INDY’s Justin Laidlaw reported earlier this month on a split vote by the Durham City Council to extend a contract with a lobbying firm whose founder has close ties to the Trump family and administration, as illustrated by a photo of him hunting with Donald Trump Jr. and RFK that we included in the Instagram post sharing the story. Readers sounded off on the contract, the article, and the photo. 

From Facebook user Christiane Voisin:

I read the article and what it says is Checkmate has a rolodex of “relationships” and their work can be hard to quantify. Ok, so tell us qualitatively? Why are we paying them? Beyond something about Durham now being able to set its own speed limits?

From Instagram user david.r.tucker.75:

Yet another in a long list of reasons for this Durham resident to be extremely disappointed in the majority on our city council.

From Instagram user bordenjeremy:

A lot of blue municipalities in NC have GOP lobbyists in Raleigh. It seems absurd except when you realize that we have the weakest governor in the US and a GOP legislature that is drunk on its own power and loves to stick it to Dem cities. Lobbyists help you maintain relationships and, very occasionally, can get you more of the public funds your citizens deserve — which again, they should do anyway, but not the way it works with our legislature. If you want to get anything out of the legislature, you have to hire a lobbyist, so you could hire a Dem firm and be less effective or in my opinion you could bite the bullet and hire a GOP firm and deal with the reality of living in a state with a gerrymandered legislature. It’s not really much of a choice when you think about it if you want to be effective.    (also using this pic is incredible click bait, the Indy can do better).

Recently, we published a story written by Andrew Nurkin for The Assembly on the deadly assault that prompted the first LGBTQ pride march in North Carolina. The incident took place at a spot on the Little River known as a safe and secluded place for queer people to gather. The story of the brutal attack and the man killed, Sonny Antonevitch, had never been fully chronicled before Nurkin’s story. Readers responded to the deeply researched piece.

From Instagram user spillerlillian:

We used to go there every Sunday with the NYT and hang out on the opposite shore. We’d wave at each other. We haven’t been back since

From Instagram user eric_ginsburg:

Most compelling thing I’ve read anywhere in a while — really excellent work!

From Facebook user Danya Silberman:

Thank you for this incredible reporting. I’m a queer Durham native and never heard this history 

From Facebook user Beth Shulman:

I was at Our Day Out on 6/27/81. It started with several speakers at Five Points, and then we walked through downtown, which was pretty quiet back then on a Saturday. It was an act of visibility for the Lesbian and Gay community, a call to show up and take a stand. I was scared of violence occurring but I had to go; I knew that as a college student it was less risky for me to be out there than it was for others who could lose their job, their family, even their children if they were seen. 

The Assembly’s Carli Brosseau, in a story we published last month, wrote about a program in Wake County working to fill the teacher shortage by training instructional assistants to lead classrooms. The story resonated with one reader.

From reader Hamid Malik by email: 

As the Imam in North Carolina covering Baitul Kareem Mosque in Fuquay-Varina, I read “A Hand Up for the Helpers” with gratitude. Wake County and NC State are testing an apprenticeship that lets instructional assistants, like Meaghan Goldberg at Penny Road Elementary in Cary, earn a teaching license and a master’s degree and lead their own classrooms.

The helpers in our schools are easy to overlook. Gratitude is how a community notices them. Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, the worldwide head of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, said in a July Friday sermon: “It is this spirit of thankfulness that fosters unity and cohesion within a nation.”

Psychologists who study gratitude find that expressing thanks tends to strengthen bonds with the people who help us. A thank-you is a start; a pathway upward is better.

Wake County neighbors can do both: thank an assistant this week, and give programs like this one room to grow.