A Little Child Shall (Mis)lead Them
by Ken Gorrell, Weirs Times Contributing Writer To be fair, it’s not the children who are doing the misleading. It’s the adults who are using them as props. Children are being used as tools to…
Category: Opinion / Editorial
Mr. Negron Goes to Washington
by Ken Gorrell, Weirs Times Contributing Writer If the voters of the 2nd Congressional District are smart, we’ll send Steve Negron to Washington, D.C. next year. While any of the declared Republican challengers to Rep.…
Appropriate This!
by Ken Gorrell, Weirs Times Contributing Writer An old Scottish proverb holds that open confession is good for the soul. To honor my Scottish ancestors, I have a confession to make: In middle school, I…
BSA, RIP
by Ken Gorrell, Weirs Times Contributing Writer We must depend upon the Boy Scout Movement to produce the MEN of the future. – Daniel Carter Beard It’s never easy to lose something close to our…
Making Schoolhouse Rock
by Ken Gorrell, Weirs Times Contributing Writer Bob Dorough died last week, but his music lives on. It lives on not just in his jazz recordings, but also in the minds of millions of kids…
Comrade Kim Goes to China
by John J. Metzler Weirs Times Contributing Writer UNITED NATIONS – The political choreography was classic. The staging was epic. But the outcome remains unpredictable. North Korea’s reclusive leader Kim Jong-un and his entourage secretly…
Esse Quam Videri
by Ken Gorrell, Weirs Times Contributing Writer As state mottos go, “Live Free or Die” is unrivaled. We have the best state motto in the nation. But North Carolina’s Latin motto, Esse Quam Videri –…
Context and Confidence
by Ken Gorrell, Weirs Times Contributing Writer Three years ago this week I penned “School-to-Prison Pipeline?,” for the March 5th, 2015 edition of the Weirs Times. It could have been written yesterday. I wrote that…
The Seed of Evil
by Ken Gorrell, Weirs Times Contributing Writer Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin. ― Aesop Evil has been with mankind since the beginning. Yet we still seem surprised when…
To-Do, or Not-To-Do
by Ken Gorrell, Weirs Times Contributing Writer The new year brought new state laws across the land, new experiments in the “laboratories of democracy.” That phrase, coined by Progressive jurist Louis Brandeis, sounds like a…
Ten Years After
by Ken Gorrell, Weirs Times Contributing Writer I’d love to change the world But I don’t know what to do So I’ll leave it up to you “I’d Love to Change the World” —Ten Years…
Everything Old Is New Again
by Ken Gorrell, Weirs Times Contributing Writer Last week, advocates for education who put children ahead of institutions were given a reason to smile: SB 193, establishing education freedom savings accounts, passed a critical vote…
Tribal Tribulations
by Ken Gorrell, Weirs Times Contributing Writer E pluribus unum. It’s one of the few Latin phrases kids learn in school – or used to. Given the sorry state of civics education, perhaps the motto…
Cleaning House
by Ken Gorrell, Weirs Times Contributing Writer Philosophers and theologians have debated for millennia what happens to us when we die. I am supremely unqualified to contribute to their search for the material or spiritual…
Hey Bungalow Bill
by Ken Gorrell, Weirs Times Contributing Writer One of the lesser works on 1968’s The Beatles (a.k.a. The White Album) was The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill, a song mocking an American who went on…