Tom McLaughlin

Way back in April, to summon the memory of a time long ago, members of the Halifax County School Board were talking about the pandemic-era future of Halifax County Public Schools at their monthly meeting when Board Chair Todd Moser and ED-8 trustee Walter Potts offered almost diametrically opposite takes.

What happens when the irresistible need to get kids back in school meets the immovable reality of a deadly health pandemic?

Just as paper products have begun to return to grocery store shelves, the United States — a vast swath of it, anyway — is edging back into shutdown mode due to the coronavirus.

One thing I would think we all can agree on nowadays is there’s so much bad news floating around — between mass protests, looting and rioting, eruptions of violence committed by and against police, a deadly pandemic, and, not least of all, a U.S. political system tottering on the brink — that it’s hard not to look away from daily outrages against the domestic tranquility. Bad acts roll in like hurricanes. Who among us can be faulted for wanting to tune everything out?

Since we’re all supposed to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, it also shouldn’t be too hard to hold two different thoughts in mind at once.

At this writing more than 100,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, a loss that overwhelms our ability to appropriately mourn the dead. With no vaccine and no known treatment in sight, the plan moving forward seems to be to hope for the best, even if by now we should all know hope is not a plan.

Having written the story on our front page Monday that caused something of a stir — in the same way an EF5 tornado settling over a farm pond might cause a stir — I feel obligated to say something about the contents reported therein.

How all over the place has America’s coronavirus response been?

It was a sparkling morning yesterday, the way spring is supposed to be, but the early part of the week had me in a grim mood.

It’s tough in times of crisis to talk about much else other than the crisis, but the coronavirus isn’t everything — not quite yet, anyway. There are news items stacked one on top of the other that merit at least a brief airing in this space. Some are virus-related, some not. Let’s go down the list: