Pam Sohn

We made the national news again.

What's new to say about guns and mass violence in America? Nothing. Just dig some more graves and shut up.

Over this week, as we've waited for the Tennessee Republican Party State Executive Committee to consider the challenge to the outcome of the Republican primary for county mayor.

Firearms were the leading cause of death for children ages one and older for the first time in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The leading cause of deaths for children used to be from motor vehicle accidents.

Time and again, we've written with regret about Tennessee's seemingly inexorable roll toward charter schools and school vouchers, which we generally see as siphons of money away from struggling public schools. Not today.

Political insanity appears to be contagious.

With nationalism sweeping across too-big swaths of the country, it's hard to be surprised — horrified certainly — but hard to be surprised at incidents like the straight-up race hate that led an 18-year-old in Buffalo, New York, to embrace the far-right racist ideology of "replacement theory" before he killed 10 people and wounded three in a grocery store. The victims were mostly Black and the shooter was white.

"Show me your papers!" That is the chilling authoritarian demand that became the first line in the 1942 movie "Casablanca" about encroaching Nazi control in French Morocco.

The "big lie" about an election has come to a mayor's office near you.

Last week, Hamilton County Commissioners got a visit from Hamilton County Sheriff Jim Hammond, who was holding his hand out again, this time for a $6.5 million budget increase that would primarily go toward the recruitment and retention of qualified corrections officers.

From the looks of the headlines about pending development in the Chattanooga area, conversations about ensuring many of us can afford to continue living here have either taken a backseat or simply aren't being heard above the clinking of big developers' gold coins.

As fatigued as we all are of COVID-19, it would be disrespectful today not to recognize and mourn the horrible milestone we'll likely cross by Monday - the deaths of 1 million Americans to a virus that could and should have been snuffed out last year had it not become another ridiculous political culture war talking point.

Suppose you're a Hamilton County commissioner. And suppose you read in the Times Free Press on Tuesday that the Hamilton County Board of Education may come to you soon to request $10 million in recurring maintenance money. That's $10 million over the $456 million fiscal 2023 budget the school board just voted to send you. You read that they want the extra money so they can "begin" tackling the school system's nearly $1 billion in deferred building repairs.

Time's a-wasting. "Earth given 50-50 chance of hitting key temperature mark by 2026," screams Tuesday's headline at the top of Page A5 in the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

Beyond thinking about specific stadium plans and wastewater treatment and how to improve schools, a city and a county like ours must have broader goals - broader, but not so broad that they become mere platitudes.

Lost amid the election hubbub of the week were headlines about Gov. Bill Lee on Monday signing into law the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement Act.

Suppose a plane powered solely by solar power circumnavigated the Earth without using a drop of fuel.

The primary morning-after newness is starting to sink in, and with new political leaders springing up here like May flowers, it's a new day in Hamilton County, Tennessee.

There is no greater testament to the adage, "election's matter," than today's screaming headline across the country about a leaked Supreme Court draft of a majority opinion striking down the landmark 1973 abortion rights decision, Roe v. Wade.

Voting locally is complicated these days. Far more complicated than calling yourself a Democrat or a Republican or an independent.