If you’re not willing to be part of the solution, you ARE the problem

I’m all for airing complaints if somebody sees an injustice; that’s the beauty of letters to the editor and freedom of the press.
But if you don’t have the courage of your convictions to sign your name to a letter, don’t bother sending it because we won’t bother printing it.
On my desk right now are two anonymous rants (which is the nicest way I can describe them) that start with the Chelsea Fair, but digress into a manifesto of complaints about the city in general.
“Shame on the Chelsea Fair Board!” begins one, then takes them to task for raising the admission price this year by $2 (for the first time in 10 years), and goes on to blame them for the mud that ensued after three days of heavy rain.
The writer even manages to make “You could find a parking space” sound like a bad thing.
Tell you what: The folks on the Fair Board go out of their way to ensure that people have a good experience at the fair, but even they don’t have the juice to control the weather.
The other writer complained about (among many other things) having to pay an admission charge to get into the fairgrounds to set up an exhibit a few hours before the fair officially opened.
“These volunteers should be armed with shotguns and if anyone dared to touch those gates without paying, shoot them on sight!” the letter stated.
Now that’s the kind of thing I would have wanted to look into as a reporter, but the letter was signed “Ashamed to Now Live in Traffic City USA, alias Chelsea, Mich.”
Hmm. Not much help there.
The first letter was e-mailed from a link on the newspaper's Web site, chelseastandard.com. The fields for name, e-mail, phone, address and locality all were left blank, so there’s no way to contact the writer.
The second was mailed, with no return address or other contact information on the envelope.
Despite the rambling inventory of how much better it was to live in Chelsea "50 years ago and up," perhaps my favorite aspect of the second letter was its admonition that we print it, which is below, verbatim:
“Pleasse print this. It needs to be said. Thank you. We will watch for our letter.”
You go right on watching for it, sweetheart, because this is as close as you’re going to get to seeing it in print.
I’m not doing this to be mean-spirited, and I’m certainly not trying to make fun of anybody.
But the newspaper can’t bring to light things that need to be changed unless somebody, somewhere, goes on the record and says, “There is a problem here, and it must stop!”