Category Archives: Opinions
Courier Letters to the Editors 3-4-20
Put existing businesses first for once
Dear Editor,
You have read the news stories that the county council is discussing raising taxes for roads and is considering options including a 29-mill property tax increase, an increase of the road fee from $20 to $100 or a sales tax hike from 7 percent to 8 percent.
Watching this unfold, I see another example of the councilmen following along with the county administration and council leadership.
I examined this new council’s voting record of 2017, 2018 and 2019 to try and glean the elements of independence or alternative thought, if any, on this council.
There were 545 votes the past three years (not including procedural votes like adjournment, going
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Making a move toward God
I know that life sometimes can be difficult. It seems I’m always writing about the struggles of 
spiritual warfare, but we cannot deny the Christian life is filled with battles. However, there is good news!
The Lord is with us and is waiting to help us if we will only allow Him to be in control of our life. I had a long conversation with a precious elderly lady this afternoon, and she is struggling with negative emotions. She lives alone and is discouraged, which is not all that unusual, but there is a way to learn how to rise above our feelings of negativity. I reminded her that we must make an investment if we want to enjoy the peace and joy of God’s presence.
What does this mean? Simply, that Christians must take the initiative to pray and read our Bibles
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What is it that makes us happy?
What makes us happy as we get older? Below are the results of an informal poll of seniors at the local coffee shop.
• Having enough income. It turns out that many who are living only on Social Security can have enough to make it through the month if they made wise decisions before retiring. Paying off the mortgage is a big one.
• Being listened to, or at least not being disregarded. There’s something about aging that seems to make us melt into the background, and if we have opinions or comments, people don’t always listen. Medical staff seem to rank very high on this list of people who
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I heard it on the party line
Does anybody remember the days before cellphones? The days when you could look up telephone numbers in something called a telephone book? And businesses were listed in the 
yellow pages?
There is an entire generation walking around today who doesn’t know what a rotary phone is. And they don’t know that when Southern Bell was the only telephone company, there was such a thing as party lines, when a number of families shared the same telephone line. The ring pattern let each family know who was being called.
If someone inadvertently left the phone off the hook, an entire line would be unusable until someone noticed. Unless, that is, everyone kept a bird dog whistle next to the phone in case of just such an
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Remembering the man who saved Stone Mountain
Well, what can you say about the man who saved Stone Mountain?
That would be my dad, Bobby D. Barnett.
As a young poultry scientist at Clemson University, he conducted research that proved that chickens didn’t really need to eat granite grit for their gizzards to grind up chicken feed, because it’s already ground up. That discovery put the Stony Mo Granite Grit Company out of business and saved the mountain they were grinding up from being fed to chickens.
That was just one of the many stories my dad told me and my brother Paul and sister Susan
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Start decluttering in a realistic way
There’s decluttering by the book, and then there’s realistic decluttering. Too often we follow the experts’ advice and end up unhappy with the result.
Clothing styles run in cycles. Pant legs go from wide to skin tight, and shirt hems go up and down. While it’s likely that your fairly new pair of wide leg pants might come back in style soon, the 2-foot-wide bell bottoms of the ‘70s probably won’t make a reappearance.
You thought you would like that magazine subscription you got two years ago. You read three issues and the other nine are in a stack that keep sliding off the coffee table. Out they go.
And what about that coffee table that you threatened to take to Goodwill ages ago because it’s
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AnMed improving community health
Improve community health. For more than a hundred years, that’s been our calling and what 
AnMed Health works to uphold every day. We passionately blend the art of caring with the science of medicine. It’s how we’re optimizing the health of those in the Upstate.
Furthering that mission is our partnership with Choose Well. Choose Well is a privately funded contraceptive access initiative with a network of 170 health centers across the state working to build a healthier South Carolina. Choose Well’s goal is to eliminate unintended pregnancy. This collective of multi-disciplinary professionals is accomplishing this by equipping providers and
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Great peanut debate goes on
There is a serious ongoing debate about an issue that may never be resolved. Which is better? The roasted peanut or the boiled peanut? Perhaps this is not a burning issue for everyone, but in some quarters, it has split families asunder and destroyed friendships.
This is important. In my experience, a person who prefers the dry roasted peanut cannot be converted into a fan of boiled peanuts, and vice versa. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule.
Some of those converted to the boiled peanut have never experienced the unique taste of a properly boiled peanut. There are so many ways to go wrong in the process that it’s truly difficult to find a person who understands all the ins and outs of the process.
Now, peanuts roasted in the shell are difficult to spoil. There are only two ways to mess them
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Courier Letters to the Editor 2-19-20
What’s love got to do with it?
Dear Editor,
“What’s love got to do with it, got to do with it?” Or so sang Tina Turner. My answer is simply this — love has everything to do with it. Without love, what would our world be? It would be a living nightmare hell.
No love would mean no one would care if you lived or died. No love would mean only hatred, selfishness and lust would exist. No love would mean no reason to look forward to tomorrow, for it would be like today, filled with hatred and hopelessness. No love is impossible to comprehend. The human spirit would die out. The spirit that wants to help others in need
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A river runs through the yard
A river runs through it.
That’s a good description of my front yard., as I write this. Well, my backyard, too.
I was lucky, though, during last Thursday’s deluge. After seeing photos of what other residents in Pickens County and across the Upstate endured, I really should be thankful.
We live on relatively high ground, but we still get a pretty good gully-washing when these big rains come along.
It actually used to be a lot worse than this. It used to gush right straight at my front steps, even with a normal rainfall of half an inch or so, and it washed away all my grass.
That was after the city of Easley, in its somewhat less than
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