A wave of unrest, which began unfurling last fall, washed across the country Wednesday, to the discernible notice of observers in the White House, where a lockdown was ordered, and the noticeable chagrin of the president’s compadres in Congress and his acolytes elsewhere.

Rice and cotton require proportionally more water to thrive than other crops, so naturally the federal government since the Depression has paid farmers taxpayer money by the bushelful to manufacture harvests in places where rain is stubbornly disinclined to fall, on land that was formerly desert.

Seeing that by Tax Day its flow of cash would turn from thin trickle to dust, Waynesboro’s Main Street organization a month ago pulled out budget knives, then held out hands.

On a memorable Easter Sunday, America’s 44th president shed an image he had carefully cultivated over the course of almost two years of campaigning for the job and in his first three months in office, as one disinclined to move past diplomacy’s muddle into the realm of swift action.

A societal proclivity: In calamity’s wake, officialdom scurries to prevent recurrence.

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As waves crash and the ship rolls, Waynesboro city staff heave crates over the rails and two councilwomen respond in kind, tossing coins into the sea, drawing applause, much of it their own, amid thunderclaps. Now to the real business: whether to cut $550,000 more from city spending or impose a tax increase with major local employers dispatching workers to the plank as the storm roars.

In the residual chill diffused in recent weeks by men bearing arms, the General Assembly gathers today to consider whether to override Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s decision to veto five gun rights bills passed from lawmakers’ hands to his.

North Korea defiantly marched back onto the world stage Sunday, aiming a long-range missile toward the heavens, depressing the flashing red button and therewith making a statement that reverberates still.

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Images that flicker to mind upon the utterance of the word boy have changed but a little from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of a “sturdy little urchin” in “The House of the Seven Gables:” with “cheeks as red as an apple ... he was clad rather shabbily ... [wearing] a chip hat with the frizzles of his curly hair sticking through its crevices.” Boys themselves since have slipped through crevices. Today, they are education’s urchins. Blame Carol Gilligan.

As the American auto industry zips toward oblivion with both feet planted firmly on the accelerator, solace can be found in the fact that while steering hybrids on a highway to nowhere, carmakers will get 41 miles to the gallon, or better. This soothes, like hearkening to the strains of “Nearer My God to Thee” aboard the Titanic while the Atlantic gushes over the rails: Hey, the band sounds great, pass the life preserver.

Amid the huff into which state Sen. Mark Obenshain has worked himself over plans to, among other things, close most of the 41 rest areas on Interstate 81, an idea has sprung: Why not privatize those spots? To which we say, why not?

Meet Barack Obama, president of the United States, savior of the universe, sheriff of Motown, automobile executive.

Somewhere in Waynesboro’s pulsing West End, a firehouse will rise bearing a similarity to the plain-faced efficiency of that section’s anchor, the Wal-Mart Supercenter off Lucy Lane.

History, as philosopher George Santayana admonished, is instructive in what to avoid, but replication is not always a bad thing.

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Tracy Pyles goes on the offensive again, this time over supervisors’ travel.

Going to nonprofit status would strip newspapers of independence.

Conquering the recession isn’t worth surrendering our future.

On the still-sparkling campus of the Augusta Medical Center, set in Fishersville facing the Blue Ridge Mountains, the residue from the battle that preceded the hospital’s opening 15 years ago long since has been swept away.

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Ambivalence is a trait rarely displayed in the political repertoire of President Barack Obama, a man whose views tend toward a level of absolutism disdained by people of his ideological kind, unless, of course, it behooves them.

Fittingly, state Republican Party Chairman Jeffrey M. Frederick begins an electronic missive to 2,000 GOP members with the greeting, “Dear Republican Friend,” the singular noun being roughly proportionate to his partisan support.

Barack Obama, among other things, is the president who will throw open the sash and let in the light. He hailed while campaigning for the job he now holds the coming of a “new era of open government.”

America is in danger of losing the spirit of self reliance that forged this place as a bastion of liberty and greatness.

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With the supervisors having failed to act as they ought, the Augusta County reassessment battle shifts to the courtroom. Will supervisors fail again, this time in lowering the tax rate?

Here’s what the Waynesboro City Council’s majority faction and at least one local merchant apparently cannot bear: the lure of people downtown.

Tonight is the night of nights for Augusta County’s swelling legions of reassessment protesters, who are expected to descend on the Government Center in Verona as though it were a French beachhead.