Cheers & Jeers
Cheers: Cheers to West Greene wrestler Colin Whyte, who claimed the gold medal at the Chartiers-Houston Invitational on Saturday. Whyte, a junior in Class AA, defeated Class AAA Mt. Lebanon senior Ben Lloyd, 1-0, in the championship bout at 285 pounds. Lloyd was a state qualifier last season. Whyte recorded the match’s only point with an escape in the third period. He is the first West Greene wrestler to ever win a gold medal at the C-H event. Whyte was a PIAA qualifier as a sophomore last year.
Jeers: Before the identity of Luigi Mangione was known to the wider world, the suspected killer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was being lauded in some quarters as a kind of modern-day Robin Hood, a guy who was mad as hell at the country’s health care system and was not going to take it anymore. But since he was apprehended Monday in a McDonald’s restaurant in Altoona, Mangione has been revealed to be not heroic but pathetic – a young man raised in wealth who had every opportunity in life and has apparently tossed it all away because of mental illness or seething anger he was unable to channel in more productive directions. Gov. Josh Shapiro put it perfectly in a press conference after Mangione was placed behind bars: “In America, we do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint. … I have no tolerance, nor should anyone, for one man using an illegal ghost gun to murder someone because he thinks his opinion matters most. In a civil society, we are all less safe when ideologues engage in vigilante justice.”
Cheers: The former Beth Israel Synagogue on North Avenue in Washington is about to be given new life, thanks to the veterans service organization AMVETS making the building its new home. A groundbreaking ceremony happened on Tuesday, and the formal opening is tentatively planned for mid-March. The organization, among other things, helps veterans with benefits and gives them a place to gather, and is uprooting itself from Washington, D.C., to “little Washington” after 80 years in the nation’s capital to be closer to the veterans it serves and to take advantage of the area’s lower property costs. Horace Johnson, the national commander of AMVETS, said at the groundbreaking, “The D.C. area was a great home for AMVETS for eight decades, but we know we can always do better. In moving to Washington County, we are moving to the county that has more veterans per capita than any other county in the continental United States. We are moving to our fellow veterans.”