Sartre was wrong.
"Hell is other people," wrote the diminutive French philosopher, author of The Age of Reason and one of the heavies of 20th-century existentialism. It's a famous quote, commonly dropped by angst-riddled 20-year-olds who make a habit of intentionally waking up on the wrong side of the bed.
Granted, as a broad and inclusive category, "other people" are responsible for such irritating behaviors as tailgating and talking too loud, not to mention a long list of more substantial sins.
Yet, without other people, where would we be? No man, or woman, is an island, and it is just such other people who point out a sunset or pick us up when we fall.
Case in point: last week's edition of the News carried a front page story about a Magnolia resident who, as a teenager, survived a hit-and-run accident that left him in a wheelchair. A few years back he began snapping portraits of flowers, after realizing he liked the way they showed up, all bright and colorful, in a picture he'd taken of his dog.
It was other people - namely, a group of folks at Fisherman's Terminal - who saw this gentleman taking photos and decided to pitch in and buy him a lightweight digital camera, which was then mounted on a tripod attached to his motorized chair.
And it was other people - in fact, one other person, a lone Magnolia woman - who brought the photographer to the attention of this newspaper, along with the fact that he had landed a show at Tully's Coffee in the Village.
Sometimes the best of human hope resides in the generosity and selflessness of other people, without whom yet more other people might not grab the attention of further other people.
As a community newspaper, the Magnolia News relies largely on the efforts of strangers - those other people who call up or email in with, say, the score of last weekend's softball game, or information about a neighbor who happens to be driving across the country in a Model-T Ford.
That's something we can do that might not always happen in bigger, daily papers: peel back the anonymity to reveal the face and the character of the individual souls who comprise the community.
And that's something you can do, as someone invested in the community as well as, we hope, the paper that covers it. Let us know about those other people.[[In-content Ad]]
