Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 46. Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 6:06 PM for 10h 53m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 42.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1851, Herman Melville‘s Moby-Dick is first published as The Whale by Richard Bentley of London.
Not long from now, we may find that our national and state politics have grown darker. Nevertheless, should that be so, our obligations will be the same: to work for better in nation, state, and city. All three will be as important to us in November as they are to us now in October. These nine square miles of Whitewater are precious, and deserving of our full effort.
Many in Whitewater use Facebook. It has been a useful social medium for many, no matter how much a few of us may dislike it. Connecting family and neighbors is a social good.
That platform, however, has also been a fertile ground for trolling, inflicting on communities baseless claims, outright lies, and catty comments. Most are written as poorly as they are laid out. See Identifying Types and Spotting Issues. These users should be dealt with in blunt, declaratory statements of refutation. See Trolls and the Exclamatory, Interrogatory, or Declaratory Response.
Whitewater now has a few like this, loathsome trolls such as they are.
In the years since FREE WHITEWATER began publication in 2007, Whitewater has had six district administrators, seven university chancellors, three city managers, and four chiefs of police (including among them interim leaders). Dozens of other officials have come and gone.
During this time, our city has had more than her share of struggling public officials, with a few who were simply unsuitable for public office. After seeing so many come and go, a reasonable person should be able to discern which, among this lot, have been truly bad for the city. Although we’ve had too many who were inadequate, we’ve only had a few who were both wrong and reprehensible.
It is a false and risible contribution to public policy that classifies Whitewater’s interim city manager, her last permanent city manager, or her last common council president in the category of Big Bads. They’re not what Big Bads look like. (To think that Whitewater’s interim city manager, in particular, is ‘aggressive’ or ‘divisive’ is prima facie evidence of poor judgment.)
It is a false and risible contribution to public policy that contends this city might have produced a defund-the-police policy. That was never going to happen in Whitewater. It was more likely that there would be a defund-the-policy policy on the Moon (where there are no people) than in Whitewater (where there are 14,889).
There are challenges in this city, but we’ve no need to fabricate or delude ourselves into believing there are more than, in fact, there truly are.
And yet, and yet — here we are, in a condition shared by many communities, in which Facebook trolls litter the web with their crackpottery.
Waterspout swirls off Cyprus coast: