Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 69. Sunrise is 7:30 AM and sunset 5:46 PM for 10h 16m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 52.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1512, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, painted by Michelangelo, is exhibited to the public for the first time.
Policymaking in a community begins with asking what people in a community are like, how they’re faring. Part (only part, yet a significant part) of that inquiry should consider their socio-economic condition.
A proper analysis doesn’t depend on one’s own position, but on an assessment of others’ conditions. (It doesn’t matter that I have, for example, no personal concerns. I don’t, in fact. Writing about a community is writing about a community, not one person.)
Part of others’ condition is, for all of us, socio-economic: a mixture of culture and income.
A socio-economic condition reveals not merely where one stands at the moment, but often where one can go, and indeed might, go in the future. Stronger present conditions open doors to greater future opportunities; difficult present conditions restrict future opportunities for lack of means. All this should be plain and obvious, but it’s not so plain and obvious as it should be.
A key truth: nothing, including stagnation, is truly stagnant. There is movement always, in people and in a community. There’s forward, backward, and side to side, but stationary only for the briefest moments.
This brings our city to the unfortunate situation of the Community Space in Whitewater. (The Community Space, 834 E. Milwaukee Street, Whitewater.) That charitable effort is now temporarily closed, having experienced difficulty managing the volume, and some residents’s treatment of, donations.
Different people have different roles in the city, but this libertarian blogger can see, and has written, about the importance of charitable roles in Whitewater. One does not have to be a doctor to see that professional medicine saves lives. I’ve no practical solution, regrettably, to offer anyone at the Community Space.
I can offer, reasonably, a view of what these difficulties at the Community Space mean, more broadly for Whitewater. They suggest that Whitewater’s need is greater than ever, and that difficult socio-economic conditions in the city include for a few residents’ a lack of acculturation about how to donate, and how to treat donations.
Ironically and sadly, the problems that have temporarily impeded work at the Community Space show how important the Community Space is.
(These are not new concerns at FREE WHITEWATER. See Waiting for Whitewater’s Dorothy Day, Something Transcendent, and in the Meantime, and An Oasis Strategy.)
What’s in the Night Sky November 2022:
The need is tremendous. Thank you for the acknowledgment of that in our community. One hopes that there is both a short-term fix to address the immediate and ongoing need for food, and a long-term sustainable solution for the Community Space holistically. Further, one hopes there is an epiphany amongst the broader community to this need, and indeed a spur to action to lend helping hands.