I got so excited when I saw two or three comments on the Middletown Eye today that did not revolve around mud-slinging or playing "gotcha" between our mayoral candidates.
It started with a quote buried at the end of a diatribe against Ed. It seems that we have at least one or two readers/candidates who caught the reference to "The Christmas Story", a television special based on a peculiarly American short story by Jean Shepherd.
Gotta love that about Middletown.
I'm a crazy Jean Shepherd fan - something I inherited from my parents. My copies of "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories (and other disasters)" and "In God We Trust - All Others Pay Cash" are tattered after decades of re-reading. Even if you didn't grow up in working-class Michigan, there's something universal about the backwards way these families have of showing they love each other. Plus, they're really funny.
Read some Shepherd and it's pretty much guaranteed that you will laugh so hard that you cry. That kind of mirth has been in short supply for those of us who approve comments on the Eye lately.
Frankly, it's a lot more fun to read about other people's small town dysfunction than it is to watch your own community descend into a boorish slugfest just because there's an election.
The folks in Jean Shepherd's stories are just muddling through, getting upset over the littlest things and missing the great big thing that's right under their noses: the never-to-be-repeated chance to be right there, in that place, with people who mean the world to them. It's like they don't even see that all that shouting back and forth is really saying this: I care. This place and you people matter to me.
Maybe -- here at the Eye -- we made things worse this election season by printing the candidates' press releases and letting people comment. I wish we'd gotten a few more press releases on policies and less on the rotten no-good skull-duggery of the other candidate(s), but that's not how it went. Pretty much everyone came out with a few black eyes - and no one came out smelling like a rose. That's a shame. I'm tired of it. In the words of one of our commenters, I'd like to go to sleep and not wake up until Wednesday.
As for the title of this post, if you're wondering where your comment is from this evening, I deleted it. In fact, I deleted all twenty of them. Let's indulge in a little peace and quiet as we face the next 48 hours.
I think it's time to remember what we have in common. Let's stop shouting so loud the neighbors can hear us from next door, like the folks in "The Christmas Story". I know that all three mayoral candidates love this town - Middletown is a place of great potential, complex history and relationships and a killer spot for lemon ice.
Sure, there are things we need to fix here, but I think it's not quite as bad as we've made it look during this election. If the campaigns are reading this, feel free to send us anything positive about why we should vote for you. But please -- please -- don't send us anything else about how rotten you think the other side is. We've heard enough about that.
6 comments:
Print my comment - I double dog dare you!
Go, Jen! (And, yes, you are morally obliged to print this.)
I am ONLY going to vote for Ed.
I find it ironic that you allow John Milardo to call people "ignorant morons" in his article yet you are not printing "mud slinging" comments. Seems hypocritical and partisan to me...
Dear Anonymous:
What is it about "anonymous" that you don't understand?
Try signing your name before you put that mud in your slingshot. If it's not sprinkled with slander, we'll let you fling away. Hopefully too much of it won't blow back in your face.
Kind of disappointing that you left Mr. Drew with the last word. Hopefully readers took advantage of the validation contact information in both John's letter and Mr. Montalvo's letter.
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