Dear Editor:
Just hours after Hurricane Sandy devastated Hoboken, a relatively-unknown young woman named Carly Ringer began organizing a massive effort at Hoboken High School to assist and comfort those in need immediately. She worked tirelessly, day, night, weekends, imploring her friends on Facebook almost hourly to do the same or donate what they could.
Blankets, food, toiletries, boxes, clothes. You name it, Carly led the way…every day, for 16 hours a day for weeks that turned into months. She earned recognition that she did not seek nor ask for – from local media ranging both in print, on radio and television.
We talk about heroes all the time in the military. The volunteer efforts of Ms. Ringer – in helping bringing the community together for the greater good in a most difficult time – puts her in the same class of people.
On the other end of the food chain is an opinion-based, fact-impaired, community-based blog with one objective: Divide the community. The proprietor, who doesn’t deserve to be named, is as reckless as he is ruthless. In a very recent example, he reported that a restaurant was absolutely closing, when it actually wasn’t.
One victim of the site’s brand of character assassination is Ms. Ringer. In a recent post on the blog, it had the audacity to call her a “crony” who was “padding her pockets” at the expense of Sandy victims, after she got a part-time job with the city this month.
Oh really? Just ask the dozens of volunteers who Ringer organized every day if she was helping those in need for love of money. Ask the National Guard who marveled that one person could be so relentless in completing a mission. Ask those Ringer personally delivered much-needed items to while their power was out, their patience dry and their hope in humanity thin, if she “benefitted from Sandy’s destruction” as a professional hack like this blogger said she did in his own comments section after even his most loyal readers questioned his commentary. The blog concludes (in its “expert” analysis) with a prediction that Ringer will be on Zimmer’s campaign staff.
Please join me in rejecting the kind of hateful speech this publication deals out via his increasingly unpopular, credibility-challenged blog.
Instead, embrace heroes like Carly Ringer instead. She truly deserves our gratitude and respect in making Hoboken a better place in good times and in bad.
Joe Concha