A glimmer of light, perhaps, in the darkness
Way back, way back, like three or four weeks ago, our little company was on track for its best year ever.
Our print newspaper was going strong and we had just added a new, energetic and driven sales professional. Our digital footprint was growing faster than we had expected, and our staff was brimming with new ideas to help local businesses get their message out via several online platforms. Our niche publishing sector had grown significantly in the last 12 months, adding two annual magazines and the four-time-per-year Blue Ridge Motorcycling Magazine to our portfolio.
Right now, life as an otter sounds pretty good
Can we all admit that this quarantine is getting a little weirder every week? The rules for what we can and cannot do in order to defeat the coronavirus have become so specific that many of us are staging strange little rebellions at home by completely obliterating the rules that were once so much a part of the fabric of our daily lives that we took them for granted.
History lessons being learned the hard way
By Jerry DeWeese • Guest Columnist | When in grade school, I wondered why my teachers spent so much time teaching history. What did it matter? This was old news. Now that I have reached “old age” status, I recognize that history is full of lessons and it repeats itself. If we pay attention, today’s society may be able to avoid making the same mistakes we learned about in history class.
Finding Easter in the COVID-19 era
Growing up, my family spent the week of Easter at Ocean Lakes Campground in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We had a little blue and white camper on Sharks Tooth Trail a few streets back from the ocean. Easter typically fell around our county’s spring break, so once that final school bell rang, we packed up our van and headed south.
It’s time to be the hero in your own life
Guys aren’t supposed to sit and wait. Guys are supposed to take action, to get things done.
Yet we seldom get the chance. Most weeks, most months — shoot, most decades — we try to be kind and do what we can. Sully Sullenberger had been flying for domestic airlines for 29 years: dragging his flight case through terminals, sitting in a pilot’s seat that was still warm from the last guy, flying all over the country, all day long, just to end up in Cincinnati. Then on a cold January afternoon, about two minutes after he left LaGuardia for two-hour trip to Charlotte, he had a broken airplane over Manhattan.
The days just drone by, listlessly
I am thinking of a scene in the movie “Fargo” that captures exactly how I am feeling a couple of weeks into quarantine. The bad guy needs to bury a suitcase full of money somewhere on a long stretch of highway, so he pulls the car over, grabs the suitcase, and walks over to a barbed-wire fence that runs along the road as far as the eye can see.
Like a virus, emotions are contagious
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper issued a new executive order stating schools would remain closed through May 15 due to COVID-19. I watched the press briefing in a different room from my boys and when it was over, I quietly closed my laptop and sat for a moment trying to process.
Finding our way without a map
The helplessness is the thing that’s making all of us so uneasy. Like being pushed along by a wave that you know is big and that you know could hurt you, but in that second before it crashes it’s too late to do anything but ride it out.
On main street, things won’t ever be the same
The world changed over the weekend, especially on main street. And it likely won’t ever again look the same as it did on Friday, not with the Covid-19 hell storm unleashing its fury.
In trying times, the cream rises to the top
If it feels like we’ve seen this all before, it’s because we have. All of a sudden, we are all characters in our very own dystopian movie, with a virus on the loose that has already killed thousands of people around the world and has the potential to kill millions, a feckless President whose utter ineptitude has made a bad situation much worse, and a country that by the beginning of this week was on the verge of complete lockdown.