Mack Brown was a good coach, but can he keep up with the new football culture?

Mack Brown was a good coach for UNC the first time around. However, as he couldn’t break through and win the big one. That’s how you define greatness in a coach. Dean Smith was a top coach, but had he not won the NCAA, nobody would’ve cared.

Brown at age 67 is probably too old to be a top flight recruiter. That’s the most punishing aspect of the head coach’s job. These days, the coach has to work like heck to sell these top prospects on a particular school. UNC was looking to reclaim past glory, but that’s problematic. The world has moved on.

Robert Peele

Rocky Mount

Creating dependence

As a new subscriber, disappointment set in with the most recent headlines (an undocumented Mexican man’s arrest, advice on teaching “Truth” about Thanksgiving, guides on discourse, teaching students how to deal with our new social climate and how even red states are adopting Medicaid) all with a liberal spin which I’ve become accustomed to. But the Nov. 26 front page about Chapel Hill’s plan to pay employees’ housing (“Chapel Hill plans program to help town employees purchase housing, pay rent”) is what sparked this letter.

Call me crazy, but why would people want to be more dependent on the government? Government dependence keeps people poor. Why doesn’t Chapel Hill simply give those people a raise instead of a handout? Why wouldn’t they want to decide how to use their money, if they want to buy, where they want to buy a home and what they can afford?

Chapel Hill is a city; cities get their money from taxpayers. Did the taxpayers vote to help city employees buy their homes? Personal Responsibility plus Limited Government equals Liberty. Does anyone remember what that is?

JM Casanave

Benson

Border wall

Senators Tillis and Burr, please note that I do not want one dollar of my tax money going for a border wall. This entire border situation is a national embarrassment. We are all immigrants.

There are more civil ways of dealing with immigration than tearing children away from their mothers, gassing old people and children, wasting our tax money by sending troops to the border and authorizing the border patrol to shoot asylum seekers. These acts will remain a stain on the GOP forever. It is appalling and totally un-American. Stop the president from continuing down this path and do not agree to use my tax dollars for this ridiculous wall.

Mary Martin

Cary

Limit immigration

The idea of open borders pushed by progressives has not addressed the end game, which involves logic. There are three reasons that are generally given for allowing anyone, regardless of U.S. law, into this country. Fleeing a repressive regime. Fleeing the threat of violence. And seeking economic opportunity to improve their lives and the lives of their families.

So according to progressives, anyone meeting one of the three criteria should be allowed into this country without question. They are not talking about allowing hundreds of thousands or millions of people in, they are talking about admitting billions. Now that is certainly not desirable or even possible, but that is the logical end game using their criteria.

For all of those who pontificate about admitting any caravan that may approach our borders, my question is how and when will it end?

Bob Jenkins

Fuquay-Varina

Whole person

Mandy Cohen described real progress in the Medicaid program that can help North Carolinians get better health care (“Linking physical and behavioral health care is a big step for NC,” Nov. 28).

While a “whole person approach” is the right way to go, the whole of health care is split among many professionals who are trained separately in separate cultures. Those cultures and the administrative structures that surround each make it difficult to truly integrate care no matter how well we organize payment.

We must move more toward integrated teaching and training of health professionals as well as constructing information systems that allow for effective communication among social workers, physicians, pharmacists, therapists, front-line caregivers, behavioral health professionals, and patients as well as systems that organize and finance their work and their care.

The North Carolina Medicaid initiative is an important, but early step toward this kind of integration. We must integrate professionals, payment, and processes for the benefit of the patient.

Thomas C. Ricketts

Chapel Hill