What else is possible?

Now that it’s over, it appears the Shawville Fair was a huge success. After missing one year and running a scaled down version the next, it’s fair to say that the Fair came back with a roar given how many people came out for it. Now’s the time to appreciate all the work the community put in making sure the Fair happened.
For the average person attending, it’s easy to miss that these things don’t just happen spontaneously.
The Shawville Fair is an incredible feat of organization. It may seem like chaos, but the degree to which that chaos is managed is impressive.
Everything from running three days of concerts, managing the beer tent, handling a huge volume of animals that participate in all the various shows, running a large carnival, managing all the food providers, security, a first aid station, waste collection and more; all the variables that need to be accounted for is mind boggling.
Just managing the huge amount of people that come through the gates is an impressive accomplishment.
The fair board, the staff and all the volunteers that made the fair happen deserve to be recognized for how much effort they put in for making it happen. Without their hard work and dedication, an event on that scale would have been impossible.
In all, it really makes you think about what is possible when people work together. If a small group of people from an already small community can pull something together as huge as the Shawville Fair, what else are we capable of?
The Pontiac, Quebec, Canada and the world have a lot of problems that rightly leave individuals feeling powerless. But if the Shawville Fair shows anything, it is that people can perform huge things when they work together with a higher goal in mind.
With the Fair it was all about bringing the community together for a good time.
Imagine what we could do if that same collective pursuit was directed towards alleviating the economic issues, or the healthcare crisis, or climate change, or just lifting people out of states of despair people are too often finding themselves in these days.
All of these issues have solutions, and if people work together towards solving them, starting on the level of the community, those solutions can be attained.
To put it another way, the Shawville Fair provides a model of what people can do through a collective effort. Planning, a community ethic, the utilization of people’s diverse talents and resources and individuals selflessly volunteering their time for a greater goal show huge things are possible.
So beyond thanking the fair board and everyone else who made the Shawville Fair possible for putting on a great fair, we should also thank them for giving us an idea of what is possible when people come together.

Brett Thoms