Opinion

Our universe is in apple pie order again. Wrong returns to right. Surreal reverts to real. Upside down is right side up, and forward is the motion, not reverse.

Some of you feel it, too, because you are devotees of Shelby County Rockets basketball, and ever since that new school opened out west, well, the Rocket Pride and the history of greatness have sort of become a footnote in the bigger swings of life.

The diagnosis last week for the financial problems besetting KentuckyOne Health was at first scary and then a great relief.

Much like a patient whose X-ray shows a big problem to be benign, KentuckyOne, parent company of Jewish Hospital Shelbyville, said it would do surgery but that the patient should survive – at least for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps it is appropriate that in the month we celebrate African-American history that this week we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the historic rise to prominence of one Cassius Clay, the boxer and not the abolitionist for whom he was named, the man famous worldwide as Muhammad Ali.

And there are few persons I can identify during my lifetime who did more to span the great divide between races, to bring focus and discussion to the principles that Martin Luther King had preached.

Way to go, Triple S Planning Commission. You received your first challenge from what will be explosive growth around Simpsonville, and you did the right thing.

You didn’t allow Bob Evans Restaurant to change the rules on building standards and to undermine the standards for quality of the area before any business ever opened.

We received the Greater Louisville Yellow Book for 2014 recently. It was noticeably smaller than the 2013 edition. The print seemed the same size. The Yellow Pages were down to 687 pages from 1.137 in 2013…..a 40 percent drop. The white page, were down to 263 pages from 366 in 2013….a 28 percent drop.

I’m not sure I know what this means. My first thought was that this many businesses ceased to exist. Then I thought, no, there would have to be a few new ones during that period, so the news is even worse.

We hear and read something every day what a 1920s song had to say about the distribution of wealth: “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

There’s another one from that era with a lyric that says “It ain’t necessarily so.”

I remember a quote from Lee Nor Mack, a former city council member at the ribbon cutting of the housing project in West Shelbyville. Someone said to Mr. Mack, “This is a great thing for your people isn’t it?” which was the most politically incorrect thing to say.

The concept of paying a more equitable dollar for the lowest-level jobs in our economic scale is not new. This idea of raising the minimum wage was a political football long before President Barack Obama kicked it into the end zone during his State of the Union address and House Bill 1 ran it into the public consciousness of the Kentucky legislature.

And most Kentuckians – if not most Americans – think it’s about time to take that step.

On Friday night, the romanticists among you probably were laying it on thick for Valentine’s Day.

Maybe you dropped a special piece of jewelry or chocolate or flowers on your sweetheart.

Maybe you sat across from him or her in a dark little corner of a restaurant, sipping champagne or honey bourbon or a bountiful Brunello and staring into the most enchanting eyes you’ve seen.

Maybe you lit candles on your dining room table and put on your finery to make something routine into something extraordinary.

The critics were passionate and to the point during the Simpsonville City Commission’s meeting last week. They didn’t want a restaurant tax in the city, and they offered a smorgasbord of reasons why.

And although commissioners voted as they should have – to impose the 3 percent surcharge on food and beverage sold in the city – this wonderful discussion, filled with so many well-constructed opinions, left us with one really bad question and one really good one.

The bad one: Can Shelby County afford to have a tourism commission?