For those in need

The fifth annual Georgia Legal Food Frenzy is a joint effort by the Young Lawyers Division, the Attorney General’s Office and the Georgia Food Bank Association, and is a statewide fund and food drive supporting local Georgia food banks. More than $5 million has been raised in five years with this campaign.

Participating in our service area this year were Columbus law firms Waldrep Mullin & Callahan LLC; Hall Booth Smith; Phillips Branch & Hodges; Magistrate Court of Muscogee County; Columbus Regional Legal Dept.; Page Scrantom Sprouse Tucker & Ford PC; Columbus Consolidated Government; Aflac Legal Division; A. Binford Minter; Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit DA office; U.S. District Court for Middle District of Georgia – Columbus Division. Also participating was the Coweta Judicial Circuit DA Office, LaGrange.

Mariel Smith with Hall Booth Smith, David Helmick with Waldrep Mullin & Callahan LLC and Columbus Mayor Teresa Tomlinson led the efforts of the Columbus campaign. Blake Adams with the LaGrange District Attorney’s office led the campaign efforts in LaGrange.

More than $5,000 and more than 1,000 pounds of food was donated, along with raising awareness about hunger in the community. Many thanks to these individuals and organizations.

In Georgia, one in four children are considered food insecure. As summer approaches, many of our food programs expand to more areas to reach more children who are not in school for lunch programs. Food and fund donations are even more vital to us during this time of the year.

We are grateful for the generosity and support of our legal community in our efforts to solve the hunger problem in our community.

Sing out loud

Maybe it is the effect of too much exposure to John Lennon's "Imagine." However, I would lay it at the feet of big events where some celebrity sang a jazzed up rendition of our National Anthem to aggrandize themselves. The song couldn't include us, as we didn't know where the leader was going through all those gyrations, and weren't allowed to sing together. We got used to it.

Next thing you know, we are just standing, listening to a pre-recorded, wordless National Anthem. No singing. Just some song to be endured, so we can get on with the event. That is silent, cleansed national pride. Non participatory love. Sanitized and removed from our civic duties. Are we so busy and important that the fact that people lay down their lives and fortunes for us was their problem?

I exhort you to snatch back your song, before they succeed in cleansing it from your heart. Belt out that tangle of words. Reach for the high notes. Crash down to the low notes. Feel the power of our song, as you keep it firmly your song.

Every time you hear the notes begin, feel the anthem, sing the anthem, create the anthem, soar with the anthem.

Patriotism has meaning only through its patriots. That's you. Stand for that flag. Demand to sing. No proxy. No silence. No cleansed love for America. Keep your eye on the Grand Old Flag.

Economic unrest

We have read much about middle class and minority unrest associated with presidential politics this year. It is justified, but why and what can we caring citizens do about it?

Moody’s Investors Service just reported that five U.S. companies own one-third of the $1.7 trillion in cash and cash equivalents held by non-financial companies in 2015. Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Cisco Systems and Oracle are sitting on $504 billion, or 30% of the total. Corporate America’s rising cash pile is increasingly important to investors as profit and growth in the moribund stock market vacillates between strategies to overcome bear prophecies.

An ignorant electorate continues to elect neoliberal Wall Street prostitutes who enable these profligates to shield their cache in offshore accounts exempt from federal taxation, thus gutting meaningful employment currently and future growth to meet greater need. Will it stop anytime soon? Not unless we rethink the redemptive values of FDR’s New Deal or LBJ’s Great Society.

Both philosophies delivered us from the depths of the Great Depression, economic ravages of WWII and Korea that fostered despite the excesses associated with Viet Nam.

Bernie Sanders has his thumb and heart on the pulse of this nation’s needs but is branded a socialist, communist, liberal beholden only to the vast array of ne’er do wells; but such vilification is steeped in prejudice, hatred, racism and vestiges of the Confederacy that should have been dead for more than a century.

Trump is not the answer and can only perpetuate and extend the plunge to economic collapse with accompanying hatred and injustice. Think hard, folks!

This story was originally published May 25, 2016 at 2:59 PM with the headline "For those in need."