(names changed and redacted)
It is 10:53am Friday morning and the team responsible for publishing the _______ Gazette and ______ Tribune are busy tracking down witnesses to a recent (Aug. XX) local BLM protest and getting the details from police about a robbery just interrupted at the hardware store across the street. This small-town paper moving at a big-city pace. Editor and contributor L. V___, tells me that, often, people are very willing to share rumors and opinions until it is time to go on record. For example, a retiree happening by the office for his free copy of the Gazette, in full disregard of any concerns of spreading or contracting COVID-19, handed over a business card for a man he claimed could confirm, but would not when later called to comment, whether at least one of the protestors present the previous weekend had been bused in, months earlier and rent paid until the marchers finally congregated. The man also alleged something about a sawed-off shotgun being handy the day of the protest–happily, the papers reported no arrests or injuries from that day.
Clearly people like to stop by the friendly crew’s office to make their opinions known; another staffer surmising that this person was one of those in town of the opinion that no coverage, no matter how unbiased, of the BLM movement would have been better than any. Later that day, I overheard an elderly woman also complaining that the protestors had been rude, which is tame criticism next to the federal government’s reaction to the movement in Oregon. It is difficult to get a sense of where the majority of Beach Valley residents themselves stand on recent protests, outside of civil disobedience being rude, which it is supposed to be by definition.
The city of Beach Valley is not totally free from conflict or devoid of its incidents of racism, as one local (D. T___) expressed her disappointment (on Facebook, Aug. XX) over the BLM protest being supposedly inspired by harassment of a black business owner on Main Street; rumor or not, the protest seems to have highlighted some major differences of opinion. One would assume, most agree that blatant racial slurs and xenophobia would hopefully be a thing of Beach Valley’s past; a past marred by the same displacement of indigenous people that much of this nation must contend with. The majority of the community in the end all presumably want the same things however and that is teamwork across the aisles and policies that benefit the community as a whole and are fair to all sides, all creeds, all shapes, sizes, and colors.
Despite known incidents of hate speech, as reported for example by International Business Times of __________ (Sept. XX), like ex-sergeant V____ using racial slurs to describe protestors in Beach Valley, it is hard to imagine the majority of Beach Valley residents are pro-racism or racist but just against tackling such subject matter because they never have had to and many are not used to being on the defensive. Some residents seem to view this as a battle between supporters of the two major presidential candidates running in this year’s election and their specific policies, or as a debate between racist police and egalitarian anarchists, but perhaps the conflict is even more simply about trying to face the ugly specter of racism in a town that rarely has openly discussed it. Over the din of shouts of, “black lives matter,” followed by, “all lives matter,” it is hard to imagine the individuals engaged in this back-and-forth truly differ that much and are not in fact arguing the same point, that the law should be applied in an unbiased way no matter the major demographic of any city big or small in the U.S.
Alex Ash Creative 