Opinion

It’s good to be back in Union Parish on a regular basis.

In 1978 I walked out of ULM with a diploma and family in hand, boarded a plane and left for my new job in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. What a change a few years makes.

I have suspended my weekly columns that have appeared in over 80 newspapers in Louisiana, for the next few months, just to give this “old guy” a break.

This is part 10 in a multi-part series about questionable behavior in Calcasieu Parish, reprinted from The Washington Post. The L.A.C.E. program is statewide and has been criticized and found to have many issues all across the state.

America as a country has done a very good job of fighting the COVID-19 virus. We took the most vibrant peace-time economy in the history of the world and stopped it in its’ tracks.

Continued memories from fellow students during Jerry Lee’s time at Linville:

During the horrible polio epidemic that peaked in the 1950s, I became one of the victims. But since then, thank God, I’ve been the picture of health.

Our current pandemic is of Biblical proportions from the point of view that it has aggressively spread across a modern world with dramatic speed. We tend to lull ourselves to sleep and think that we are indestructible due to a modern living condition that far surpasses anything the world has ever witnessed. As modern as we are and as privileged as we believe we are, a small microscopic bug, a virus, has greatly thwarted the most robust economy in the history of the world. The term pandemic is not a general term but is defined as a disease that has crossed international boundaries.

In only a matter of days, what was once a generally stable, prosperous, independent nation filled with everyday people just grinding it out on a daily basis to raise their family and have a little fun in the process has turned into something much different.

We’re in the midst of a global pandemic, but its impact on America’s communities is local.