Category Archives: Opinions
Hagood Mill rocks
Located in the town of Pickens, Hagood Mill knows how to rock. It has rocks that are useful, remarkable and 
mysterious.
Useful rocks have been shaped into huge millstones used to grind grits and cornmeal. Remarkable rocks, like a medicine wheel and a mortar and pestle, have been gathered to form a trail of rock history. There are rocks everywhere. It is the rock that is covered with extraordinary drawings called petroglyphs that is both puzzling and mysterious.
Recently deceased archeologist Tommy Charles, one of the discoverers
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Addressing money matters
Here’s a subject I think all of us can relate to:
Money.
What, exactly, is it?
I hardly ever see any of my money. It exists only as numbers on a computer. When I buy something, the number gets smaller. When some money comes in, the number gets bigger.
Does money — hard cash — ever really move from one place to another?
It would keep a fleet of couriers bigger than the combined forces of Amazon, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service busy to tote money from here to there to account for every transaction, just in Pickens County, I imagine.
So in reality, money doesn’t exist. It’s imaginary.
What got me to thinking about this lately is the wrangling that has been going on in Congress over its idiotic practice of directing the government to spend money it doesn’t have and can’t even borrow without raising the “debt ceiling.”
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Courier Letters to the Editor 10-6-21
Much ado about nothing
Dear Editor,
Here’s something to think about.
According to some, nothing created everything. Makes no sense, since nothing made the seasons to change. Nothing made the sun to rise and set daily. Nothing made love. Nothing made life. Nothing made thought itself. Nothing made nothing, too? Nothing made you. Nothing made me. Nothing wrote this. Nothing is reading it. Nothing pays your bills. Nothing would be owed if bills did not exist. Nothing itself is something, as in it would never be, as in nonexistence, if it didn’t exist. Nothing must not exist then. Which makes no sense. Confused? Me too.
So that’s a lot of nothing for nothing not to have created it, isn’t it? Whew!
Eddie Boggs
Westminster
Getting through hard times with Matt and Andy
During these trying times, I’ve become very careful about what TV shows I watch. I can’t watch anything with disturbing endings or anything depressing. So that eliminates a lot of what we used to consider entertainment.
Although being informed about current events is necessary, too much news isn’t healthy. So that reduces TV viewing time dramatically.
We’ve fallen back on old shows being rebroadcast.
We’re working our way through the black-and-white years of Gunsmoke. It was considered an
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Anger in the air
Being hired to be a stewardess was like turning into Cinderella. It meant you were beautiful, single, slender, under 30 and had a college degree. Some airlines requested modeling expertise, necessary to serve those seven-course gourmet dinners with charm and grace, in mid-air.
Stewardesses wore uniforms designed by Balenciaga and Pucci. They sported perky hats, wore high heels and had matching luggage. They traveled to exotic locations.
As time went on, planes got bigger and carried more passengers. The gourmet dinners were
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Well, it has been worse
I was out for a walk a while back and came upon one of my neighbors walking his dogs.
“It’s a shame the way things are going in this country, isn’t it?” he said, shaking his head after we had dispensed with subjects of more immediate concern such as the weather and the dogs.
“Well, it’s been worse,” I said, which put an abrupt end to that topic.
There is plenty to worry about nowadays: climate change, especially. And the disinformation divide. Those are the biggies, I think.
But when a lot of people complain about how bad things are nowadays, I think they’re harking back to a golden bygone era that some of us remember — maybe in the 1950s and early ‘60s.
It was a simpler time, when everyone sat on their front porches in the evening and told stories
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Courier Letters to the Editor 9-29-21
Tired of the broken promises
Dear Editor,
I attend some meetings of the Pickens County Council, and I want to comment on the recent happenings. The county council voted 5 to 1 to raise property taxes 9.97 mills, or 18 percent, in the wake of the state Supreme Court ruling that the $20 road fee per vehicle was illegal.
The council was saying it was going to eliminate the road fee and raise property taxes an equal amount of 3.8 mills. They printed a notice to
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Celebrate the small things
On the personal side, there is good news. I finally found a box of Morton’s salt at Publix in Easley.
I don’t know what the difference is between Morton’s salt and Laura Lynn salt, but there is definitely a difference in the spouts. You can pour salt from the Morton’s salt box. You have to dump salt out of the Laura Lynn salt box because the spout doesn’t work properly.
It may be very expensive to manufacture a salt box with a working spout. Who knows. I certainly don’t. But it is something to celebrate when even the smallest thing goes your way.
Something else I’m happy about. Everything that isn’t nailed down on Fowler Farm has been
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American freedom?
I’ve been thinking about freedom a lot lately.
No, I’m not thinking about leaving my wife.
What I’m thinking about is good-old, hard-core, patriotic American freedom, its limits and how those boundaries should be defined.
This is, of course, a topic of debate because of the “freedom of choice” being claimed by those who believe the government has no right to require them to take measures to protect, if not themselves, the rest of us from getting sick and possibly dying in this seemingly neverending pandemic.
I hate it that Pickens County is near the bottom in a state with among the lowest vaccination
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Let’s talk about plastics
Pickens County is making significant progress in improving service to the public at our eight recycling centers.
In September 2020, our recycle centers returned to the 7:30 a.m.-7:20 p.m. schedule, Monday through Saturday. As a result, our facilities 
are open 71 hours each week to better serve our county population. Compare these hours with our neighboring counties (60 hours a week in Anderson and Oconee, and 55 hours a week in Greenville).
At the same time, our solid waste staff transitioned from a landfilling approach to the use of a waste transfer station and trucks as our county landfill was near capacity. Concurrently, we are working to limit use of our facilities by out-of-county individuals in order to maximize the services provided to our own
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