Opinion

We have been unemployed, locked down, locked up and watched television until every fiber in our body screams to let me out. America, and the entire world for that matter, has watched as tired and exhausted men and women are suited up, covered, disinfected, and go forth and do battle with an enemy that has devastated the lives of the population of our beautiful planet. Unlike the men and women that put on the uniform of the United States military, the enemy is not human nor is it fought with guns and bullets and bayonets. Instead the enemy is so small that even the biological microscopes cannot see it and the ammunition used to kill this enemy is lacking the knockdown power of the assault rifle of the modern infantryman. Yet, the men and women of the medical corps continue to go forward day in and day out to provide help to the sick and hope for pleading families. Hats off to these wonder workers and fortunately a grateful nation has raised them up in prayer, extended the praise of appreciation and witnessed in awe what our health care workers have sacrificed for our nation.

When there is a need, leaders step up. That’s what we saw happen last week with the Karl Malone Foundation for Kids Union Parish Food Project.

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.