Opinion

We now have watched the troubling final frames of  Trey Williams’ life, heard the fuzzy words Shelbyville Police Officers Suzanna Marcum and Frank Willoughby exchanged with Mr. Williams and seen some of what they saw on that Saturday afternoon.

But although we have studied that video, watched those final minutes unfold and read the accompanying transcripts, our picture remains equally cloudy and minus the understanding we had hoped we would have received.

Recently members of the Shelby County Board of Education met with our elected leaders and gave them quite an elementary lesson in public education’s most well-known subject: Your budget is killing us.

That, of course, required no piece of post-graduate analysis for anyone elected to any office in this state or for parents who pay careful attention to how their children’s needs are being met by the annual outlay of tax dollars.

The chants on both sides are loud, clear and enumerated with valid points, if not universal solutions.

The saga involving Midwest Metals’ desire to open a facility in Shelby County seems to be on the road to an appropriate conclusion, which leaves us to ponder why there was such an unnecessary detour along the way.

Midwest Metals, the recycling company, earned approval from the Triple S Board of Appeals on Thursday night to construct its collection complex on Windhurst Way, basically across the street from the acreage set aside for the new Shelby County Convenience Center adjacent to the Shelby County Industrial Park.

The price of a full-page ad in a local county paper costs an average exceeding $500. The Kentucky Medical Association has placed ads regarding “Identify Medical Doctors” in many local papers statewide. The total money spent by this organization on their recent smear campaign targeting non-medically degreed health-care providers probably totals thousands.

The boy climbed to his seat high in Rupp Arena on Saturday, his every sense keen to the sights and sounds of this famed arena, a Mecca to which he was pilgrimaging for the first time.

He had passed its outer lobby while visiting the Hyatt Regency Hotel, reading the signs, noting the doorways, but his only peeks inside were from the narrow views of pixilated formations on a variety of television screens.

The redistricting plans for the state’s House and Senate leaders appear to be complete, and Shelby County has avoided the dubious and unsavory slicing that has affected so many of the counties around us.

You can’t imagine how important it is that state Rep. Brad Montell (R-Shelbyville) and state Sen. Paul Hornback (R-Shelbyville) continue to represent all Shelby Countians and not just those on one side of an arbitrarily selected road.

Random ravings while wondering why Richie Farmer had more laptops in one year than our entire newspaper staff has had this decade….

Gatewood Galbraith today probably is entering the great governor’s race in the sky, bringing his folksy charm and unusual but not ill-formed ideas to that great debate.

Whether you thought Galbraith a lion or a loon, you have to admit he brought some luminance to Kentucky’s political world, which typically has all the color of a corpse.

What a heart-warming story it was for a young woman whose bloodlines seep deep into Shelby County’s fabric to wear the sash of Miss Kentucky across the stages of Las Vegas last week.

We speak of the Miss America pageant on Saturday and the heritage of Ann-Blair Thornton, who grew from the gene pool of the Borders family in Shelby County.

Most of you know Bill and Ann Borders, part of the former ownership of Smith-McKenney Drug Co. Perhaps you know their children or even some of their grandchildren. Ann-Blair Thornton of Bowling Green is one of them.

It was important to learn last week that a grand jury in Shelby County found that two Shelbyville police officers showed proper judgment and had no recourse in their deadly confrontation with a teenager last fall.

We wish that the tragedy that spins around this horrible moment would have such a simple ending, but we don’t think it can.

We cling to the hope that  the continuing debate also won’t have an equally tragic outcome.