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.

Budget passage critical for Western Carolina

You often hear that North Carolina’s public universities are the “crown jewel” of the state. While this is indeed true, the deadlock in Raleigh over funding for a new budget continues to hamstring our state’s public institutions. Some of the most urgent needs can be found at Western Carolina University, where the lack of funding is beginning to negatively affect students and faculty.

Helping kids keep out some of the noise

I’m a child of the 1980s. 

With side ponytails on full hairsprayed display, my big sister and I kept busy making mixed tapes, riding banana seat bicycles and collecting plastic charms for our charm necklaces. We stayed up late watching “Dirty Dancing” and “Indiana Jones,” swooning over Patrick Swayze and Harrison Ford. We heated our food in BPA-laden plastic, drank from hoses and ran around our neighborhood for hours before returning home happy and spent and ready to hurriedly eat dinner so we could be in front of the TV by 8 p.m. to watch “Who’s the Boss” or “Growing Pains.” 

There is no defense for hypocrisy

By Mark Jamison • Guest Columnist | One of the defenses I have heard most often offered for support for Mr. Trump is his defense of unborn life, a term that seems oxymoronic or possibly contradictory but can at least be appreciated when offered with sincere spiritual commitment.

The contradiction, I sense, attaches less to the term itself than in its rather narrow application. This, combined with a worshipful elevation of Mr. Trump to a pedestal his life and words almost certainly don’t support and which seems almost blasphemous when accompanied by tortured explications of scripture and motivated reasoning that stands in for solid theology.

Plenty of room in the arena

I became aware of a Facebook group recently called “Finding Solutions — Waynesville.” On the surface it appeared this group was looking for solutions to the town’s social issues of homelessness and addiction, so I joined in so I could observe and perhaps offer valuable resources to the discussion — after all, The Smoky Mountain News has covered these issues extensively in the last several years.

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