Sadly, except for Nawlins– us coastal Southerners live secure in the knowledge that a hurricane is never going to hit us, except when it does. And if it does? Woooo! Party! Pull in that kegger for the big blow, bro.

A case in point: The True Freedom Learning Center in St. Marys, Ga You may take this as an advertisement if you wish but it is intended as a tale of seemingly small but profound and hard-won triumphs in the face of almost insurmountable odds.

52% of conservative Americans believe Barack Obama wants to institute Sharia Law.  I'm sure if you also asked those polled what Sharia law is, they couldn't tell you.  Since it's associated with Islam and Muslims, it must be terrible-- and this president must be in support of it.  Everyday more of his American identity evaporates in the eyes of these people--if it were even there at all.  Why?  Even in the face of substantial proof--evidence that is insurmountable--these people insist on painting the president as some foreign enemy of the state.

It's peculiar and unnerving in a way to see so many young people walking around with mobile phones and iPods in their ears and so wrapped up in media and video games. It robs them of their self-identity. It's a shame to see them so tuned out to real life. Of course they are free to do that, as if that's got anything to do with freedom. The cost of liberty is high, and young people should understand before they start spending their life with all those gadgets.

If you are a young enlisted man charged with the security of getting a general, and everything that goes with him, safely out of Afghanistan the last thing you need to be in charge of is a box of dirt.  Also, if you are an enlisted man and a colonel tells you to safely escort a box of sand, you may be thinking, “Say wha?!” but you respond with a crisp, “Yes sir.”

In my work as a volunteer at the National Infantry Museum at Ft. Benning Georgia, I hear a lot of good stories. This young man’s story was spreading through the museum that day like kudzu on the nearby trees. You see… he was here to see the sand.

Uncle Conley didn’t own a tractor; he used a mule to pull his plow, drive his cane mill, pull his wagon and doing the myriad other tasks required for operating a farm. I was six. The mule was hitched to the wagon. When all backs were turned, I climbed up on the wagon, sat in the seat and shouted, “Giddy up.” The mule did; not at a slow pace, but hell bent for leather ...

So yes, TV news suffers from delusions of adequacy. But let’s move beyond pop criticism and look at a problem academics have often identified as one of the roots of boob tube evil, the idea that its news tends to be episodic rather than thematic. Or in the words of political scientist Shanto Iyengar, TV tends to tends to present "recurring issues as unrelated events."

Over his first twenty-five years, Ol’ Dan has written and recorded a  gaggle of country western songs, managed to graduate from UGA’s College of Agriculture, did a stint with the Braves (as a groundskeeper), been a successful door-to-door salesman, written and starred in a bunch of music videos. Oh, and he’s also had six open heart surgeries.

We have been preventing and fighting forest fires for a couple of hundred years believing it was the best way to preserve our forests and our way of life. We were wrong.

Left to themselves, naturally occurring forest fires were frequent, slow moving and limited. These fires cleared the weak, dead or dying trees. These fires burned the brush and vegetation from the forest floor, which supports destructive insects and has become the fuel of the major fires we know today. These fires diversified the environment, made the soil richer and forced the trees to develop thicker bark, which protected them from the heat...

Unlike Sea Island, I've never visited Amelia Island and I'll tell you why. I first heard about Amelia Island from a close neighbor whose major interest in our community revolved around "protecting" our in-town neighborhood from the depredations of university students, illegal in-street parking and our periodic invasion by football fans.

While it lacked the precision of a Steely Dan concert, the laconic sway of a Boz Scaggs concert or the drive of a Doobies Bros. concert, The Dukes of September was a steady entertainment that probably heralds the next big thing in Retirement Rock, but more on that in minute.

I’m there on the first row kneeling and hands folded in lap between 9-year-olds named Herbert and Virgil, one black, another white. On the back row at the side stands Mrs. Scott, also black, a somewhat stout figure in a simple navy dress and shiny black dress shoes. In the picture, I also see Joey Jackson, Douglas Shaw and Mark Wiggins, three childhood friends who I haven’t seen since our family moved from Jesup in 1974. Looking at the photo forces other names to the surface — Michael, Greg, Dawn, Joanne, Tony, Chuck, Wayne and Christy.