Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 28. Sunrise is 7:25 and sunset is 4:32, for 9 hours, 7 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 8.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1777, American forces under the command of General Washington repulse a British attack led by General Charles Cornwallis at the Second Battle of Trenton near Trenton, New Jersey:
After assaulting the American positions three times and being repulsed each time, Cornwallis decided to wait and finish the battle the next day. Washington moved his army around Cornwallis’s camp that night and attacked [Lieutenant Colonel Charles] Mawhood at Princeton the next day.
Somewhere in America, perhaps even in Whitewater, a grammarian is pondering whether nouns or adjectives are more important as parts of speech. And so, and so, in the expression the extraordinary ordinary, that person might wonder: does the noun ordinary matter more, or might the modifier extraordinary tell the crucial tale?
The public policy of Whitewater offers an answer.
Bringing the city into an ordinary development position, like other cities, is for Whitewater an act that should be ordinary, but requires instead extraordinary effort.
It’s in this way that Whitewater’s politics (and culture) are best understood. What should be easy is often hard, and what should be embraced often meets special-interest opposition.
Whitewater’s like a community where a few people have always eaten well, but some of those few have left others with less and worse, all the while insisting falsely that less and worse is somehow more and better.
If we’d had better policies before, one could say that this city for the last generation was meeting an ordinary development standard; as we had worse policies before, Whitewater is only now overcoming below-average standards.
We’re now on a proper diet after years of missed meals and poor nutrition. It’s simply that a few would like the community to believe that the past’s poor nutrition is preferable to the present’s proper diet.
For Whitewater, it’s extraordinary to be, at long last, ordinary in policy. It’s from the ordinary — the normal, and business-standard — that we can at last take advantage of the national and state growth that other communities have enjoyed.
Whitewater has waited long for ordinary, long for normal, long for business-standard.
There’s the answer to a grammarian pondering whether the noun or adjective of extraordinary ordinary is more important. For Whitewater, it’s extraordinary to be, at long last, ordinary in policy. It’s from the ordinary — the normal and business-standard — that we can at last take advantage of the national and state growth that other communities have enjoyed.
That’s a notable accomplishment.
A methodical, patient look at recent development projects, post by post, is overdue. Not so overdue as the projects themselves, of course, but that fault lies with the past.
Looking at these projects, of the last two years, is a good way to begin this year.
That’s what this libertarian blogger will do.