Opinion

The man was telling me about his recent afternoon of Christmas shopping. He bemoaned the parking lot at a mall, saying he had to drive around 20 minutes just to find a place and hike a long way in the frozen wind to get inside the mall. There he found the muddled masses, which brings this question: Is the very word “mall” an adaptation of “masses all?”

He was frustrated and indignant. “I hate dealing with all of that,” he said. Or perhaps words more colorful and to the point.

Dear Santa:
We have a special request we want to whisper in your ear this holiday, and this is a gift you really don’t have to deliver until next year.

Please, Dear Santa, send us some candidates for public office.

We were making a list and checking it twice, and, although we sometimes know who is naughty or nice, we didn’t find many new names of people who have filed to run for public office next year.

A few weeks ago we examined piece by piece the structure of taxing districts in Shelby County. We endeavored to explain to you how, why and when your tax dollars are being collected and being spent.

We looked at 16 taxing districts that draw dollars from residents of Shelby County. At least four of them – all fire districts – aren’t based in the county but remain subsidized by you.

Collins High School is returning to the Class AAAA Kentucky football championship game, and we heartily commend the Titans for that accomplishment.

Never to our knowledge has any athletic team from the county competed for back-to-back titles. Shelby County’s girls’ golf team certainly has contended in an open tournament, and Caterina and Gabby Karas have brought great individual honor by winning four consecutive state cross-country titles for Collins.

For decades the Shelby County Community Foundation, carrying on and expanding on a tradition established by the generosity of a lone man, Moses Ruben, has provided non-profit funding – often life-sustaining dollars – to non-profits across Shelby County.

We couldn’t be more pleased with the group’s efforts to generate endowments, provide funds and then underwrite the existence of so many who do so much with so little. We heartily applaud the foundation’s goals.

Anyone older than about 3 can recite the history of Thanksgiving. Newcomers to America got together with the natives in 1621 and celebrated a harvest. About 240 years later, Abraham Lincoln established it as a holiday on the last Thursday of November. About a hundred years ago a guy named Gimbel suggested that a parade that day would be the opening of the Christmas season. About 100 months ago, somebody named Walton decided that you didn’t need Santa’s arrival in that parade to get the merchandising ball rolling and keep it going all day and all night and all weekend.

In the future columns, if I test the limits of the First Amendment and the latitude of this newspaper, I expect someone to slap my hand. I have, however, promised the publisher that I will not mention political parties, elected officials still in office or candidates for office.

Last week we discussed some things that shaped my conservatism. Probably events during the Great Depression are most vivid.

The recent Kentucky High School Feedback Report appears to show that educators in Shelby County are doing something right.

Certainly we were encouraged to see that our graduates are outpacing the state in attending college, and we were overwhelmed to understand that more than twice as many of them actually are sticking around for a second year and hopefully beyond.

The most recent data, for the 2011-12 school year, wasn’t broken down between our two high schools, but about 270 of the 429 students from the county who graduated went on to college.