Recent editorials from Georgia newspapers:
___
March 17
The Savannah Morning News on the city’s St. Patrick’s Day without a parade:
As Savannah St. Patrick’s Days go, the 2020 edition was memorable.
Plenty of parking near the parade route. Trash-free squares. A soundtrack absent of bagpipes, fife and drums and marching bands.
And absolutely no kissing.
Equal parts sad and surreal, Savannah’s most anticipated holiday passed without a parade for the first time in generations.
About a dozen would-be marchers congregated in front of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist around 9:30 a.m., and two hours later the gathering had grown to three dozen. Led by Grand Marshal Mike Roush, the group leisurely walked the sidewalks of the parade route, exercising social distancing all the way.
To their credit, the procession showed no sense of defiance or protest, as was talked about in the 24 hours or so after Savannah Mayor Van Johnson announced the parade’s cancellation on March 11.
Take away the sashes and the green jackets, and the grand marshal’s group could have been mistaken for random foot traffic. They marched in the tradition of Savannah’s St. Patrick’s Day - in celebration of their Irish heritage.
The grand marshal and friends weren’t the only ones to mark the holiday in a familiar if scaled-back manner. Small groups of diehards walked the route throughout the morning.
On Oglethorpe Square, a handful of families gathered for a picnic in their normal parade-watching spot. They tossed the football and played cornhole. They clapped and called out “Happy St. Pat’s” to the horse-drawn tourist carriages as they passed by, as if they were units in the parade.
And they spoke for all of Savannah in saying, “We can’t wait for next year.”
LOOKING AHEAD
A popular discussion point over the last week is whether Roush, the grand marshal, should retain the title for the 2021 parade.
The answer to that question is simple and definitive: Whatever the Savannah St. Patrick’s Day Committee decides.
The broader community may claim ownership of the parade, but the reality is the event and everything around it belongs to the committee. The rest of us are invited guests.
The committee will no doubt discuss extending Roush’s marshalship or perhaps even consider co-grand marshals for next year. Or they may elect a new grand marshal and move on as normal.
Whatever they decide this community should support.
Online: https://www.savannahnow.com
___
March 16
The Brunswick News on appointments to a local police advisory council:
Creating a Police Advisory Panel is a great idea, but only if Glynn County commissioners remain focused on its real purpose when appointing members. To put it in plain terms: no cronies and certainly no political buds.
This is what often happens with appointed boards. The same people are named to them over and over again. An opening on one sometimes results in a mere reshuffling of the others.
County commissioners can ill-afford to do that this time around. Too much is at stake. Citizens demand it, and the reputation of our police force, sullied by controversy after controversy, could certainly use it.
It’s so bad that just recently, state legislators considered measures that would force commissioners to dismantle the county police department and return all responsibility for law enforcement to the Glynn County Sheriff’s Office.
Legislators who favored this may have been overstepping their bounds, but they certainly had plenty of cause on which to catapult their actions. It’s been one misstep after the next, starting with the drug task force, defunct today. Now, the police chief is under indictment and the police department and taxpayers are being sued by the grieving mother of a daughter maliciously ambushed and killed by a former county police officer.
The majority of men and women with the Glynn County Police Department are dedicated to law enforcement and to the protection of citizens. It’s sometimes hard to remember that with so many accusations bouncing around.
Commissioners must appoint a panel that reflects the demographics of the county population. It cannot just be five white men, a number that includes the county administrator and a county commissioner. It must include the proper gender and racial mix, or at least as close to it as they can get.
No one is asking them to include rabble-rousers on the panel. It needs finger-pointing noise-makers as much as it needs rubber stampers. Keep both off the panel. Find level-headed individuals capable of reaching fair conclusions. Our situation today begs for such a panel.
Online: https://thebrunswicknews.com
___
March 12
The Augusta Chronicle on setting boundaries for personal social media consumption:
You don’t have to be a trained scientist to know that spending time online can raise your blood pressure.
That’s the darker nature of social media. Tools developed to meaningfully improve human communication have allowed people across the planet to argue about politics or hurl insults at one another at a speed undreamed of by our ancestors.
For the past several years, experts report drawing clear connections between time spent on apps such as Facebook or Twitter and elevated occurrences of depression, anxiety or isolation.
Those are adverse mental and emotional effects. But few researchers seemed to have delved deeply into the possible physical ill effects from the same activities.
That’s what’s intriguing about recently released findings from Augusta University researchers.
The findings from trained scientists? Spending time online can raise your blood pressure.
More specifically, people who use social media heavily have been found to suffer from high blood pressure at night, which is a leading risk factor for heart disease.
Dr. James D. Halbert, a postdoctoral researcher at AU’s Georgia Prevention Institute, and Gregory Harshfield, the institute’s director, were looking for new sources of stress that raise blood pressure. They didn’t have far to look, given the sorry state of blood-boiling incivility online these days.
Studying their test subjects revealed that nighttime blood pressure was most prevalent among frequent cellphone users; whose personalities were a generally balanced mix of both introverted and extroverted qualities; and who fell within a certain age group.
But it wasn’t among old folks, as researchers were expecting. It occurred most often among millennials, the societal cohort loosely defined as people in their 20s or early 30s on which mobile technology had a formative influence.
Why those groups, and what specifically spurs the stress? The study’s authors aren’t sure, but it’s worth studying further. Social media is here to stay, and every problem connected with it should be fully understood for the sake of everyone’s wellness.
Lately, it seems just about every angle on social media’s negative mental-health effects has been explored, observed, measured, studied and written about by researchers for scholarly journals. We even came across a 2017 study from the Industry Psychiatry Journal, titled “Adverse health effects and unhealthy behaviors among dental undergraduates surfing social networking sites.”
But studies’ findings are difficult to dispute. You can be a social butterfly on Instagram or on message boards, but still can be a hermit. Social media shields you from actual personal human contact. And being deprived of that can spur depression, anxiety, disrupted sleep patterns and, as AU’s findings now indicate, a too-prevalent physical ailment that health professionals often dub “the silent killer.”
The increasing worry over coronavirus is sure to keep more citizens at home - which will glue more people to their computer keyboards and mobile devices. Without adding to rising hysteria, practice commonsense protection to avoid getting ill.
But after the disease known as COVID-19 fades, take extra preventive caution. There are very few reasonable excuses to stay shackled to social media that outweigh the importance of self-care. A sedentary, solitary lifestyle is a sure way to shorten your life. Spend less time tapping on a keyboard and more time staying physically active. And stay socially engaged the old-fashioned way - face-to-face.
Online: https://www.augustachronicle.com
Please read our comment policy before commenting.