Well...we at this newspaper office just went through our second January of COVID issues. Progress I suppose. This year’s version only knocked half of us down. Seems it was milder as well. I guess we’ll call it a small victory.

Although it’s not over yet, we didn’t have any true concerns that we would not be able to put out a newspaper. Who knows what’s around the corner though.

My cousin Phillip Reid, who prints our newspapers twice a week at his plant in Weatherford, and also publishes the Weatherford Daily News, along with several other newspapers across the state, told me last week that he was down to his last four rolls of newsprint. Yikes! He was in desperation mode as he spent several days scanning the nation, looking for any available rolls. Happily, he finally discovered a warehouse full of newsprint in Texas that belonged to a newspaper that had recently shut down operations.

He immediately purchased it all and sent a truck to go get it. So now, for the next few months anyway, we have a reliable source for printing our newspapers.

It’s all COVID related. He can’t get backordered paper from the mills because they are at least a year behind in fulfilling orders due to COVID shutdowns, followed up by no truck drivers available to bring him the paper.

Just another example of how fragile and complicated the supply chain is across the world.

We see it everywhere, from almost empty automotive dealership lots to sparsely stocked shelves at the retail stores.

For the past 38 years, my role at this newspaper has mostly been on the business side of operations. I have a journalism degree, and have done my share of writing news, but chasing advertising dollars and ensuring that our newspapers get distributed correctly each issue have always been my main jobs. Without a doubt, I have never experienced anything close to the stress that the COVID pandemic brought our way in January 2020.

It’s been two years and counting, and the pressures remain.

It’s not only us. It’s everywhere. 2020 was a year of watching the monetary reserves bleed away, while doing everything possible to keep our staff employed.

We discovered that we could close on Wednesdays to cut down on overhead, and I worked a few more hours, including all day Wednesdays, with the doors locked, in a effort to keep two issues still being dispersed weekly.

Because we lost a bunch of advertising that had always been reliable in our pre-COVID world, we took the drastic measure of temporarily ceasing the print publication of our Sunday issues.

Over the course of 2021, we stopped the bleeding. We certainly haven’t yet begun the process of reloading the financial reserves, but we did reach the break-even point in 2021.

Now at the beginning of 2022 we continue to rock along at that break-even point. At least we’re paying the bills. We’ll take it. We’ll count that as a victory as well.

This pandemic has created havoc with almost every industry in our nation. Brick and mortar retail and small businesses everywhere have been presented with a seemingly unending procession of challenges, with not much light at the end of the tunnel. Many have called it quits and moved on. Let’s hope the tide turns in 2023.

Russian & Chinese War Drums

Now we find ourselves with a weak President of the United States who is proving himself to be completely incapable of handling the aggression of two dictators in Russia and China.

Russia wants to bring the Ukraine back into the realm, while China wants to bring Taiwan under the communist thumb.

Both aggressor nations have been held at bay by strong U.S. presidential and military leadership over the years.

Let’s all pray that Biden’s handlers can manage to keep the wolves away, or I fear he and his crew will blunder us into a two-front war that many retired generals and admirals say we now cannot win.

When the radicalization of perceived “diversification and social equality” becomes the number one priority of our U.S. military, many times the best, brightest and most capable are being kicked to the curb.

From what I can see, the number one goal of the radicals that have hijacked the Democratic party of our nation is the make much ado about what separates us, as opposed to what binds us together. Because of their political gerrymandering within our armed forces, excellent military leaders are retiring in droves because they are disheartened and see no path to righting the ship.

When our military’s warrior ethos is replaced with a ridiculously confusing and deranged set of rules and regulations regarding the hyper-sensitivity of offending any and all of the woke movement, tribal separatism, (meaning hyphenated titles of ancestry such as Asian-American, African-American, etc.), and perceived social injustice, we lose our nation. It’s dangerously delusional, and it’s happening right now. Not sure we can experience three more years of this.

“We may have all come on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now.”

–Martin Luther King, Jr.