Dear Editor,
As a 51-year resident of Plain City I feel compelled to respond to the recent Marysville Journal-Tribune article, “Dead baby girl found in PC trash.”
In the article Plain City Police Chief McKee is quoted, “This kind of stuff doesn’t usually happen in Plain City.”
I know it’s hard for readers to believe that some positive message could possibly be found in this tragedy but maybe there is.
For generations Plain City residents have been insulated from the societal ills of the urban sprawled city of Columbus. Beautiful, rich, fertile, irreplaceable farmland has protected us from such tragedies that the Journal-Tribune reported. I work at the University Medical Center and see every day the societal ills associated with living in urban sprawl. In Columbus babies are abandoned, often going unreported.
Victims of shootings, stabbings, muggings and assault associated with home invasions and car jackings I see all too often. That being said, maybe baby Madison’s story can serve as proverbial light in the church tower for Plain City residents. As the onslaught and destruction, by arguable developers, begins on the farms surrounding Plain City, like Paul Revere’s ride, Plain City residents should take heed the message that Madison Doe’s story is shouting out to us.
As the metastasis of the urban sprawl cancer begins to infect southern Union and northern Madison counties this societal disease is becoming symptomatic for Plain City. With a projected population increase in Plain City to over 21,000 residents, over the next 20 years, the realization of this prophetic diagnosis is a mathematical assurance.
Frustratingly, Plain City residents will feel the pain of the urban sprawl cancer that has already infected such communities as Dublin, Hilliard, Johnstown and the whole of southern Delaware county.
In the search for that positive message, if Plain City residents were to recognize the Light in the Church Tower that baby Madison’s story has left behind and demand a farm land usage only plan, counter to the one that’s always argued by developers’ as their right to engage in the oxymoron practice of destructive development, maybe we can thwart the invasion of the urban sprawl cancer and the tragic, painful, symptoms that we in Plain City have, predictably, already felt.
S.A. Carpenter
Plain City