Hits & Misses
HIT: At a time when the opioid epidemic has become the most pressing issue in our area, a local hospital and its drug rehabilitation counterpart are doing something to give addicts hope. Washington Health System and Greenbriar Treatment Center are establishing a residential substance abuse treatment program that will include 28 beds at WHS-Greene hospital in Waynesburg to help those in “chronic distress.” Drug treatment experts often say there aren’t enough beds available to offer the long-term rehabilitation addicts need. Until now, Greene County had none. It’s a step in the right direction in fighting this awful epidemic.
MISS: Shootings at schools and workplaces in this country get most of the media attention, as they should, but it seems to us that incidents of “lower-level” violence are reaching epidemic proportions. Rarely does a day go by that we don’t read about one of our area residents attacking or threatening to kill another. Sometimes both. Two recent incidents were real eye-openers. In one, a Bethel Park man had a gun pointed at him and was assaulted during a road-rage incident in East Finley Township. In the other, a Canonsburg mother is accused of driving her 13-year-old daughter to Wash High so the girl could beat up another girl. To paraphrase Rodney King, can’t we all try a little harder to get along?
HIT: You’d have to be a pretty old baseball fan to remember the last time a pitcher had a debut like the one turned in last Sunday by the Pirates’ Nick Kingham against the St. Louis Cardinals. The seemingly unflappable Kingham retired the first 20 batters he faced, a figure reached by no one else in baseball’s expansion era, which began in 1961. As rookies go, Kingham is hardly one of the youngest. He’s 26 and was drafted nearly eight years ago, his progression to the big leagues slowed by injuries, including Tommy John elbow surgery. But he certainly made the most of his first opportunity to impress with the “big team,” and it’s been clear in the early going of this season that the Bucs could use another quality starting pitcher. Here’s hoping Kingham will be that guy.
MISS: Surely we’re not the only ones sick and tired of the relentlessly nasty tone of the ads for Republican gubernatorial candidates Paul Mango and Scott Wagner. If you’ve seen these commercials, we won’t labor the point. Suffice to say it wouldn’t be a surprise to see one of them blame the other for playing a role in the Lincoln assassination. What’s being assassinated here are the characters of both men. It makes us wonder whether either of them, when this primary season is over, will be very attractive to the commonwealth’s voters.
HIT: The American landscape is filled with museums and memorials, but the arrival of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is long overdue. It opened in late April in Montgomery, Ala., and recognizes the thousands of victims of lynching in the decades when racist terror went unpunished in the United States. All told, close to 4,400 lynchings have been uncovered by the museum’s organizers, who spent years going through libraries and archives. The memorial takes its inspiration from counterparts that scrutinize apartheid in South Africa and the Holocaust. Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the nonprofit organization that supports the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, told The New York Times, “I’m not interested in talking about America’s history because I want to punish America. I want to liberate America.” It’s a site all Americans, regardless of their race or political persuasion, should visit.