The Biggest Story of 2021 That Everyone’s Forgotten
It's the time of year that everyone worth their salt does an end of the year review, revisiting the top stories of the year about to end.
For those of us in the Shreveport and Bossier City area the top three are pretty easy. The devastating cold front and accompanying ten inches of snow in February. Also on the list, the building of the massive Amazon Distribution Center in north Shreveport, with its promise of 1,000 or more jobs. And sadly, the city setting a new record for homicides in a calendar year, with the possibility of 100 not out of the question.
On the national stage, it's everything Biden. A President marked with disasters from Day 1, including Afghanistan, the highest inflation in a generation and an inability to curb the COVID pandemic.
But one story, one that affected millions and millions, seems to have been forgotten in every retrospective of 2021.
The death of radio icon Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh, who passed away in February after a year-long battle with lung cancer, drew as many as 20 million listeners weekly. And despite his on-the-air brilliance, the small town Missouri native was perhaps his greatest in his final days.
Since promising his audience "not to be a cancer patient on the radio" after announcing his illness, Limbaugh attacked the disease with the same intensity and singular focus that he did his program.
And even in his final days, Limbaugh continued to do the daily three hour broadcast, as family, friend and listeners marveled at his ability to sound as if nothing was wrong.
"We didn't know it was going to be the last few days," Producer James Golden (Bo Snerdley) recently told Glenn Beck. "Rush's bucket list was his audience. And so every...single day that he could be there, that he wasn't in treatment, that he wasn't suffering from the effects of treatment, he came to work. And when the mic went on...you would not even think the man was was fighting any kind of an illness."
Limbaugh told his listeners in October that his diagnosis was terminal. "It's tough to realize that the days where I do not think that I'm under a death sentence are over," he said.
Rush was 70 when he passed away on February 17.