GREENSBORO, NC -- My greatest disappointments with Greensboro is the ease with which we accommodate mendacity in our public discourse. Their is no greater evidence for this than the prevalence of propaganda that masquerades as sincere information about the FedEx overnight cargo sorting hub.
Andy Brod thinks that the mere idea of the misnamed logistics-driven "aerotropolis," is a sore spot with me. That's ridiculous. It's not. What gripes me is the spinning and bullshit that has driven enthusiasm for this long-delayed, over-promising/under-delivering project. It has made us an inverted perversion of our state motto: "Greensboro: To seem, rather than to be."
I could come up with a long list of the ways people and institutions equivocated in order to promote the hub: From people initially denying that noise studies should anticipate the heavier jets needed to fly to Europe because the hub would serve only the eastern seaboard, only to now tout the hub's potential to serve Europe; to the refusal to conduct a meaningful cost/benefit analysis; to biased "reporting" pitting one person's assertions of fact against other people's denials instead of an evaluation of the facts themselves and offering up "data" that was massaged to put the hub in the most favorable light possible.*
The latest example is an attempt to tweak history a little bit -- to have us misremember what was promised. Originally, hub cheerleaders promised the hub would employ 750 - 800 workers when it opened. Having created no new jobs since it opened, Dick Barron of the News & Record "reminds" us today that the hub originally promised jobs for "more than 600 workers" upon its opening. Well, yeah. More than 600 the same way they promised us more than 400 new jobs; more than 100; more than zero. But, accurately, they promised us at least 750 new jobs upon the hub's opening and massaging that to "more than 600" is just another in a long, long string of disappointing ways in which Greensboro has shown itself willing to lie to ourselves--to each other--when it comes to this hub. Just a little at a time--constantly--little drops of deception into a now-overflowing bucket. I don't understand it, but I'm quite embarrassed by it.
* One of the most common and insidious was the News & Record's repeated publishing of a "noise cone" map that showed noise contours overlayed on a map of Greensboro while failing to report that the "noise" shown was of a twenty-four hour/seven-day average that included periods of silence from days and day-parts when cargo jest would not be flying. There was never a map projecting the loudest noise people would experience, but this map of averages was made to seem like it.
No comments:
Post a Comment