Knockdown dragouts become too literal

This week’s consumer tip: Stop spending money on cable TV and streaming services if what you mainly want to watch are cage matches, so-called reality shows, and the type of shoving and screaming featured on all those nightly so-called news channel debates.

You can get a dose of free theater every bit as dramatic — and foolish — right here in Marion County. And you don’t even have to go to a promising entertainment venue like the wonderful Sunflower Theater.

You can see all this and more — including attempts to weaponize the law for political purposes — just down the street in the Peabody City Council chambers.

Once again Monday night, a council meeting turned into a verbal brawl, but the verbal brawl apparently got a bit physical on the sidewalk afterward, leading to police filing a complaint alleging battery and a self-styled public watchdog demanding that police be decertified.

If it all weren’t so sad, it might actually be entertaining.

The person accused of shoving the activist aside is actually the same person who tried during the council meeting itself to refocus attention on what Peabody really needs to do: Stop disagreeing and start addressing numerous challenges the city faces.

The past few years have been anything but pleasant for Peabody residents, particularly the vast majority of them who haven’t taken sides in debates that make Republicans and Democrats in Congress and the state legislature look like best buddies.

To be sure, grievous mistakes have been made — on both sides. But now is not the time to demand resignations, seek criminal charges, or shout like coyotes howling at the moon. Otherwise, Peabody will find itself doing the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The challenges that Peabody and most small towns face may seem titanic in nature, but no problem is so large that coordinated effort by well-meaning citizens can’t address it. It’s only when people refuse to come together that everything starts falling apart.

Instead of seeking gotcha moments against those with whom we might disagree, we need to better “get” them — to explore their positions and let them explore ours with a goal of compromise not confrontation.

Peabody is a resilient community. If it can do that, instead of becoming a footnote to all the divisiveness that’s gripped America it might actually shine a light for the rest of us to follow about how better to exist in a supposedly civilized world.

— ERIC MEYE