Columns & Opinions

Something incredible started happening in Baton Rouge on April 28. At the Natural Resources and Environment Committee hearing on Representative Dodie Horton’s HB630 bill to start reining in the appointed bureaucrats with the Cypress Black Bayou Recreation and Water Conservation District, the Good Ol’ Boy Network of Bossier City was put on full display and notice.

Lately, we have been considering energy and what impacts personal energy. Consider psychologically that we live in a three-room house. Three rooms are what everyone has in our conscious minds. The three rooms are the past, the present and the future.

There was a sense of irrational exuberance inside the Northwest Louisiana Council of Governments’ (NLCOG) meeting room in the late spring 2019 monthly meeting. The room was filled with the usual business leaders from this third-largest city in one of the top 50 states in the Union.

Shreveport’s April 2021 sales tax receipts reached an alltime monthly high of $13,756,900, easily surpassing the prior mark of $13,000,330, just established in January this year.

The renowned Canton Spirituals popularized the song “Clean Up.” In the song the artists seem to express that individuals who had messed up their lives from a spiritual perspective recognized the fact and the need that they, the individual(s), needed to clean up the mess which they created in their lives. Should this message hold true for a city’s blighted properties?

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”

Acknowledging that an energy crisis exists in our world today raises the questions of what is causing it and how to address it. More questions may lead to answers.

Standing on Cargill’s soccer field 1B with a group of soccer dads back in 2008, talk turned from presidential politics to raising young athletes in the new century. One conservative dad said something that I had never heard before. “The biggest danger to our boys from marijuana is getting arrested and thrown in jail,” he noted. That was 2008. Some of those young athletes grew up and got into a little bit of trouble with marijuana. Many of the families have since moved to other states for better opportunities.