A few days ago, I was in Athens to see my all-time favorite musician, Matthew Sweet, perform at the legendary 40 Watt Club. On my way to the venue, however, I spotted a gaggle of quite homeless-looking youngsters holding up signs at the entranceway of the University of Georgia. Since it was fairly dark, I couldn’t read all of their signs, but I did catch the scrawling on one of them: “Unions, the people that brought you the weekend.” They all shuffled about, and most of them looked, well, pretty depressed. Apparently, Occupy Athens was anything but a rousing success. You know, I’ve been …

  For as long as I have been at Kennesaw State University, it has been an annual tradition: a couple of weeks after the fall semester begins, a group of evangelist preachers would come to campus and yell inflammatory things at students, who, in return, would yell inflammatory things back at the visiting ministers. The preachers would hold up signs saying that the “secular humanists” would eventually serve as Satan’s kindling lest they changed their un-Christianly ways, and student representatives from the gay rights and skeptics clubs would hold up poster boards denouncing the preachers for …

According to the statistics, times aren’t just tough for thousands upon thousands of Americans, they’re literally unbearable. In the years between 2000-2007, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention said that approximately 2.3 million people in the United States had intentionally taken their own lives; although official stats from the last four years have not been released to the public, the current suicide rate is estimated to be the single highest in the nation’s history, eclipsing even the monumentally high rate of 1933--a point in time in which one quarter of the nation was …

“The intended purpose of drugs like Adderall, Ritalin and Dexedrine is for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,” said Teresa Johnston, Director of Kennesaw State University’s Center for Young Adult Addiction and Recovery. “They are a stimulant class of drugs, and students are taking them for that stimulant effect.” Johnston said some college students are misusing the behavioral treatment drugs for reasons as diverse as diet control and concentration for studying. “Culturally, we are a nation that advertises prescription drugs, so we are conditioned towards turning to medication…

Being a senior in college is really no different than being a senior in high school. You’re caught in this weird vacuum where you don’t know if you’re looking ahead or looking behind you - you’re either daydreaming about what the end of the tunnel looks like, or you’re reminiscing on the last three or four years and how much things have changed in such a short amount of time. A few weeks ago, I was walking to class and encountered a throng of incoming freshmen. Sure, there was more than likely a couple of transfer students in that mix as well, but as a commonality, they were all new to KSU. …

When the Atlanta Thrashers were recently sold to Canadian-based True North Sports and Entertainment Limited, it seemed to have a virtually infinitesimal effect on the Cobb area. Here in SEC football and NASCAR country, who really cares about losing a pro hockey team? An unsuccessful sports team leaves Atlanta, and the impact on Kennesaw, on the surface, seems to be non-existent. The Atlanta Thrashers boondoggle is perhaps the greatest testament to metro Atlanta’s commercial organization problems to come along in quite some time. Charting the Thrashers' disastrous 12-year stay in Atlanta tells…

Every now and then, do you ever come across an idea that you just can’t make a decision about? Well, I’ve had one of those burning thoughts raked across my mind recently. My ongoing dilemma? Whether or not Newt’s 2012 Presidential run is a good or a bad thing for Cobb County. On one side of the debate, a Gingrich presidential win would mean I, and other KSU alum, could say we went to school where a United States President once taught. Sure, it may have only been for one class for one semester 16 years before I enrolled there, but it has to give Kennesaw State University some serious clout as …

Here’s a fun little experiment you can try: the next time you’re on Google, try typing two search terms into the inquiry box. The first term is Kennesaw “conservative bias,” and the second term is Kennesaw “liberal bias.” So, what results did you get? On my trial run, I got 497 instances of “conservative bias” and almost 5,000 instances of “liberal bias.” Clearly, this must mean Kennesaw has a major problem with liberal idealism, right? That should seem a little peculiar since Kennesaw seems to be such a conservative community. But, if the city really was so entrenched in the conservative …

Kennesaw, like every other community in America, is feeling the sting of the economic downturn. By and large, I’d say that Kennesaw isn’t being crushed by the recession the way a number of neighboring communities are. If you travel north on I-75, you can take any number of exits and find yourself in the middle of a modern ghost town. Not only has the downturn sapped small town America dry, it’s almost killed off the back road towns and hamlets of the region. Although Kennesaw is undoubtedly hurting, compared to most burghs and provinces of Georgia, even the poorest among us are living …

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” For some reason, a lot of people around these parts simply refuse to accept that church and state are supposed to be separate in this country. The fact that it was the very first thing mentioned in the very first governmental tract in our nation’s modern history should be a pretty big clue to that testament. Like I said, should be. And so, on May 5 a number of community members will plop down a couple of bucks to partake of a breakfast seminar at the Cobb Galleria Centre, for a …

It really wasn’t until this year’s Super Bowl that I realized just how dumb our state’s alcohol sale laws truly are. Can you imagine the amount of money that’s lost every week just because some Puritans from 200 years ago didn’t like the fact that people could enjoy a beer or two on the Sabbath? Nobody wants to live in a theocracy, and the state’s blue laws are both a clear violation of our civil liberties and a direct infraction of the whole “separation of church and state” guarantee. Am I happy that state legislators are finally giving this thing a vote in the State Capitol? Buddy, this …

Cobb County is home to a lot of renowned politicians, both past, present, and possibly future. While our county may forever be remembered as Newt’s stomping ground, I would like to dedicate this article to the work of a lesser known Republican in the area - 43rd District State Rep. Bobby Franklin. Rep. Franklin was elected to the Georgia House in 1996. During last year’s elections, he ran unopposed, garnering more than 14,000 votes in the process. Rep. Franklin is what I would call a “visionary.” You see, he has a lot of ideas about the way this county should be, and I really want to share …

It’s spring break for the kids at Kennesaw State University, which means large numbers of the almost 25,000 strong student body will be - or already are - kicking back for a week filled with sun, sand and of course, copious amounts of alcohol consumption. Since I’ve been at KSU, about a dozen or so students have died due to alcohol-related accidents. Some died in automobile collisions, and others literally drank themselves to death. Regardless of the method, alcohol consumption has led to tragedy for many members of the campus and the community, and it’s quite clear that binge drinking is a …

Well, it looks like those HOPE dollars are beginning to dry up. Really, that doesn’t surprise me, since the entire thing has been an over-budgeted nightmare since its inception. The HOPE scholarship (and its less heralded younger cousin, the HOPE grant) has been an ingrained aspect of higher education in the state of Georgia since 1993, when it was used as a massive bargaining chip to install the Georgia Lottery. Sure, sure, all of those Clinton-era politicos may have said the intent of the program was to keep students in college, but it was really a ploy to keep kids from leaving the state…

A few weeks ago, I received an automated phone call from Kennesaw State University. A robotic voice informed me that authorities were attempting to locate a pig that had wandered towards the campus. A few hours later, I log onto a social networking site, and my classmates and peers seemed to make the same joke, almost as if they had all collaborated on the punch line. “Pigs searching for pigs.” Dozens and dozens of sardonic, derisive notes and postings that commented on the hilarity that was law enforcement agents seeking runaway livestock. The locus of the mockery wasn’t placed on the ham..…

A few nights ago, I was walking to my car when I heard two students talking about their economic conditions. One of them said that he was making $130 a week, when his rent was $600 a month. His friend asked him how he was able to survive. “What you do,” he said with a gentle tone, “is get you some peanut butter, and some saltines.” The other student replied, “Yeah, that’s good. Peanut butter is fattening. It sticks to you.” There was a brief interstice of silence in their discussion. “So, yeah, I’ve been living off two of those sandwiches a day,” I heard behind me. “People don’t believe me …

A couple of days ago, I got a tax form in the mail detailing my expenditures at Kennesaw State University. In 2010, I spent $4,738 at KSU. Of that, $2,670 went towards tuition costs. What did the other $2,000 of my hard earned money go towards, you may ask? Well, I was charged about $700 in special fees. We’ll talk about what that entails a little later on. I paid $150 in technology fees, and about $700 more in student activity and athletic fees. Parking and health fees cost me $330 and $128, respectively. To give you a little perspective: in 2010, I made about $20,000, which means that a …

I was doing some number crunching recently, and I discovered that Kennesaw is way better off than most of its neighboring cities. And it’s not by a negligible amount, either. This, obviously, brings up the question: what exactly is Kennesaw doing right, and what exactly is Kennesaw doing differently? To begin with, you have to look at the basic stats. Kennesaw has an estimated population of about 35,000 people. That’s about 15,000 more residents than Acworth, and approximately 35,000 less than Marietta. Approximately 67 percent of Kennesaw is Caucasian, while 20 percent is African American. …

Martin Luther King Jr. would have been 82 this year. It’s been 43 years since King was gunned down outside a hotel room in Memphis. We didn’t celebrate his birthday as a federal holiday until 18 years later, and it was 14 years after that until all 50 states in the union recognized it as one. Outside of some truly fringe subculture extremists, I don’t think there’s a single human being in this country that doesn’t admire and respect King. As much as I hate to say it, I think a lot of times, it’s not a genuine appreciation, however. To me, it seems like people vaunt and celebrate his life …

On Jan. 8, a man walked into a Safeway parking lot in Arizona. He walked out, while six others didn’t. Christina Taylor Green, age 9. Dorothy Morris, 76. Phyllis Schneck, 79. John Roll, 63. Dorwin Stoddard, 76. Gabriel Zimmerman, 30. Fourteen other people were wounded, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. She may never walk again, while the man who is accused of putting a bullet in her skull rests in a nice, warm jail cell in Tucson. When things like this happen, you tend to think about what’s really important in life. If you’re a decent human being, you put all of that nonsense about …