‘All of us had the opportunity'

To the editor: Michael McDermott’s desire to exit the downtown Warwick business community gracefully may preclude him from saying it plainly and directly, and his restraint is admirable, but the plain fact remains that it is not Border’s or Amazon.com that is responsible for the shuttering of The Bookstore. It is the community of Warwick. Our marketplace is more broadly reflective of our local and national cultures than we are generally willing to admit, and it is an inescapable fact that our economic as well as our intellectual cultures are what we make of them, and the Warwick community’s failure to support The Bookstore is plainly the result of our unwillingness - not inability - to find it in our character to support an important local resource. It is a simple matter of choice where we make our purchases, and it is disingenuous—even dishonest—to ignore the realities of those choices, and their consequences. As a community, and as individuals, we get what we deserve based on the choices that we make, and the consequences of losing a valuable local resource will be felt broadly across our community, and are a great loss to the heart, soul and character of that community. It is disturbing that as Warwick continues to grow and thrive in unprecedented ways, that the fortunes of The Bookstore floundered when in fact they should have—based on our resources and booming population— been thriving. Local institutions and individuals - all of us - had the opportunity to change the fortunes of this downtown resource, and we chose not to. Henry Newhard responded correctly to the news of The Bookstore’s closing appropriately by crying; the rest of us should be chastened and ashamed. Jacob Gendelman Warwick