Apology Has Been Made: Insulting Comments Have No Place in Our Community

We understand that one of our town’s most civic-minded residents, someone who truly enjoys being a part of the entire Town Council experience and has come up with some excellent suggestions in the public comment portion of the meeting, has apologized for his remark at a recent meeting.

The resident has addressed the situation head-on and we hope this incident won’t sway him from offering other opinions on issues affecting our residents.

We must say that we applauded how our police chief, Terence Delehanty, reacted to the comment. It was an example of a police chief offering his real feelings about what had just occurred and Delehanty’s instant eloquence was nice to see.

Council President Peter Gill also showed a lot of leadership by cutting the speaker short on that topic, but allowing the individual to continue for another 30 seconds on something else because of the five-minute limit for speakers.

It is one thing to express one’s viewpoint in a forceful manner, but another altogether to be insulting on a personal basis. Name-calling has no place in the civil discourse in our community, although lamentably it is the modus operandi on the national level these days.

As our late, long-time publisher, Andrew P. Quigley, was fond of saying, “We can disagree without being disagreeable.”