Opinion

To the Editor: Suicide is one of the most challenging societal issues of our time, claiming more lives than war, murder and natural disasters combined. Per the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), suicide rates increased approximately 36% between 2000 and 2021. Suicide was...

Do you like living in a small town? Oh say, like Gonzales or Soledad or any of the South County cities? I really love living here. I know just about everyone, and the people that I don’t know well enough to stop and talk...

This week’s Funny Papers Again column will not appear in this space. Instead, some other nonsense will appear here. The reason for this is because to present an articulate position in a concise manner on the subject chosen I had to do a little...

By my reckoning 140 years, give or take, of my family’s timeline was spent in prisons; the years accumulated by my parents, a brother and his wife, a niece and myself. And it seems the family occupation within the California Department of Corrections (CDC;...

I am grateful for Mee Memorial Healthcare System, I really am. In the past decade I have had more contact with the folks there than I wanted to, but as one ages one must face the realities of natural physical deterioration or, as in...

This has been a rough week. It might look different to most of you, but for me it’s just another reminder of the test of time. Many years ago I bought a car from Joanne Rodriguez. Joanne’s husband Alva had passed away and he,...

With the advent of 24-hour news coverage by numerous networks, we now have a multitude of current events coverage; coverage that invariably comes with opinion-fueled rhetoric offered up by everyone from professional pundits to amateur analysists and simpering sycophants to determined detractors. And with...

I had to do it, the time had come, so I walked stoutly to the middle of the Oak Avenue overcrossing and stepped over the rail, took a long look around me at my hometown of Greenfield, California, then jumped to the dirt below. That...

Honey, can you come here? I rolled over and took a look at the clock on my nightstand. “Yeah,” I replied, not knowing if the house was on fire or what. Lorraine almost never calls me after I have gone to bed. We discovered many...