After years of legal wrangling, an end to New Hampshire’s use of hospital emergency rooms to care for psychiatric patients has appeared on the horizon. Or so it seems.
Last Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Landya McCafferty rightly set a 12-month deadline to stop the absurd practice of using community hospital ERs as de facto waiting rooms for the New Hampshire State Hospital in Concord. Then on Friday, the state Department of Health and Human Services announced “Mission Zero”, its plan to eliminate ER boarding by 2025, making zero reference to McCafferty’s order or deadline.
After years of legal wrangling, an end to New Hampshire’s use of hospital emergency rooms to care for psychiatric patients has appeared on the horizon. Or so it seems.
We live in a glib, overly aggressive, overly shallow, narcissistic, neurotic society if we’re to believe our phones or some of our politicians. “Doomscrolling” is freshly minted jargon we don’t doubt will wheedle its way into American dictionaries soon.
We think people have had enough with government actors and agencies that keep telling us they “take these things seriously” whenever they are found wanting in their jobs. The incompetence is not going to be fixed with a cliché.
Vox clamantis in deserto” means the voice of one crying out in the wilderness. It’s Dartmouth College’s motto, but it sounds about right for Peter Mithoefer, who wrote The Dartmouth recently as executor of the estate of Robert Keeler, Class of 1936, who died in 2022.
To believe proponents of recreational marijuana, attitudes have changed, all our neighbors are doing it, and what better way to empty our jails and grow budgets than reframe drug abuse as a needed tax stream.
Anna Jarvis created Mother’s Day and later in life came to resent the shopping holiday it grew into. We’re sure a few moms in a vexing moment or two have felt the same about their creations.
We don’t fault Saint Anselm College for agreeing to provide a forum for CNN and Donald Trump this coming Wednesday evening. We just hope that CNN, which loved Trump before it despised him, will do a better job of journalism this time.
