This has been quite a year.
The stories that have played out over our news pages and airwaves are many and varied. Yet they are, with all that diversity, still the consistent themes of our lives.
The stories have mirrored the life and death issues of health and safety. They point up our collective economic successes or squanders. They show our constant struggle for a place to live, work, farm and play. They unravel our privacy, expose our injustice, show the need for constant quest to find the best free -- or at least collectively paid for -- education for our children. They reflect our nation's continuing effort to shape world events before the collateral damage reaches us.
And intertwined in all of these issues is the part and parcel of policy and politics -- something most of us scoff at as being beyond our understanding and capacity to change. We need to think again.
Nationally, some of these themes have recently played out as Ebola, as the terror of kidnapped Nigerian school girls and the murders of Pakistani Army children, as the tragic shootings across our nation both by and of police officers. But in those events -- as in the enormous wave of migrant children from South America and the political football played with same-sex marriage, gay rights and voting rights -- we see ourselves and our children.
Statewide, we've also seen our own lives affected by Tennessee's and Georgia's refusal to accept millions of federal dollars just to make a political stand against the Affordable Care Act -- aka Obamacare. Our GOP-heavy legislatures and Republican governors snubbed the call to expand Medicaid on the federal dimes we've already paid. We felt the fiscal outrage locally as Erlanger staggered toward blood-red deficits because those dimes were going to hospitals in states that had optioned greater insurance coverage in their jurisdictions while Erlanger still had to treat uninsured patients here whether they could pay or not.
Insult was added to outrage when Erlanger finally received $18 million of what used to be called "fair-share" federal payments for uncompensated care, then turned around to award its 99 top managers with $1.7 million in bonuses averaging $17,100. That "average" was skewed somewhat by the $234,669 bonus paid to CEO Kevin Spiegel. His six-figure bonus brings his total compensation this year to $914,669. The Erlanger board also gave him a 10 percent raise. Erlanger employees got a 2 percent pay raise -- after employee cuts, vacation freezes and the elimination of retirees' health insurance.
The Tennessee Valley Authority's board suffered the same deafness of tone. For more than a year, TVA whittled about $500 million in annual operating costs at the federal but ratepayer-financed utility -- largely by cutting 2,000 jobs. Despite that painful exercise, the board just raised TVA CEO Bill Johnson's pay by nearly $1 million. He was already making $5.9 million in cash and retirement benefits. The president of the United States still earns $400,000 a year.
No wonder the U.S. middle class has lost its "world's wealthiest middle class" distinction. But enough about money: 2014 showed us that we have bigger problems.
Georgia is No. 1 in the country for school shootings, and Tennessee is tied with Florida for No. 2 honors. This unpleasant reality probably has something to do with our lawmakers making Georgia the most lenient gun state in the country with its "safe carry" (forget permits) law, and Tennessee has approved guns in trunks with no permits, guns in parks, guns, guns, guns.
We're all for 'em. Why shouldn't our kids be?
But, then, maybe our kids do need guns. Georgia is No. 2 in the country for child abuse deaths, tallying 83 from 2010 through 2013, and Tennessee is No. 7, tallying 31 from 2008 through 2012, according to a recent analysis by The Associated Press.
Here in Hamilton County, we're finally beginning to get more iPads into our students' hands, but we're also realizing that when they take those tablets home to do their homework, many of them have no Internet connections. Meanwhile, most lawmakers in both Tennessee and Georgia -- neither a state ranking high in education standards -- oppose Common Core, a states-created set of standards for school achievement. Go figure.
By the way, Hamilton County doesn't have a vocation-track high school diploma -- only one for college-bound kids. So young people who can't do college work are far less likely to graduate here with a high school diploma. That means, of course, that they are far less likely to get a job because their options have narrowed to almost nothing. There should be little surprise that we had 109 nonfatal shootings last year and 93 this year, along with 19 fatal shootings last year and 27 this year -- most among young people out of school and without jobs.
Then there's our God factor: While Chattanooga, just a year ago happily touted its new No. 1 designation as a "Bible-minded city," some 63 percent of people in our voting populace still couldn't find the tolerance and love in their hearts to support a city resolution extending work benefits to domestic partners -- including those in same-sex relationships. The increased cost was estimated to be less than $170,000 a year.
The news is global and local. So are the solutions, but fixes, like charity, start at home.