This year, the firefighters of Northeast Manitoulin and the Islands Fire Department have responded to no fewer than nine structural fires.
That’s an enormous number for a fire department responsible for a territory that includes two towns, one First Nation and spread-out rural territory for which the Northeast Town Fire Department and its well-trained staff are responsible for providing fire defense services.
Most recently, just in the town of Little Current there has been the loss of the large seven-bay municipal equipment garage, two houses also lost to fire, a shed burnt, another where a fire had started (but where the property owner was able to contain it) and, last Thursday, the spectacular conflagration that demolished the landmark old curling club building on Campbell Street, a building that had in recent years been used for storage by a private individual.
(That most recent fire has also rendered its neighbouring structure, the former Community of Christ Church that had been recently repurposed as a privately-operated gymnasium and two apartments, as likely beyond repair.)
People in the community have suspected that an arsonist has been responsible for at least some of the fires and the Ontario Provincial Police last week confirmed that suspicion as a reality.
The more fires, the greater the concern, even fear, and when the community has confirmation that one or perhaps even more arsonists are among them, then their justifiable anxiety has focus and, quite often, that focus is leveled at a particular person or, in the recent situation, at a number of individuals where the possibility of involvement in the crime of one or another of them becomes a common and often fairly public topic of conversation as claims for culpability are assigned, compared and contrasted.
And then the rumours begin, and spread, until half the population is entirely convinced that “this person (or that one) done it.”
The problem is that, almost always, several of the assumptions are incorrect but in the meantime several individuals (and by implication their families) have been discussed, tried and convicted by the forces of gossip.
We gossip. We shouldn’t, of course, and those rare individuals who absolutely will not participate in (usually) idle speculation about others’ lives stand out as such absolute models of high mindedness that when we are in their presence and they politely decline to be part of the guessing game about what is motivating others of their acquaintance, the rest of us tend to feel more than a little sheepish that we had been only too prepared to offer our opinions.
Usually, the matters that inform gossip are relatively benign.
But in the case of the arson that became an issue of increasing concern to the people of Little Current, the matter is a serious one to the entire community and so the chatter about the absolute guilt of particular parties is all the more harmful in the long run, and personally hurtful as well to the people and their families no matter who is eventually caught and convicted of the crime. That has certainly been the situation during the past week in Little Current.
The more serious the issue, then, the more damaging is the gossip to those people inaccurately identified by the community as the presumed perpetrators and from their perspective it must certainly change their future view of and relationship to the community.
The attitude of those individuals who simply do not participate in gossip, at any level, can and should teach us a great deal for they will be the unique handful of people who have not bought into the assumption that the deed was most certainly done by one or another particular individual. They were prepared to wait for the facts and a police statement.
The rest of us can, and should, feel more than a little shamefaced and we should keep this feeling in our memory, ready to be called upon, the next time we are invited to discuss someone’s family affairs, honesty or any other topic on which our opinion is only informed, at best, by guesswork.
