“Please cancel my subscription,” a reader wrote to us the other day. “We subscribed to your paper to get the local news from the Outer Cape, but lately it seems to be all politics, all the time. We subscribe to multiple newspapers and get more than our fill of political vitriol, anger, and downright hatred. There is no need to pay for yet another newspaper that bombards us with the same constant outrage instead of the news.”
I wrote back to this correspondent and asked what it was in the Independent that had caused such dismay but didn’t get a response, so I can only guess.
Was it our town meeting reporting that revealed opposing views of housing development? It included the comment by one select board member that, in Truro, the expression NIMBY should be written NIMSBY: “Not In My Second Back Yard.” Things can get heated on affordable housing.
It might have been our story about the house being built in Provincetown with a swimming pool and deck practically on top of the unprotected graves of a local Black family. What is happening there was described by more than one observer as “shameful” and “a desecration.”
Then there was last week’s article about the termination of AmeriCorps grants to local organizations like Helping Our Women, Lily House, and the Truro Community Kitchen by the “Dept. of Government Efficiency.”
I don’t think we publish anything that is vitriolic or hateful, but it’s true that the news, even here on the Outer Cape, can provoke outrage. And outrage is exhausting, so I sympathize with our unhappy subscription canceler.
But “all politics, all the time” is a bit of an exaggeration. Did you think Lola Schiffer-Kehou’s recent story on “Something Rotten” was a reference to politics? It was about a middle-school musical production.
Our staff and freelance contributors work hard to produce stories of all sorts, not just about government and politics but about our schools, the environment, cooking, gardening, crafts, fishing, sports, and people whose lives we all really should know about — including our neighbors (or former neighbors) who have died.
One effective antidote for outrage can be art, and we are certainly surrounded by it here. Just take a look at this week’s Arts & Minds section of the paper: Rob DuToit tells Abe Storer about being inspired by the 17th-century French painter Claude Lorrain; Lisa Fischer, who’s singing at Provincetown Town Hall this weekend, tells Eve Samaha about backing up the Marvelettes. Milisa Moses makes artful “analog recordings of magical things” like dahlias.
Pat Kearns writes about Thomas Allen Harris, who makes documentary films of Black families telling stories about their ancestors. He’s coming to Provincetown as part of this year’s Twenty Summers series. Harris’s work is acclaimed, and last year he won a $3.2-million grant from the National Science Foundation to support Scientists in the Family, a documentary highlighting Black participation in science education.
That grant was just canceled by the Trump administration. Even in the arts, sometimes outrage is required.
