My wife and I are living for a time in an Appalachian corner of Pickens County, Ga., watching sunsets over a 2,800-foot-high lake. They talk about “two Georgias.” This is the “other” one — rural, heavily for Trump in the last election, relying too much on state and federal dollars but with that old Scots-Irish individualist pride and clan loyalty. Pickens is one of 94 of Georgia’s 159 counties with more deaths than births each year, according to the the blog by my friend Charlie Hayslett, “Trouble in God’s Country.”https://troubleingodscountry.com/

The turnout in the last election was huge — very democratic, small “d.” As The Pickens County Progress reported it: “Pickens County voters turned out in big numbers in the November 5 election, with 80 percent of registered voters casting ballots. In the presidential race, Donald Trump (R) took 82.7 percent, or 17,263, of the Pickens vote, beating Kamala Harris (D) who took 16.76 percent, or 3,499, votes.”

You may wonder why this locally-run weekly newspaper is called the “Progress.” It has something to do with being started in 1888, honoring the agrarian Southern rebellion against the Gilded Age Republican Party, a “Progressive” movement that was not too happy with the Democratic machine either. The need for real progress here is still obvious. I look for it in the newspaper, and when I saw it recently, I wrote this letter to the editor, which ran a few weeks ago.

Editor:

Reading the news takes effort, but it’s worth it when you find nuggets of good news. I don’t mean “soft news,” like gardening tips or high school sports, as nice as those are in The Pickens County Progress. I mean gold nuggets like Sheriff Donnie Craig telling the Chamber of Commerce’s monthly breakfast that crime in Pickens County has been falling for the past five years. Burglary, thefts and assaults are all much lower in the county today than they were in 2019.

But I always want to know the “why” behind the statistics – not just good news but good journalism. (I was a journalist, then a journalism professor.) One reason for the drop in crime, Sheriff Craig said, is that deputies for the past year have responded to domestic calls accompanied by a mental health provider. He called this having a “co-response” team. Such teams had responded to 169 calls since Craig, elected sheriff for the fourth time in November, adopted this change last year, he said.

Anyone involved in crime fighting (or reporting on it) knows that a lot of the job comes from problems in homes troubled by domestic violence, addictions and untreated mental conditions. A weapon in the home can make it worse, but having a mental health worker to de-escalate the problem is an idea that doesn’t have to wait on our endless gun-control debate.

Craig, a Republican, admitted he was skeptical at first of having “counselors” at crime scenes. But seeing how it worked in practice, he called it “one of the best things” he has been part of. The counselors are empowered to follow up after the initial call, helping provide mental health services as needed.

As I read the news these days, local and national, I see how President Trump has succeeded in targeting real problems (crime, immigration, inflation, government inefficiency, you name it) that had evaded solutions – but he comes blustering in with exactly the wrong solutions. Good TV, as he calls it, but not real solutions. Sheriff Craig shows how real solutions take time, an open mind, an honest set of statistics, and a willingness to try something that comes from a different perspective.

Doug Cumming