors, combining everyday life with historical events that stretch over 140 years. This event is free and open to the public.  Books will be available for purchase and signing.

(NEW) Workshop on small business growth will be in Sugar Hill at its Community Center on March 15 at 11 a.m. Grow your business with help from Reference USA.  In this session, you’ll learn how to access Reference USA for free from your home or office, plus learn other methods. Presented by Gwinnett County Public Library, lunch is provided.  This event is free and open to the public, but reservations are required.  RSVP to events@gwinnettpl.org.

(NEW) Coffee with a Cop: Wednesday, March 21 from 9 a. m until 11 a.m. at the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce Building, 6500 Sugarloaf Parkway, on the third floor. Sponsored by the Rotary Club of Duluth, the public is invited. Please RSVP to 678 442 6504 or email David.D.Woods@gwinnettcounty.com.

(NEW) Nature Center Bird Walk at Mill Creek Nature Center, coordinated by the Southern Wings Bird Club, Saturday, March 24. Park between the Bird Watchers Supply stores and Tuesday Morning. Walk begins promptly at 9:30 a.m. (There is no Monday meeting in March.)

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