Luke Brantley

By Luke Brantley
Staff writer
The Alabama state legislature is currently discussing a bill that, if signed into law, would allow Alabamians to carry concealed weapons without a permit.
Currently, anyone who wants to carry concealed must get a permit from the county sheriff. Here in Marion County, it’s a relatively simple process of filling out a form, passing a background check then going to the sheriff’s office to get your picture taken and pay a small fee for the permit. That’s pretty much it.

Governor Kay Ivey recently released a statement pushing back against some of President Biden’s recent vaccine mandates, calling it federal overreach. Many other state leaders and officials have also spoken out against the new mandates for similar reasons.
At the same time, Texas is also challenging federal rulings with its recent abortion ban.
While it’s easy to get caught up in the all the arguments surrounding the issues of masks, vaccines and abortion, I’ve noticed something happening.

My family moved to Winfield when I was halfway through second grade.
My dad had been hired as the youth minister at Winfield First Baptist Church, so we moved to Winfield and have been here ever since.
When we first arrived, my dad was informed of a tradition that applied to newcomers to town.
He was asked to be a pooper scooper in the annual Mule Day parade.
My family used to live in Vernon, so my parents were aware of Mule Day, but I was too young to remember it, so I was hearing of it for the first time.

Last March, the world shut down.
I was still in college at Troy, and all classes went online. All work for the Tropolitan (the student newspaper) was being done virtually.
After a few weeks of not leaving my apartment, I was starting to go insane. I beat all my video games and binge-watched all the shows I’d been planning to watch. Cabin fever was setting in.

There’s an old saying that there are two sides to every story.
As journalists, this is a balance we seek out to avoid biased reporting. Or at least we should be seeking it. Talking to people on both sides of an event or issue is critical in finding out the truth, which is often somewhere in the middle. It’s sad to see how many news outlets, big and small, have forgotten this.
AL.com recently came out with an article that looked into a series of cases in which people were arrested for unpaid debts and held for a long period of time without trial.

The last year or so has been weird.
I graduated from Troy University last summer, in the middle of a global pandemic. Which was funny, because I took an elective class on that very subject my first semester at Troy!
I spent most of last summer applying for jobs, and strangely enough, ended up in Troy, North Carolina, where I was hired as the sports and features editor for the county paper, the Montgomery Herald.