Page 5 - Phonebox Magazine October 2008

HAVE YOUR SAY
Letters Dear Ed
I would like to appeal to the thoughtless moped rider that insists on using Coneygere and Church Street, a highly built up and populated area of Olney, as a cut through at 4.45am five days a week.
I sympathise with him for having to go to work at that hour of the day but anyone with any thought for others would use the main road where the majority of properties are not used for residential purposes.
Whoever it is, please consider others and use the correct roads for your exit out of Olney.
A tired and irritable resident
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Dear Mr Waller
I am utterly outraged by your response to one of our young people. We ought to be congratulating her for stepping forward and expressing her views and giving us additional insight into the challenges we face. We should be encouraging her to become more involved in the community which, lets face it, she is the future of. I have read all the articles on this anti- social behaviour issue and I can see both sides as I am old enough to be concerned by our changing town yet young enough to remember what it was like growing up here. If you are to compare the articles you will notice that the young lady managed to get her point across without mocking or writing in a rude or derogatory way, she did not resort to using mass generalisations and she did not claim to know the answers. You could learn a lot from her approach.
It was unfair to ask her to do a questionnaire when you yourself aren’t doing anything other than moaning about the issue and demanding others respect you. Respect does have to be earned, but not just by the youth in this town by everyone, respect is no one’s birth right. I have seen just as much anti-social behaviour from the adults in this town as from the youth, so are some forms of anti-social behaviour more accepted than others?
I am disgusted at some of Olney’s attitude toward their youth, what have we done to make them feel valued members of the community? How have we tried to involve them in the decision- making process for this town, have we invested in their futures? Or have we belittled and demonised our youth, remaining fearful and ignorant to why a group of friends would choose to hang around on a park bench or well lit area. We put in drinking control zones and yet do not tackle the underlying cause of this behaviour.
Olney is creating a self fulfilling prophecy, labelling our youth as ‘bad’, wishing them to ‘be seen and not heard’, until they believe it and then act it. Olney is a beautiful place but it is isolated, it’s rural and that’s part of its charm but this does not mean we shouldn’t be providing for our youth and encouraging them to take ownership of their surroundings so that they can safeguard Olney’s future. The world is a very different place from the one you grew up in Mr Waller and unless we work together as a whole community Olney will get left behind.
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See Victoria’s reply to Mr Waller on page 44
Write to: The Editor, Phonebox Magazine, Unit 2 Stanley Court, Olney, Bucks MK46 5NH Email: yvonne@olney.co.uk Tel: 01234 713298
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Phonebox Magazine 5