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Columns

  • Make giving a planned family activity

    The end of the year is a special time to gather with family, reunite with friends and remember the many blessings of the prior months. It also is a time for the more than 400 nonprofits in Hardin County to request your help in volunteering and fundraising.

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  • Thanksgiving's future: Will we choose bargains over traditions?

    My, oh my, no time for sweet potato pie this Thanksgiving. We’ve got to rush out and catch the sales at Walmart and Sears by 8 p.m., Target by 9 p.m., then Kohl’s and Best Buy at midnight.

    And oh yes, thank you Kmart for that breather between 4 and 8 p.m., Thanksgiving Day, giving us just enough time to scarf down the turkey and dressing before full-throttling ahead on our shopping tour until 11 p.m. Friday.

    The inevitable has happened: Black Friday has invaded Turkey Thursday.

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  • Violating our freedoms is no small thing

    During this Thanksgiving season, I trust you can find it in your heart to forgive me for writing about politics. But I have some unfinished business related to the most recent election.

    It seems every election season, the newspaper fields calls about destruction, damage or theft of political signs. This year was no exception. The local Republican Party, in fact, offered a bounty for information leading to the arrest of a serial sign vandal.

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  • Are you an anonymous grace-giver? Join the club

    I’m thinking about starting a non-profit organization for all the people who perform acts of kindness and don’t want to be thanked for doing them.

    Maybe I’ll name it, “Grace-Givers Anonymous.” I could set up a website where people like you could donate. Billboards promoting deliberate acts of kindness could be set up. Together we could run TV commercials for the cause.

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  • The future changes forever this afternoon at 2

    For many communities, honoring veterans is a once a year activity. Not so here.

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  • Parting with a reliable, if a bit rusty, old friend

    This year between 30 and 40 million Americans will sell a used car. I’m one of them. I just parted with my old car.

    I bought the 1996 T-Bird mainly out of desperation; Lori and I had grown weary of car-pooling in our one vehicle. She would need to go home when I had the car somewhere else; I had to have it when she was on an errand.

    We felt like the frustrated cab driver who is supposed to take two passengers in different directions at the same time.

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  • If FEMA vanished, Americans would adjust

    dvocates of big government never miss a chance to capitalize on a natural disaster. Even before the storm has passed, they will boast that without activist government, recovery would be impossible. Peddlers of this line ask us to imagine what life would be like today — in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy — without FEMA and the state and local emergency agencies. This, they say, is the condition to which opponents of big government would reduce the country.

    But they lack imagination.

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  • Thrust headlong into an imaginative adventure

     

    It began as a serene fall experience. Leaves crunching under foot on a cool afternoon as I walked along a country fence row with my infant grandson tucked against my side.

    Suddenly as if from nowhere, a deer appears. It breaks into a dead run. The movement was surprising but not alarming until I realized it’s charging me.

    The deer’s head crashes into my side waist high just below the ribs. As I bend with the blow, the child flies free of my grasp.

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  • Study the candidates and express yourself at the polls

    Americans once again will exercise one of their most important rights and responsibilities. Millions will cast votes to decide who will serve in elected offices at every national, state and local level.

    Sadly, over the years fewer and fewer Americans have actively participated in this most American of duties. Many election outcomes are determined by far less than half the eligible voters. 

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  • Every vote has an impact and every voter matters

    With every flyer I placed on the doorknob, I felt a surge of energy. I was actually making a difference and for an 11-year-old kid, that’s a big deal.

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