Community heroes keep us safe

By Jeff Jobe
Publisher
jobe@jobeinc.com

For the past few weeks, I have done my very best to motivate our team of community reporters and editors to coordinate news so that we can offer the best and most honest coverage available.

In a situation like this, it is so easy to get caught up in the panic mode. And from what I see is happening at this moment, there is no need at all for any of us to be in a panic.
As I scroll through social media, I am saddened by friends who want to use today’s situation as some way to feed their biased political agenda.

The loons who spend hours on Facebook attacking people who have to go to the grocery store or have the nerve to visit a hardware store or lawn and garden outlet.

On the other side, I’m bombarded with theories of how the Chinese government created this virus as some communist attack on the world.

I don’t have the resources nor desire to follow my neighbors and see if they are following the suggested protocol for slowing the spread of this virus. I trust in them and believe they, too, are as worried as I am. I believe that if they are on the road, they have a very good reason.

As a matter of fact, the more info I see, the more I realize that they – the working class of America – is at this very moment running our country. It’s not the government worker that has been drawing full-pay and been home for weeks. It isn’t the corporate owners who are managing by phone or teleconferences.

At this very moment, our country is being stabilized by truck drivers, grocery clerks, drive-thru personnel, hospital interns, and nurses and doctors who actually see patients.

These are the people who read my newspapers, and these are the people we so very much want to let know we appreciate them. Their lives and fears are every bit as real as any of ours, but they don’t have the ability to simply say, “I’ll work from home (wink, wink) and keep getting my full pay.” They must get up and go to work every day they are scheduled and, quite possibly, put themselves at risk.

But guess what? There is no hazardous duty pay for most of them, and yet the Facebook crowds continue to assume they are on the road because they are just too dumb to know better.

Over the next few weeks, we will identify as many community heroes as we possibly can in our print and also share online across our region. We have hundreds scheduled already in each of our communities, and I hope to be able to recognize them all.

If you are a business manager as myself and are proud of the team you have who is unselfishly serving your customers, their families, and our communities, please send us their names and a photo, Consider helping us pay our appreciation forward by helping us provide this space to the 35,000 readers we have in South Central Kentucky.

Jeff Jobe is founder and CEO of Jobe Publishing, Inc. His commentary reflects his personal views and does not reflect the views of personal or professional associations and affiliations. Reach him at jobe@jobeinc.com. Read his previously published commentary at www.sckentucky.com.