March 2018 archives

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Saturday, March 31, 2018

Justice, not blame: A solution to this epidemic requires shared perspectives

You do this job long enough, it starts to come home with you. You get to know the people you report on. You try, near as you can, to put yourself in the person's shoes and see things from your...

Monday, March 26, 2018

Fleet of feet: Cures for the Colors welcomes everyone to step up to the challenge

It could be fun. Running is seldom a good idea unless someone -- or something -- is chasing you. OK, that's rotten advice. Running is great exercise and can do wonders for a person's mental health, maybe due to the...

Sunday, March 25, 2018

Lasting honor: An airman's sacrifice 50 years ago still resonates today

It is still a couple of weeks away, but to learn that two Thursdays from now the Patriot Guard will be escorting home the remains of an airman shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War has us thinking. Perhaps...

Saturday, March 24, 2018

Hoops heaven: Basketball brings a happy respite this year more than ever

Gun protests. Banned transgenders. A last-minute spending bill and the will-he-won't-he saga surrounding the president's alleged musings of firing Bob Mueller. A relatively quiet weekend of late, but still enough to send us reaching for the remote, scrambling to switch...

Thursday, March 22, 2018

Not paper targets: America's youth seize control of narrative on guns

David Berkowitz shot and killed six people and wounded several others between the summers of 1976 and '77, because a barking dog told him to do it. He is dubbed a serial killer. Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd...

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Quiet on the set: Maxwell Center needs a hotel, but the show doesn't end there

If you build it, they will come. Right actor. Wrong movie. While admittedly it will be doubly hard to attract major conventions and acts to our fair county without a hotel adjacent to the multimillion-dollar complex built to house such...

Monday, March 19, 2018

Finn's tale: The term 'rescue' is relative at best

He came out of the woods. The first thought was a neighbor who'd been moving out that day had mistakenly left him behind. But on a return trip for a left-behind sofa, that notion was proven false. Knocking on doors...

Sunday, March 18, 2018

Huge gift: Anonymous donor clearly knows the value of literacy

Anyone willing to donate more than half a million dollars to fund a literacy program benefiting the poorest population of a county clearly knows the true value of money. Whether it was one person, a consortium of the civic-minded or...

Thursday, March 15, 2018

Vote for Raytrell: Boys and Girls Club mentor deserves national accolade

We need more Raytrells. Here is a guy, not from this county, brought to the area for a job 17 years ago, who found his niche not in the work he was contracted to do but in volunteering. After eight...

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Lessons: Students put into practice what they've learned of past movements

In one regard, if in no other, the National School Walkout demonstration in which students left their classrooms for 17 minutes on Wednesday to mark the 17 lives lost a month prior in Parkland, Florida, was nothing short of a...

Monday, March 12, 2018

The pressure: Each of us has to find a way to keep it all in perspective

Stress is a killer. These days we all seem consumed with work, politics, social media and the pressures of paying for more "things" while valuing less what truly matters. Maybe that is an overreach, but that appears to be the...

Sunday, March 11, 2018

Pre-Madness: NCAA puts the framework for excitement in place

Prepare to have your brackets busted. Unless Virginia or Villanova cut the net, any other team's fandome's 'I-told-you-so's' at the end of this dance just won't ring true. It's not because the field isn't any good -- it's because so...

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Time for a talk: School board's move was abrupt, but class sizes do need discussion

County commissioner Joe Daughtery said Tuesday that he and other commissioners were "shocked and disappointed" at the school board's recent 5-2 decision to begin implementing class size reduction measures despite a recent reprieve fought diligently for and won by our...

Monday, March 5, 2018

Sharp focus: Social issues fill the frame on Oscar night

Far be it from us to imply that Hollywood is any sort of place to look to for political guidance or moral instruction. But socially speaking, and partly because it has been home to it for much of its history,...

Sunday, March 4, 2018

Good roots: City and county prove they're fertile ground for growth

Destination Wayne. Now that the Maxwell Center is in place and open for business, and downtown Goldsboro is undergoing a kind of renaissance, it seems the county seat is poised to become a mecca of sorts. But for whom? The...

Saturday, March 3, 2018

Superheroes: 'Black Panther' inspires; so, too, a ticket buyer's generosity

Sometimes a film moves beyond the big screen. Sitting here contemplating all of the films one might consider pivotal to a particular time frame, the list grows longer rather than shorter. Reach back as far as "On the Waterfront," "Casablanca"...