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John Hartsock stepped out of the Altoona Mirror's sports pages in the May 27-28 edition to deliver an important message, that awareness and education effectively combat the stigma attached to mental illnesses.
In the Mirror's news pages, readers have seen what clinical depression looks like and how it can be treated effectively.
Look no further than the continuing recovery of Pennsylvania's junior U.S. senator, John Fetterman, who was hospitalized for depression this spring and has returned to his Senate duties.
A stigma, it should be noted, is in the mind of the beholder, not in the person experiencing the illness.
Hartsock identified various pejorative expressions used to describe persons with mental illness, and they share a common characteristic.
They are dehumanizing; they reduce real people to nasty labels.
Which brings us to another Mirror story from last month, of the local restaurant worker who used a hateful racial slur to describe a blackened chicken order.
Yes, the disgraced and disgraceful N-word.
Of all the words in the English language, few are as dehumanizing as that one, which reduces an entire race of American citizens to six letters.
Perhaps the former restaurant employee learned the lesson; perhaps not.
But the real issue is that the restaurant worker might not have been aware of the tragic history of that word, of how human beings were regarded as property for centuries and, even after emancipation, were soon denied their rights as American citizens by Jim Crow laws in the South.
And it is not only African Americans or those with mental illnesses who are targeted with dehumanizing labels.
Haters will hate, and the targets of their dehumanizing slurs are Blacks, Asians, Jews, Hispanics, Muslims, gays, and now transgender persons, to name a few.
Collectively, they are the Other, especially in relatively homogenous regions like Central Pennsylvania.
It may well be that, at base, dislike or distrust of the Other is baked into the human condition.
The basic unit of society beyond the individual is the family, and beyond the family is the tribe, whose central purpose is to protect its members from other tribes.
Our religious faiths teach us to spurn hate, but that teaching may well come from a deep understanding of the human condition.
So, how do we combat hate in coming generations?
First, the family, but that messaging will be inconsistent. What can be consistent, however, is our educational system, both public and private.
At appropriate times and at appropriate ages, our educators can teach the full breadth of American history, warts and all. And our educators can ask the questions that lead rising generations toward tolerance.
To be sure, some people do not want these lessons to be taught.
They call it "indoctrination," when in fact it is U.S. history.
But we must remember the words of the philosopher George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
For the sake of our children, our grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, we must remember our past and strive for tolerance of those who, past and present, have been the subject of irrational and unwarranted hate.
Duncansville resident Don Clippinger has been a journalist for 58 years.