Somebody -- say, the Hurricanes -- does something bright, funny, interesting: They celebrate their thrilling run for the Stanley Cup by placing -- with written permission, mind you -- hockey jerseys on statues near the Capitol. Then somebody else -- say, some guy named Davis Jones -- flips his wig and goes after the jerseys with a knife. He doesn't make a complaint; he doesn't circulate a petition; he doesn't make a phone call. He just takes out a weapon and attacks.

Final result? First, the chairman of the state Historical Commission, Jerry Cashion, inconceivably supports the attacker ("I share the outrage over the desecration of the monuments." Um, excuse me, but hockey jerseys? Desecration?). Worse, the entire city of Raleigh scuttles backward, saying, "Shhh! Don't anybody do anything that might get somebody to flip his wig!" The Hurricanes reasonably elected not to press charges (no point in dragging this out; good for them). Just the same, they said they were unlikely to do anything similarly bright again.

Our loss.

Dullness 1, excitement 0, end of the first period.

Welcome to a town run by No-It-Alls. It was this spirit of "if I personally don't like it, then NO" that kept the artistic chandeliers off the new Fayetteville Street. You remember -- the colorful light standards that at no cost to the taxpayers were going to enliven the new street? Enough people squinched their eyes shut and fiercely shook their heads that the City Council caved and removed them from plans.

Something similar is happening with the artwork designed for the new plaza near the Convention Center, where City Manager Russell Allen appears to have appointed himself No-It-All in Chief. And we can say much the same about public transportation, a downtown library and virtually every other innovative suggestion made concerning the public space in the last decade.

Let me assure you: Saying no to things is easy. I have an 18-month-old at home, and he does it all day long. Saying yes -- playfully clothing statues during a moment of civic excitement; designing brightly colored and lovely light fixtures for downtown; thinking of new ways to combat traffic rather than doing the same old thing (building more roads) and expecting different results -- is hard. Saying yes is hard not least because so many stand ready to stick their fingers in their ears, make a siren noise and shout "no!" at the top of their lungs until you stop saying yes.

As a city of about 340,000 -- and a region of a million-and-a-quarter -- we have got to learn to stop giving in to knee-jerk No-It-Alls. I believe I personally have blazed a trail in sitting still for things I don't like because ... well, because I know the great secret: It's not all about me. That statue of firefighters in Nash Square? I'm sorry -- I'm all for firefighters, but that's one of the ugliest statues I've ever seen, and we weren't long on public space before we took up a bunch of it for that.

But guess what? It's not all about me. The people wanted that, they did something about it, so there it is. I won't gaze at it, but I won't attack it with a knife. The Outer Loop? Our grandchildren will hate us for that, and I spoke out when I could against it and in favor of our beleaguered efforts for reasonable public transportation, but I'm on the losing end, and I'm going to have to cope.

Same thing for the Convention Center. I still think it's a poor idea that will probably cost us a lot of money in the long run. Just the same, without the Convention Center we'd have never knocked down that hideous Civic Center, and the revitalization of Fayetteville Street, which I think is marvelous, would not be happening. So you see? Even ideas you don't like can spark ideas you do. It's part of living in a city, where lots of people have lots of ideas, and you try to find a way to give people lots of choices.

It's not about saying no, and it's not about appeasing those who attack what they don't like with weapons.

We need to learn to say yes. We need leadership from forward-thinking businesspeople, who have the money and the connections to "yes" us out of our blue-nosed past. We need new blood in city government, so that when complaints arrive about, say, free public artwork that a few people don't like, at least one council member will say, "This is just silly; it's free. If you don't like it, you don't have to look at it. If in the long run we all hate it, we'll take it down." We need to remind people that taking a knife to things we don't like in the public arena isn't honorable, and we don't accept it.

We need to take chances, do something different, say yes.

And it wouldn't hurt to put the knives away.

(Scott Huler, a former writer at The N&O, lives in Raleigh. His most recent book is "Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and How a 19th-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry.")