FALMOUTH – If anyone was else was running the new Facebook group, Cape Cod Proud, the feed would certainly declare: “We are proud of Ted Murphy, a Falmouth author and restaurant owner, for being proud of Cape Cod and thinking you should be too.”
Author and restaurant owner, Ted Murphy – Cape Cod proud
But it’s Murphy who runs the new Facebook page. He’s busy celebrating others. All of his posts begin with words to this effect, “We are proud of…,” and then he names names. At the top, the Cape Cod Proud page defines itself with this sentence: “This page celebrates Cape Cod!”
The idea for a Cape Cod Proud Facebook page arose this week with Murphy’s reaction to seeing a Boycott Casino FX page appear in his Facebook feed. When he first saw the chain of comments that started the Boycott Casino FX page, he thought the comments disparaging musicians, local businesses, the community, and the community college, were “in very poor taste, to put it mildly,” he said. (See also, Tangled Up In Boo, An Essay about social media)
“I was like, oh my God, how could anyone say that,” recalled Murphy, who is perhaps the best known of Falmouth’s royal family of authors, including his father, James F. Murphy, and his brother and co-author of the book, “Running Waves,” Seton Murphy. Ted is the author of the the Belltown Mystery Series for young adults, and “Running Waves” – a book set in a town like Falmouth.
He is also the owner of Silver Shores Shanty in Falmouth Heights, named after a fictional restaurant in “Running Waves.” So, as a business owner and a creative person, he followed the growing dispute closely.
Murphy was taken aback by the original Casino FX comments. He was especially offended by comments made disparaging Cape Cod Community College. “I went to Cape Cod Community College before I went to Boston College,” he said. “I take a lot of pride in 4Cs.”
Ted Murphy is Cape Cod Proud.
But he never clicked “like” on the Boycott Casino FX page. Instead, he checked the page without joining, and saw how many people had clicked “like” – now more than 2,000.
“I was brought up by two teachers,” said Murphy. “Whenever there was a negative, they’d always say, how can we find a positive in it?”
And so he announced, on the Boycott Casino FX page, a way to channel the anger being generated into something positive, a new page where everyone can declare and announce how proud they are of all things Cape Cod. Since then, the administrators of the Boycott Casino FX page, have announced their intentions to turn their page into a positive place as well. They plan to rebrand their page as a place for musicians to connect with more then 2,000 people.
Cape Cod Proud has more than 1,000 “likes” since Monday.
— Brian Tarcy
