A Sad Day for a Proud Town

It is with the deepest regret and heartbreak that we report today on the first murder seen in Willow Cove in over 30 years. Beyond the unquantifiable loss of a town icon and friend to all, or so we thought, this town that we hold so dear lost something even more last night. Willow Cove’s special stature as a haven, a safe harbor, has been cruelly and viciously torn from all of us.

Where once we all went about our daily lives with the certitude that Willow Cove was a special place, a place where the violence and degradation of the “larger” world touched us no more substantially than as signals interpreted by our television sets and radios, we must now face the difficult fact that we are all of us a part of that ugly world.

Thirty-three years ago, it was different. The violence then, while equally deplorable, was at least comprehensible. Crimes of passion between star-crossed lovers are as old as civilization itself. That, at least, an observer could wrap his mind around. He may and should abhor it; he may not and should not condone it; but he can and could at least comprehend it.

The violence done last night in our beautiful, beloved, and now irreparably stained town, however, is another story entirely. This seemingly random act of extreme violence is a product of the modern world and serves as proof that we can no longer delude ourselves into thinking we are insulated. We are not. That world is here. And now we must reckon with it.