Show up for youth
On a recent weekend in Summerville, two gatherings told a story about our community’s priorities. On Sept. 13, the Speak Up For ALL Of Them rally, which my family organized to combat youth suicide, drew roughly 200 people. This was in response to Dorchester School District Two remaining silent to our public request to hold a vigil for youth suicide, which has claimed more lives than political violence in recent years.
The next day in Hutchinson Square, a vigil for an assassinated national political commentator drew an estimated 1,000. Both events were born from tragedy. Why is there such a staggering disparity?
It suggests a troubling hierarchy of grief. It seems that it is far easier to signal virtue by mourning a distant, politicized tragedy — an act carrying little personal risk — than it is to show up and challenge a powerful local institution like our school district about the children dying in our own communities.
Perhaps we avoid the local crisis because we are statistically far more likely to lose a child to suicide or violence than to be anywhere near a political assassination, and that reality is too close for comfort.
If we, as a community, can show up in force for national politics, we must ask ourselves why we cannot summon the same energy for the children living and dying here at home. The challenge moving forward is to cultivate a sense of responsibility that is consistent, courageous and, most importantly, local. Our children deserve to be at least as important as our politics.
JASON BROCKERT
Summerville
Free speech threatened
In response to The Post and Courier’s Thursday editorial regarding the firing of Clemson University employees for remarks made regarding Charlie Kirk’s death, I must say that I am horrified by the editorial staff’s stance.
These firings are more than a typical decision from an employer. The action was clearly forced on the university by state government officials’ threats to cut funding if the employees were not fired. This is not OK.
Nor is it OK, on a closely related note, for the Federal Communications Commission to threaten the free speech of various TV personalities, and for the owners of those media companies to bow to the government’s demands because they have a merger in the making.
We are beginning to see trends similar to those of an authoritarian government, and I only hope that we can overcome it. All the safeguards that I was taught were in place to protect our country from this type of takeover have failed miserably at every possible juncture, and we are now left to watch the situation worsen. It breaks my heart.
PAMELA JOLLEY
Irmo
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