Letters to the Editor

A Poem for Downtown Wheeling

Editor, News-Register: The hills and cliffs still bear the scars of where the Ohio once slashed at them. It is at the site of this attempted murder that the city rests, still asleep in its work clothes the crumbs of weathered roads and broken curbs littering its chest. Faded brick alleyways seep between buildings like old capillaries The Capitol Theatre wears the evening like a tux Old leather volumes ferment silently in a bookstore In bars, the carousing liturgy of stories being told some legend, some folklore. From the restaurant on the corner of Market and ...

A Deadly, Disqualifying Legacy

Editor, News-Register: A recent United Nations report documents 10,000 Ukrainian civilian deaths due to Russia’s aggressive war. That number is dwarfed by an estimated 15,000 Palestinian civilians killed in Israel’s military response to Hamas’ 1,200 murders Oct. 7. How then should we characterize the deaths of nearly 319,000 American civilians by what Brown University medical researchers call “Covid-19 vaccine-preventable deaths?” This devastating number is higher than a previous estimate by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Harvard School of Public Health, that ...

Donald Trump’s Stuck in His Head

Editor, News-Register: I skimmed through Richard Hord’s letter to the editor published last weekend. He’s trying to make the case that President Trump has early onset dementia because the former President misspoke a couple of times. The examples he gave are actually quite hilarious and shows how low some people with Trump Derangement Syndrome will go with their extreme hatred toward the former President. Donald Trump can stand for hours and speak to crowds without cue cards or teleprompters. He can take questions from reporters on a wide variety of topics and answer them ...

Prioritize This Holiday Season

Editor, News-Register: As we enter into the holiday season, we see many addicts who wish to wait until after the holidays to seek treatment. They would like to spend time with their families and avoid missing yet another holiday. But what happens in most cases is they use more to get away from the harsh reality of their life that confronts them. They think there is no way out of the stresses of life and no way out of their addiction. The next thing they know, these anxieties push them to keep using, which could ultimately lead to an overdose and/or death. The realization that you ...

Recalling Days After Pearl Harbor

Editor, News-Register: Where was I on Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1941? I was playing at my rural home in Carroll County, blissfully unaware that all of our lives were soon to change very much. Mom and Pop and my brother and I heard the news, but it didn’t sink in very much until the next day at school. We attended a one-room schoolhouse known as Carroll County No. 5. Electricity had come to our area about a year earlier through the REA. I was a nearly-8-year-old third-grader — one of three in my class. The whole school was taken by our teacher (about 30 of us) to the house ...

Trump’s Confusion a Concern

Editor, News-Register: It has been reported that former President Donald J. Trump’s recent myriad of serious memory lapses, his now even more incoherent and seemingly unhinged verbal rants as well as his apparent uncontrollable behavior, both in and out of the courtroom, has led many professionals to conclude that Mr. Trump, quite possibly, appears to be exhibiting very troubling behavior, and that he may currently be experiencing the early stages of dementia — the dreaded disease that his father Fred Trump had contracted prior to his death in 1999. Mr. Trump’s most concerning ...