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Work with us, not against us

Did you know that you can send in news or tips to The Express? We have a virtual newsroom, through which many people — of all stripes and persuasions — send us summaries and photos from local events. This helps us collect and provide more local content to our readers. Sometimes, we get people — and organizations — who will send us content for their own aggrandizement. Here’s the catch: if the work they are doing in the community is good enough, we take the stance that their motivations are, at best, secondary to the deed itself. It could perhaps be considered suspect if ...

The worth of a life

Our lives, it turns out, are not priceless, as we are generally led to believe. In fact, they are assigned a very real dollar value, which depends on a number of factors ranging from geographic location, to age, and so forth. Generally speaking, the value of a human life is considered to be between $3 and $10 million — lower values are found in the poorer countries in the EU, for example, while the richer European countries and the United States skew higher. There are a lot of economic ramifications of these figures — but we would prefer, math-averse as we writers tend to be, ...

Show up, not shut down

As we entered our fourth month without a budget in Pennsylvania, the federal government also shut down. Jokes about taxation and representation aside, this is obviously flatly unacceptable. Our elected representatives are supposed to represent us — to put our needs, in this case a functional governmental, ahead of their own. Yet, in this moment in American history, are not our representatives a reflection of our own disunity? Politics is supposed to be the art of the compromise — the idea that just as pens are mightier than swords, so too are they preferable. Historically, ...

Outcry insufficient — again — as Rockview, Quehanna to close

It is something of a recurring trend that we, the people, never really get heard or listened to. At best, it feels sometimes like the decision-makers placate us average folk — like, perhaps, one would soothe a crying baby. The most recent example of this is with the closings of SCI Rockview and Quehanna Boot Camp, as the final decision came down Friday, barely a day after the thousand-page recommendation document from Dept. of Corrections was released. It’s almost like the decision was made months ago. But we have been through this before. A quick connection can be made to Lock ...

Charlie Kirk

Today will mark a week since the killing of Charlie Kirk. While many details — including about the gunman’s ideology — remain uncertain, it has become increasingly clear that this is a major moment in American history. Let’s start here: who was Charlie Kirk? It has been our experience that, prior to his killing, many people had never heard of him. Kirk was 31 years old, and leaves behind a wife, two children and grieving parents. He grew up in Prospect Heights, Illinois, the son of a mental health counselor and an architect. He earned the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy ...

Remembering 9/11, and the legacy of that shared trauma

Today marks 24 years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In that time, America has undergone a remarkable transformation, born of a shared trauma and grief that has never truly healed. Many young Americans have no idea what our nation was like before 9/11. If you read our periodic Throwback Thursday columns in the Scene section, you might encounter this when some of our younger editorial staff are confronted by the filmed ghosts of an American gestalt long since faded. Perhaps most commonly referenced internally in our newsroom is one person’s confusion at the airport scene in ...