COMMUNITY HEALING - Letter To The Editor

Community Healing

Type: Letter to the Editor
Words: 1,013

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Date: Sometime in the not too distant future.

The Journal should be ashamed of itself! The continuous milking of AP, Reuters and UPI for coverage of a local tragedy to pump circulation is inscrutable. Leave the global perspective to the Post, the Globe, the Star. Concede the macabre to the Enquirer. Somewhere along the way, we have lost where to turn for a balanced overview of what is happening in the community. More recently, where to turn to for ways to get on with our lives.

How do we convince you that the community is also a victim? Your coverage has been no different from incessantly reminding a traumatized rape victim of the details. With this in our face, how can we ever expect to heal?

The event was an anomaly. Please treat it as such. Let it dissolve into a neutral memory in the past.

It is disheartening to witness our newspaper circling with the other vultures? Exactly when did this disconnect from the community occur? Was it when the paper was sold? Or, was it when the editorial and printing departments moved to Toronto - or is it Bhopal now? When the only remaining employee living in town is resident box-filler and aspiring reporter, Sam McLean, how do you seriously expect to be treated as the voice of the community?

There was a time the newspaper played a stewardship role. In the 60’s, there was the movement to protect the groundwater from contamination. In the 70’s, was the fight against annexation into Kingsville. The 80’s was the re-education of farmers towards alternative crops (from corn and peas to ginger and grape vines) and to think globally.

That role has decayed into supplanting the values and methods of the big city under the auspices of acting in the community’s best interest. The Journal is now as much of an outsider as the insurgence of trauma counselors who rushed in immediately following the police. When did the southern most tip of the province become a suburb of Toronto? Acting under the facade of protecting our mental health, they applied ‘one size fits all’ scripted formulas. “If you don't talk about it”, they said. “You will get sick from it.”

Well ... FYI! ... and for everyone else from out of town acting in our best interests, please rest assured that we’ve been talking about it. In fact, it’s been the only topic of conversation, other than the tomato blight.

A cross section of ‘the two cents worth’ at Zehrs, Giant Tiger and Timmy’s tends to cluster into two distinct, yet equally supported ways of thinking. The first is that Chelsea will never be able to heal and get on with things as long as the likes of the newspaper and psychiatry industry continue to profit from our misfortune. (Aside: Can’t wait to see the bill. Trauma counseling for the entire town. Better yet, the mayor’s explanation of mass rewind hypnotherapy! Ha!) The second, slightly less pragmatic and intolerant, can best be summarized by the phrase ‘Hey you freaks get off the lawn!’

What people from Toronto fail to understand is that we spend most of the morning commute time in the Tim Horton’s drive thru. And we know most of the people in the line. Chelsea is neither a burg, borough or suburb of their fair city. Nor do we ever wish to be. We are a community unto ourselves. The operative word being community. Not to be confused with bedroom community. It is where we reside, work and most importantly, live. This may sound simplistic, but stop for a moment. What would you answer if asked ‘Where are you from?’ Which of the three, reside, work or live does it include?

Our community differs from the big city because we are not just a collection of strangers acting individually. So the one size formulas for editorial content and trauma counseling do not work.

Having a strong sense of community, by no means make us immune to crime. When it does happens, everyone either knows the victim or something about them or their family. The whole town is victimized in various degrees as it ripples throughout the neighborhoods. The sense of belonging allows us to withstand a certain threshold of crime. The support from neighbors helps us to move on and, God forbid, without third party counseling.

However, when the heinous occurs, the community is susceptible to trauma like anywhere else. To that I say people, as species go, are pretty resilient. Just given time, most seem to sort through things in their own way. Some are even galvanized and inspired by it. They re-engage in the community with a new vigor. Personally, I choose to write.

The Journal’s front page exposure is interfering with this. One editorial justified it with the rational that the community needs to hear all the facts and that a quick arrest needs to be made in order to attain closure.

In reality, what the community needs is healing and to move on. Closure is not being denied. Forgiveness is always available through meditation and prayer.

So please return to covering the positive events occurring in Chelsea. There’s so much going unreported. There’s the new season starting at the little theatre, the out-reach program for the homeless, the shelter for single mothers, the need for volunteers at the food bank, the mayor’s initiative to encourage tourism or the downtown revitalization program.

Having said all that, if ‘what sells newspapers’ remains the rule of thumb at the end of the day, at least follow though on it. Do an old lady and a loyal reader for fifty-five years a favor. Please give Sam the authorization to keep the boxes full. My legs are too old to walk the extra block to buy the dang thing!

A proud citizen of Chelsea for eighty-five years.

p.s. You should consider moving here.