To the Editor:
Local institutions hold a special place in my heart. I love libraries where the staff remember your reading preferences, newspapers that run stories with the names of people you know, and businesses that help raise money for youth activities.
It is only at the local level where the individual and the institution can have these powerful, mutually affecting interactions, but we increasingly take these blessings for granted and neglect the basic acts of care to sustain them.
If you want to see examples of this phenomenon, read the community submissions to this newspaper.
There are many spouters and letter-writers who use this public forum to discuss city council meetings and little league games with thoughtfulness and humor, but there are many more who simply repeat what they heard on Fox News or MSNBC. They are addicted to politics and other matters that are either irrelevant to Cape May County or beyond our control.
This is a problem because negligence is an inevitable consequence of addiction. By obsessing over the news of the day, we risk ignoring the issues that threaten to erode our community.
In the May 19 edition of this paper, Cape Issues published a piece titled “State Needs to Address Community Concerns on Wind Farm.” It’s an interesting take on a trendy topic, but it’s also pointless. Unfortunately, Cape May County has little influence on the decisions made in Trenton. Pretending otherwise is a waste of energy and column inches.
Rather than tilting at wind farms, we can better serve our community by engaging our neighbors and our local officials to solve the problems we have here at home.
The Herald recently did just that with a brilliant front-page article titled “What Does Cape May County Need? — Vision.” In contrast to Cape Issues, the Herald focuses on local problems and local solutions. I won’t say anything more, because you should read the piece in full, but it embodies the robust dialogue that our community both needs and deserves.
In 1949, the French philosopher Simone Weil wrote, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” She was writing from her experience in post-war France, where many communities had been disrupted or completely dissolved during the German occupation. The people had been uprooted, and the path to reestablish those lost communal ties was not easy.
Fortunately, that is not the case in Cape May County.
That is why I am grateful to the Herald for providing this platform. That is why I am also grateful for the libraries, the schools, and the churches. These institutions are like a gardener’s tools, and they are used to cultivate the roots of a community. But first, we must put our hands in the soil.
To my fellow spouters and letter-writers: let us take the opportunity of this public forum and our other associations to engage one another in a constructive way. We can’t do anything about the rage-filled and substance-free news cycles, but we can do something about how we live in Cape May County. We owe it to ourselves and our community.
