In most cities and towns, a few organizations and institutions play the role of community watchdog. Whitewater has no one who plays that role, as the Whitewater Register — our hometown paper — doesn’t behave like a community watchdog.
In other towns nearby, the newspapers are willing to ask questions of elected and appointed officials. Consider the recent stories in the Janesville Gazette about whether a hockey coach’s contract should be renewed (after allegations that he was excessively harsh toward school-age players). Asking questions like that is merely one of the roles that the Gazette plays, and there are few people in Janesville who are surprised, and surely many who are grateful, that there’s a daily outlet that greets decisions with healthy scrutiny.
We have nothing like that in Whitewater, and the idea of it would be offensive, shocking, and almost unthinkable here. The longer we have gone without it, the more arrogant our municipal workers have become, and the more thin-skinned, too. In Whitewater, even ordinary questions are greeted as presumptuous, as lacking in civic-mindedness.
On the contrary, many healthy communities of our size, and even smaller (like Fort Atkinson), are not so hypersensitive to criticism. A community like ours becomes stultifying quickly, and will not accept reform-minded suggestions. The most typical –and vulgar — reaction is to claim that “if you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?” Here’s what that really means: “To be here, you have to agree with me, and think like me, and be like me.”
We have no reason to accept a definition of civic-mindedness that implies there is only one right way to think or act, and that any criticism of municipal actions is wrong. Whitewater should be remembered as someplace more than a small town where the First Amendment goes to die, or play dead.
I, and others, will not leave: we will work to offer honest suggestions for a better, FREE WHITEWATER.