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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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In Our View: Cheers & Jeers

Local residents show generosity; theft of tricycle especially mean-spirited

The Columbian
Published:

Cheers: Generosity in Clark County is clicking along, to the tune of about $422,000 in 24 hours. Through a program christened “Give More 24!” and sponsored by the Community Foundation, organizers got local residents to dig deep into their pockets from 7 a.m. Thursday to 7 a.m. Friday, with most of the donations coming through a handy website that allowed donors to choose individual charities or specific program areas.

“I think the biggest thing was learning how we can leverage technology and social media to raise funds for causes and needs in our own community,” Community Foundation President Jennifer Rhoads said. “We thought this would be a great opportunity for us all to learn together.” A total of 1,842 individual donations went to 85 different nonprofit agencies in Clark, Cowlitz, and Skamania counties. Big cheers are warranted for organizers, those who donated and, especially, those who run the programs that benefit our community.

Jeers: We’re pretty confident that the number of good, thoughtful people in this world outnumber the cads, but it only takes one or two jerks to shake your faith a little. So, plenty of jeers go to whoever stole and then damaged the adaptive tricycle of a 10-year-old Vancouver boy who has special needs.

The tricycle costs at least $1,400, according to the manufacturer’s website, and it had been donated to the family by Shriners Hospital for Children. The trike was stolen from the porch of the family home last week, and when it was recovered a few days later, it was unusable. That kind of crime requires a special level of callousness on the part of the perpetrators.

Cheers: Vancouver Fire Chief Joe Molina says he doesn’t want to be regarded as a hero, but some labels are hard to shake. Molina last week saved the life of a man who was choking at a restaurant on the Oregon Coast. “His lips were blue and his face was blue; his eyes were bulging,” said Molina, who then performed the Heimlich maneuver and dislodged a french fry that was choking the man.

Some people might think the victim was fortunate to have trained emergency personnel nearby. But Molina shared the story with Columbian reporter Stephanie Rice simply to point out the need for everybody to receive training in simple lifesaving procedures. The more people who learn the Heimlich and learn CPR, the more lives can be saved. Because you never know when you’ll need a hero.

Jeers: Financial scams are not limited to any particular demographic or any particular time of year, and the Battle Ground Police Department has noted an uptick in cons targeting senior citizens. With that, the department has issued some reminders of what to watch for: Any time a stranger contacts you and asks for money, that is a con; don’t give personal information over the phone unless you initiated the contact; and hang up on suspicious telemarketers.

Kudos to police for reminding citizens of some common-sense guidelines, but jeers to the scammers who perpetrate frauds and prey on the vulnerable.

Cheers: For all of its simplicity of design and color, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., is remarkably powerful. That is because the names of the dead, more than 58,000 of them, humanize the cost of war in a poignant fashion. Now, a group of volunteers is working to humanize those deaths even further by collecting photographs to go with those names.

As Janna Hoehn told The Columbian, she still needs photos of 19 Clark County residents who died during the Vietnam War. The project, which has collected some 37,000 pictures from across the country, is a worthy one that reminds us that the casualties of war are not merely faceless statistics.

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