Thirteen years ago, local notables in small-town Whitewater, Wisconsin insisted that Whitewater was the very center of the universe. When that claim didn’t entice newcomers, these same men began to claim the very opposite, that Whitewater wasn’t doing better because no one knew where the city was. (Both of these claims are silly: billions of years since the Big Bang make locating the center of the universe difficult, and anyone with Google Maps could find the city if he or she so chose.)
Whitewater is truly smaller than boosters care to admit. See The Meaning of Whitewater’s Not-Always-Mentioned Demographics.
Many parts of rural America are suffering a population drain of energetic people of working age. See Area Population, Properly Understood.
This means that local institutions like the American Legion Post can’t go on with their own building. See Whitewater American Legion selling its building. The story is sadly predictable in two ways: (1) Whitewater lacks enough vital newcomers to replace aging community members, and (2) a nearby newspaper is only now reporting about a building sale that others already knew was coming for some time. (The local paper’s reporter is a reporter only in the same way that a sloth is a cheetah.)
Some self-described local development men have spent years searching for ideal newcomers, but their definition of ideal often amounts to people like themselves, given to big-government conservatism, cronyism, corporate welfare, with rich shades of provincialism and nativism.
These men have searched in vain: industrious newcomers don’t want to fall in line behind platitude-spouting, big-spending, small-town reactionaries.
Whitewater and other Wisconsin cities need people (see ‘Migration Key To Wisconsin’s Workforce’), but welcome means welcome to all and any who’ll stake a life here.