WHAT HAPPENED TO BEING CLASSY?

There’s a home located on Pleasant Street in downtown Lake Geneva.  It’s currently a rental and, with property values rising, or rather skyrocketing, has gone up in value from $125,00 that it sold for in 2015, to $343,000 today.  The current dwellers are renting the place, apparently, if the Internet is to be believed.  That house used to have an American flag flying from a buttress holding up the porch, viewable in the Google maps section.

Well, something happened.  The current occupants of the residence have decided to fly a “F… Biden” flag and this flag waves there day and night.  The U.S. Supreme Court has determined that flying such a flag from private property is protected by the 1^st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  But what about the neighborhood?  What about the issues in life that deal with more than rights?  What about property values nearby because of mindsets that have to lean toward ‘who wants to live next to that?’ kind of thinking? The issue of politics isn’t the issue here at all.  Whether a reader is a supporter of Trump or Biden should not really matter.  What about the kids in the neighborhood?  How are they influenced by not only the flying of that flag but by its permissiveness?  What does that flapping piece of penetrating garbage say to people driving by on that unlikely named street?  What does it say to the community and all of those people who have so much more class than these residents of 1124 Pleasant Street?  Much of today’s world is not about class, however.

The Geneva Shore Report did a short video illuminating what was going on at 1124 Pleasant Street.  The right-wing threateners and supporters of such filth came out of the woodwork to voice support for Donald Trump, hatred toward Joe Biden, and also hatred not only for the Geneva Shore Report but for the individuals on camera doing the report.  A report they were ordered to make.  Some of those same people cheered away when the GSR ran a story about some guy coming up out of Florida to sell right-wing (mostly pro-Trump) memorabilia and signs in Hebron.  The guy admitted that his stuff sold much better in such a closed small rural area than back at home.  The right-wing cheered the story as being fair.  That guy wasn’t selling any stuff that had foul language in or on it.

The GSR covered the story simply as a story of something strangely unusual going on in a small nearby town.  The GSR did not cover, nor will it, the story about the people with a total lack of class, good taste or care for anybody else, running profanity up on a flagpole and waving it into the rest of the community’s faces.  As death threats rolled in and remembering what happened in Paris with that cartoon media operation (Charlie Hedbo), the GSR pulled the video after a few days to protect its employees, but there the flag stands today, at its unpleasant address on Pleasant Street.

The law can do nothing to stop people from doing such things, apparently no matter how much in bad taste they may be, but the media has an obligation to alert the community as to what is going on and what’s being done in their name and in their own back yards.  Whether the community chooses to take action or not becomes a matter of the social mores and customs that might be applied to deal with situations like this.  Does Lake Geneva want to become described by such actions by a few seemingly mentally damaged individuals, or does it want to act to turn its back on such individuals until they go somewhere else or possibly decide that it’s not worth being hated by so many to make awful statements?  It must be wondered by one and all that the property owners think of their renters doing such things because this kind of behavior will ultimately hurt the owner’s value as well as their reputation.  Neither the owner’s names nor those of the occupants will be published in this paper, in order to give them the kind of protection that some of their supporters did not provide the employees of the GSR.