Editorial: Kindness matters

#MiddleburyCT #Kindness

We wish a very Happy New Year to all our readers and all our advertisers, both of which keep this woman-owned independent newspaper afloat. We deeply appreciate your support, and we don’t want to push our luck, but there is one thing we would ask of everyone this new year: to be kinder to ourselves (as Pat Iannuzzi writes this month) and to be kinder to each other.

We personally are resolving to do this and hope this is one New Year’s resolution that will stick. We’ve been through some really rough times this past year here in Middlebury. When emotions are running high, it can be a challenge not to launch a personal attack on those who hold different views than we do. Add in social media, which somehow seems to lead really nice people to say really nasty things we would never expect from them, and the relationships among our community members can really suffer. Relationships have suffered here in Middlebury. Some decades-long relationships have fractured.

When someone voices a different view, we remind ourselves of the lesson we learned in political science 101: Free speech means you have the right to speak (with some limitations), but it also means the other person has the right to speak, even if you don’t like what they are saying. We are so lucky to live in a country where free speech is valued! Let’s try to be kind to people who express views different from ours.

Another personal reminder that can be helpful is to attack the issue, not the person. If a person uses their right of free speech to support an issue we do not, let’s refrain from verbally attacking their person. Instead, let’s focus on the issue and be kind to the person.

In our 20 years of publication, we have seen residents get upset about issues and express their concerns, but we’ve never before seen the nastiness we have witnessed this past year. Dear readers, each of us is better than that. We live here because we love this town, but the community within the town is what truly matters.

Let’s be kinder to each other this year, apologize to those we may have mistreated, forgive those who may have mistreated us, and reach out to those with differing views to see if we can find some common ground. Let’s rebuild our sense of community. We don’t think anyone is going to step in and do this for us, so we need to do it for ourselves. Let’s work together to end 2024 as a more united community.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this editorial by sending an email to beeintelligencer@gmail.com.