Editorials

I was in Freedom Hall the night Anderson County played for the state basketball championship. It was the place where I heard Muhammad Ali say he wanted to fight George Foreman and Joe Frazier on the same night.

I saw Julius Erving, then of the Virginia Squires, do things with a basketball that I had never seen and still can’t describe. I have been to several concerts there and I watched Richie Farmer make string music the state finals 23 years ago.

When the Greek philosopher Aristotle famously quipped, “Nature abhors a vacuum,” he probably didn’t have the mayor of Lawrenceburg in mind.
Were he alive today, though, that’s probably just what he’d think about the leadership vacuum that exists regarding the mayor’s cemetery debacle.

We generally loathe the idea of government at any level sticking its bureaucratic nose into people’s lives, but will gladly support any effort from county government to take action against the owners of abandoned, dilapidated homes.
A perfect example is the home on Hammond Road that is the subject of an article on page A1. It has been abandoned for years, has bags of trash falling out of its broken front windows, has floors and ceilings that are caving in, and is an eyesore of the first order.

While hiding in the hallway, I listened as the commander retold the story I told him a few hours earlier.
It was the story of how my daughter, Hayley, had gone from aspiring college student bent on becoming a physical therapist to landing in that career field with the Air Force. The catch, though, required her to report to boot camp three days later, leaving her parents almost no time to come to grips with the fact that their middle child was leaving the nest.
The commander knew I was listening in the hallway. Hayley didn’t have a clue.