Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 23. Sunrise is 7:13 and sunset is 4:20 for 9 hours 7 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 81.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater Fire Department Inc. meets at 6 PM and the Plan & Architectural Review Commission also meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declares December 7 to be “a date which will live in infamy,” after which the U.S. declares war on Japan.
On Tuesday, December 2, the Whitewater Common Council adopted a modern, forward-looking budget on a 6-1 vote. The position of the Whitewater Common Council was the right decision. While it’s possible to describe aspects of local policy in political terms of left, center, or right (as this libertarian blogger sometimes has), this budget is best understood in different terms: as positioning this city well for present conditions and future opportunities. It is, simply expressed, a budget more in keeping with the needs of a community of many thousands than any prior effort over the last generation.
Efforts of the last decades — over a generation, really — were directed as though the government were of a few, by a few, and for a few1. Whitewater was deserving of more than that. We are a city not of a few, but of fifteen thousand. Those thousands of our fellow residents need, and deserve, modern services both for our community today and and also for a prosperous future.
Along will come a few from the past (or those they’ve collected) to say that their policies, of yesteryear, were so very much better. More pointedly, they’ll say that today’s policies should be yesteryear’s policies perpetually2. Well, this libertarian blogger was there in yesteryear, and it was often a dog’s breakfast of bad ideas, wastefully executed.
Americans are a dynamic, inventive, and innovative people. Each generation builds something new to meet the new circumstances before it. Modern is worth defending.
This conversation is sure to continue over the next several months.
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- Indeed, right-leaning residents from successful Wisconsin communities visiting Whitewater have been among the first to notice that Whitewater was poorly balanced over this last generation, with too much attention to the demands of student-rental operators and not enough to the city as a place for all residents, equally considered and respected. ↩︎
- They’ve a full quiver of other helpful advice, no doubt: Just walk in and hand them your résumé — that’s how you get a job; kids these days just don’t want to work; stay at the same company for 30 years — that’s how you get ahead. ↩︎
Mount Kilauea in Hawaii resumes its on-and-off eruptions: