Before the tragedy in Tucson only a year ago, I only knew one thing about Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords: That she was a Blue Dog Democrat. And I’ll be honest, as a proud and outspoken progressive Democrat, I’m not a fan of Blue Dog Democrats. Gabby Giffords may still be a Blue Dog, but either way, to me, she will always be a hero.

As a kid, I spent entire years of my life in and out of surgeries, recuperations, and physical therapy. I didn’t know anything else, really, but there’s absolutely no use feeling sorry for someone like me. It’s not as if I was afflicted with a sudden tragedy, that I’d known life one way and, in an instant, everything had changed. And in a way, I sensed, even as a kid, that I was lucky– not just because I was born into this amazingly supportive and encouraging family– but because I never knew any other reality or state of being.

When I was around ten years old, I had a series of major orthopedic surgeries. My bones were growing in the wrong directions, so they needed to point everything the right way. That’s how it was explained to me at the time. No one ever said, “If we don’t do this, once you’re an adult, you’ll never be able to walk.” But I understood.

It was about four or five days after one of those surgeries. I was in a hospital room in St. Paul, Minnesota, a room I shared with at least two other kids. And I was in severe pain; I had casts plastered around both of legs, from my ankles to my hip. “You have to exercise,” I was told, like a mantra. “Up, up, up.”

And even though I was sometimes reluctant and sometimes slow, I always followed instructions, because I had absolutely no intention of living with those casts. As a kid, it was as simple as that: The sooner I can recover, the better. And I was doubly fortunate because my mother was a trained, registered nurse; she pushed me harder than anyone else.

Across the room from me, there was another little boy, right around my age but with a crop of bright blonde hair; he was also recovering from a major surgery. He’d been in some sort of accident.

His mother kept shuffling in and out of the room. The nurses and the doctors were telling this kid the same things they were telling me: “Up, up, up.” But the kid didn’t want to exercise, and for his mother, this seemed perfectly okay.

“Don’t push him too much,” she said. “He’s been through enough. If my baby wants to rest, let him rest.” She was obviously distraught. She probably hadn’t slept or taken a shower since her child was hurt, yet she remained forceful and adamant.

That afternoon, my mother hoisted me onto a wheelchair and rolled me out of the hospital room and into the common area. All of the rooms in this particular wing encircled an enormous space with every kind of toy a kid can imagine and an endless supply of video games– a reward for doing your exercises and obeying instructions and, looking back, an ingenious way to incentivize a kid recovering from surgery.

After spending a healthy amount of time playing video games, my mother wheeled me into the parent’s break room, which was really just a nook with a small table, three or four chairs, an old vending machine, and a couple of windows that were frozen over with snow and ice.

“That poor kid,” my mom said. “His mother shouldn’t be doing that to him. You have to work to get better.” It wasn’t necessarily advice for me. She was genuinely upset.

“Why is his mom telling him that he doesn’t have to do what the doctors tell him to do?” I asked.

“It must be hard for her,” she said. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

For kids like me, kids that were born with something and never knew life any other way, hospitals become ordinary. Sure, there was always a sense of fear and dread, but after you’ve gone through the experience a few times, it’s easier, almost perfunctory, to believe that things will get better. Time slows down; life sometimes seems to come to a standstill, a holding pattern, and somewhere, you can find solitude in that.

To me, it always seemed more difficult for the kids with ordinary lives who, in a flash, were suddenly sharing the room with kids like me, veterans of the pediatric surgery recovery unit who were surrounded and encouraged by stubborn, battle-tested families.

Gabby Giffords is not my hero because I can relate to her experience. I can’t, at all. She’s my hero because she sets an example for kids and families who confront sudden and unexpected tragedy with overwhelming helplessness and resignation, instead of unwavering hope. She demonstrates the resiliency of the body and the spirit and the absolute necessity of fierce and unrelenting determination.

Find a way to be. Up, up, up.

But let’s get a couple of things out of the way first: Until I changed blog templates a few months ago, my “hit counter” was clearly visible on the front page. Also, given as frequently as Mr. Aymond has chided and insulted the blogger Ed Hooper for referring to himself as “we” on his blog WeSawThat, Mr. Aymond is, actually, the only local blog to have ever requested my hit count. And lastly and perhaps most importantly, CenLamar is actually hosted on two different platforms, WordPress and Blogspot (really, four, as posts occasionally appear on Facebook and on the website HumidBeings.com).

I migrated to WordPress and stopped publishing the Blogspot site on March 21, 2007, though it has remained open and served as an archive of those early years. On December 12, 2006, my site on Blogspot received its 100,000th unique visitor, which I marked in this post. A little more than three months later, immediately before I migrated to the WordPress platform, CenLamar has received approximately 120,000 total unique visitors.

When I launched the WordPress version, the hit count went down to zero, yet the Blogspot site, because it remains, still, to this day, continues to receive hits. Unfortunately, though, Blogger’s hit counter software had changed in May of 2009, and it’s impossible to precisely know how many visitors the site had received between March of 2007 and May of 2009, So, in fairness and despite the fact that the site likely continued to more receive hits during the first weeks and months before it was migrated, there’s still an easy enough way to extrapolate a total number. Thankfully, Blogger still provides the most current unique visitor hit counts, beginning in June 2009 and ending in January 2012.

Remember, this is from the CenLamar blogspot archives:

Again, we’re beginning in June of 2009 (which is why May is indicated as a zero-baseline) and tracking until last the end of January 2012. So far, in raw numbers, the archives received 14,167 unique viewers during this time.

Either way, extrapolating (conservatively) from this data, the website CenLamar on blogspot, which serves only as an archive, has a monthly average of 746 viewers throughout the last nineteen months. And just to be extremely conservative, we can take that new baseline number and apply it evenly from April 2006 to May 2009: 37 months times 746 average monthly readers equals an additional 27,602 hits (though I have ample reason to believe the CenLamar blogspot site received much more traffic then).

So let’s recap Blogspot:

100,000 hits on December 12, 2006

+ 20,000 hits from January 2007 to late-March 2007

+ 27,602 hits* approximate from late-March 2007 to May 2009

+ 14,161 hits from June 2009- Present

Equals:

Approximately, 161,763 total unique viewers on CenLamar blogspot archives.

Now, we already know the hits Greg Aymond receives on his website; he calls himself the most popular and most read blogger in Central Louisiana. From his website:

And here are my most current stats via WordPress (retrieved at 7:11AM CST):

Simple math involved here, because while Greg Aymond may claim to Central Louisiana’s “most popular” blogger, the real, aggregate numbers tell a much different story.

In plain terms:

CenLamar Blogspot Archives: 161,763  (which still receives between two dozen and 14o unique visitors per day)

CenLamar WordPress: 500,133 (with an average of nearly 11,000 unique visitors per month and an average of 356 unique visitors per day)
661,896 total unique visitors*+#

*A conservative estimate of Blogspot traffic between April 2007 and May 2009
+ Does not include unique viewers who utilize social media applications like Facebook or other news aggregators.
# When including those other platforms and applications, a more accurate number of total unique readers is around 800,000-852,5000 people. (Admittedly, still less than half of Tony Brown’s entire daily audience, according to Greg Aymond).

All told, thus far, CenLamar has attracted between 106,000 – 295,000 MORE unique visitors than Greg Aymond. (If I could only claim, like Mitt Romney, that I was also taxed at a substantially lower rate, maybe then it’d be real news).

Some may suggest it’s disingenuous to include the hit count numbers from the CenLamar archives. No, it’s not, though, because the archives continue to be operated and moderated, and the site continues to attract dozens of readers every single day; it’s merely a different component of the same website.

There’s one other component to this that merits some attention.

Social media presence is equally important, in many ways.

Greg Aymond has 87 friends on Facebook.

I have 1,043 friends and over 115 people subscribed specifically to the CenLamar Facebook group.

Greg Aymond, under the name centrallapoliti, has 84 followers on Twitter.

I, under the name CenLamar, have 611.

According to Klout, an organization that tracks, ranks, and monitors, those most influential in social and online media, Greg Aymond doesn’t even register.

CenLamar, however, is the highest-ranked social media “specialist” in Central Louisiana:

By comparison, my friend Matt Bailey scores a 56, and my friend Zack Kopplin scores a 52. Not to brag on the three of us, but it’s not exactly easy to get a score over 50.

Honestly, this is not just about tooting my own horn.

I am thankful and deeply appreciative for each and every single reader, and building this website and establishing my presence online have been labors of love. I haven’t made a red dime from any of my work on CenLamar; Matt doesn’t make money advocating for progressive policies and helping to cultivate the next generation of progressive leaders in Louisiana, and Zack doesn’t make money fighting for the repeals of laws that undermine the credibility of Louisiana public education.

We all do this because we’re all gluttons for criticism, and more importantly, I think, we’re all deeply and passionately committed to the future of our home state.

I felt compelled to respond and disclose all of this after reading, over and over again, another blogger suggest I was withholding my blog stats because they’d be embarrassing to me or prove, once and for all, that he’s somehow more “popular,” as if this is nothing more than a contest.

No, it’s not. It’s a competition for ideas and discussion.

By: Charles “Chuck” Johnson, City Attorney of Alexandria, Louisiana

How many of you have ever taken the time to consider why the Lord gave you breath?

For what purpose did He smile upon you? Where exactly does your piece fit into the puzzle of life?

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a man who had a very unique understanding of his place in the world. He knew why God brought him here. The answer for Dr. King was simple but also profound: God enlisted him to be a living, breathing, walking, and talking messenger of His Divine Will, an earthen vessel tasked with forcing America to glance into a mirror; a mirror which would reflect an unsightly image of institutionalized bigotry and hatred inconsistent with the lofty ideals recited in the Constitution.

That Divine Will- the Will of the Father- is not always consistent with the will of men. Freedom, justice, and equality were Dr. King’s expressions of the Will of God- which America failed to embrace in any real sense before Dr. King lifted the mirror. Slavery, segregation, lynchings, war, holocausts, or any other form of oppression the mind can conjure are all expressions of the will of men.

The message of non-violent resistance which Dr. King communicated by hoisting that mirror was that you can spit on me.

Beat me.

Spray me with fire-hoses.

Unleash your dogs.

Imprison me.

Even fire the bullet which will take my life, but your likeness must nonetheless change.

I need not lift my hand in spite, curse, or fire a single shot at you, “America,”  to make you examine yourself and see the face of injustice.

It’s truly a beautiful thing.

One man used the moral force of his words to shake the conscience of a nation; all the while, he knew what fate awaited him.

The bullet which struck Dr. King’s body did not shatter the mirror. Instead, it galvanized the spirits of those who walk in the steps of the righteous. It gave hope to those who only knew hopelessness. It made hard hearts soften. It instilled in the minds of those with power that force and violence cannot silence the conscience. It broke the rusty chains and shackles from the souls of folks without the strength to contest the authority of the state. And it solved the puzzle America has grappled with since the birth of this nation.

Charles “Chuck” Johnson is the City Attorney for the City of Alexandria and a graduate of Southern University Law School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Less than thirty minutes before President Barack Obama delivered the State of the Union address tonight, The Town Talk published a press release from Congressman Rodney Alexander (LA-5), with the headline “Congressman Alexander comments on the State of the Union.“

Note: The timestamp is in Central Standard Time, 7:32PM CST. President Obama’s speech began at 8:00PM CST.

In fairness to the Congressman, he likely did not write that headline, but for anyone who, like me, checked The Town Talk during the State of the Union, it seemed a little strange and disingenuous. Representative Alexander, a man who switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party only after he had secured the Democratic nomination and raised thousands of dollars from loyal Democratic donors, wasn’t actually commenting on a speech that hadn’t yet been delivered; he was simply using an opportune time to preemptively criticize the President. And that is certainly his right.

Though considering the timing and the context of his press release, it’s somewhat ironic that Representative Alexander implored the President to “put an end to the political games and rhetoric behind him.” Because “political games” and “rhetoric” are exactly what the Congressman engaged in with this strategically-timed press release, a press release designed to eat up the local headlines during the State of the Union. It’s important to note: This wasn’t a media report about comments made by the Congressman in advance of the speech; it was a press release sent to the media by his office and published less than thirty minutes before the speech, framed by an amazingly misleading headline. That’s what many people would call political gamesmanship.