FREE WHITEWATER began in 2007 with a confident message for all the residents of Whitewater, Wisconsin:
You have lived in Whitewater, Wisconsin for years, perhaps your entire life. Despite your affection for this beautiful city, life in our small municipality leaves you uneasy. You find yourself increasingly convinced that something is distorted, and wrong, in the politics and culture of our city. Rest assured: You are not alone…
In the time since, this website has atttracted an audience beyond Whitewater. New readers, from other cities in Wisconsin or faraway places in America, often write and ask what Whitewater’s like. Having stumbled upon FREE WHITEWATER one way or another, they’re curious about rural America, and about Whitewater, Wisconsin’s pecularities and eccentricities.
I now think about those readers when I write, and try, so best as I can, to describe Whitewater, Wisconsin to the rest of America.
Who am I? I’m a resident of Whitewater, and began this website with libertarian critique of my town’s politics and culture. There’s much to admire in the natural beauty of rural America. We have more than our share of problems, though, sometimes ignored, otherwise described by would-be sophisticates as challenges or opportunities. Whether ignored or artfully described, they’re still problems.
It’s a sad circumstance of our situation that the more we insist that we embody a local exceptionalism, the farther we fall from the true, genuine, and worthy principles of small-town America, and of all America, really. We are at our best when we stop boasting, insisting, and declaring, and instead live out the promise of America in a small, Midwestern town.
I write under a pen name. Embracing one of the oldest traditions of free speech in America, FREE WHITEWATER is published anonymously under the pseudonym, JOHN ADAMS. Many of the greatest men of this republic published anonymously, among them Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Paine, and occasionally, John Adams himself. The second president of the American Republic was a great, but flawed man. His greatness and his flaws inspire the choice of his name: a lofty example leavened with the humbling awareness of imperfection in him, and more so, in us.
JOHN ADAMS represents no party, faction, or clique within Whitewater. FREE WHITEWATER describes life in rural Whitewater, Wisconsin — good and bad, easy and hard, beautiful and ugly — to the rest of America.
