The Trussville Tribune
January 5 - 11, 2022
Opinion
Sean of the South: Traveling with Your Wife By Sean Dietrich Sean of the South Commentary
Here’s what I want you to do. Go outside and open your car doors. Now gather all your earthly possessions and shove them into your backseat. After that, strap the rest of your belongings to the roof, including your dishwasher, LaZ-Boy, lawn tractor, and all three of your children. Now you know how my wife travels. The only major difference is that we don’t have children, so our lawn tractor usually rides shotgun.
amaze me, once our trip is finished we can never manage to fit everything back inside the car. This often means that before we travel back home, my wife has to make the difficult decision of leaving certain things behind, such as, for example, me. This morning we awoke early to leave Birmingham after vacation. We have been staying in Alabama for a few weeks in a small rental cottage. We had a long drive ahead of us. But before we could hit the highway we had to pack our car. (Cue Hitchcock music.)
Sean Dietrich (Photo courtesy of seandietrich.com)
Packing the car is always a major challenge for us inasmuch as my wife does not travel lightly. My wife’s idea of travel is to bring everything but our window treatments. Thus, whenever I prepare our vehicle for vacation mode, I painstakingly pack our car so that no space is wasted. When I’m finished packing, our automobile interior usually resembles the jigsaw puzzle from hell. Even so, it never fails to
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As it turned out, the biggest challenge wasn’t physically loading the car. The worst issue was The Hill. Birmingham is a hilly city in north-central Alabama, nestled beneath the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Most residents have to use rappelling equipment to check the mailbox. Our rental house was located on the summit of a steep hill which the locals loosely refer to as Mount Concus-
sion. There were approximately 43,118 concrete steps leading from the curb to our porch. You could actually feel your ears popping when you reached the front door. When we first arrived at this house a few weeks ago, I unpacked our car until three in the morning, endlessly schlepping suitcases up the steps until my meniscus went to be with Jesus. But that was a cakewalk compared to this morning. Because this morning, I had to schlep all that stuff back down the steps. Also, it was raining today. And when I say “raining,” I mean that Jim Cantore was interviewing our neighbors. So packing the car was not an easy task. In fact, I wasn’t sure whether I would survive the process inasmuch as I had to contend with slippage on the steps from the rain. Here’s a tip to anyone carrying luggage up and down slippery steps: Get the platinum burial package. Because when you’re climbing wet steps, you’re greatly endangering yourself. One wrong move and you’ll end up in an urn. At one point I was carrying four suitcases, hobbling down the steps in a downpour, unable to see. Things got worse when my wife’s bottle of skin moisturizer fell from a bag and wedged itself under my foot. I wasn’t aware of this happening, of course, I was too busy bear-hugging a Steinway-sized suitcase with my wife’s initials monogrammed on the front. See TRAVELING, Page 6
Phil Williams: It really matters
By Phil Williams 1819 News Commentary
I don’t know about ya’ll but we had an amazing time with family during the Christmas season! Charlene and I had kids and grandkids at the house all of last week. We gathered with about 25 family members in Huntsville one night, and this past Saturday got together with my Mom and brother and family members … so good! On one of those evenings, my adult kids stood around in the kitchen with Charlene and me laughing and telling stories and it just blessed me. I thought to myself at one point, “this is what really matters.” There’s a reason why solitary confinement is considered harsh punishment. There’s a reason why social distancing is considered abnormal. We are social creatures by nature. As a general rule, we Americans believe in the value of family and relationships, and typically we don’t cotton to being told that those we love are not supposed to be around us or us around them. Out of all the frustrations of the past two years, I think the culminating events have been the deprivations of our freedoms of assembly, the right to gather. I don’t think that any of us ever questioned the need to require a permit for a parade or a protest. No one minds having to pay for a ticket to a concert or a sporting event. But stipulations on assembly in the past two years got weird. They came for our churches. They came for our businesses, and our ability to
Phil Williams is Policy Director for the Alabama Policy Institute.
travel. Most egregiously they came for our families. Think about it: they may not have come into your home per se and said you can’t gather for Christmas, but you have definitely been told where your family cannot gather. In some places in our nation, we are still seeing families unable to dine out together in their favorite restaurant. Families that live remote from each other have been unable to get their flights because of canceled airlines, and when they do, it’s mask up or else. Even here in Alabama, we’ve experienced the inability to attend church services together or, sadly enough, to visit a loved one in the hospital or nursing home. I know people who never got to say their goodbyes as loved ones passed away alone among strangers in a medical facility where the fear of covid liability surmounted compassion for the mental and emotional well-being of their physically challenged patient. I’m just going to throw this out there: if Charlene was (God forbid) in a hospital and they said I couldn’t come and see the love of my life, I would
find a pair of scrubs and a lab coat, pick up a clipboard, don a mask and waltz in the employees-only entrance like I owned the place and scour the floors like a bloodhound until I found her room … because it matters! It really matters. That said, on a recent morning as I was preparing for Rightside Radio, I came across an op-ed on The Hill magazine’s site. Written by a professor at the Catholic University of America the piece was titled “The Constitution isn’t working.” My first thought was “for who?” The article went on to describe with great presumed authority that the vast majority of Americans would be better off if we just did away with that archaic document that does nothing for we contemporary citizens of an enlightened world. That same document that enshrines our freedoms of assembly, among others, matters. The author expressed such views as one would expect from an ivory tower elitist and even invoked the January 6th protests at the US Capitol as grounds for See WILLIAMS, Page 6
