Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 5:35 AM and sunset 8:27 PM for 14h 52m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 7.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1972, an 18-and-a-half-minute gap appears in the tape recording of the conversations between President Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex.
Whitewater has a city government, public school district, and public university, but these three government institutions are not enough to assure Whitewater the prosperous future she deserves. Manipulation of these institutions over the last generation, through various schemes of landlords, bankers, and supposed public-relations men has not brought happy times to the city; what’s left of these types offers even less for the future.
And yet, and yet, even if Whitewater had stronger institutions and fewer scheming types, the community would still need competent, useful private efforts aimed at uplifting residents.
Scott Girard reports on one example from Madison in Former rocket scientist launches Stellar Tech Girls summer camps. Girard reports
In early 2022, [aerospace engineer Marina] Bloomer officially leased an office space in Middleton and held her first set of summer camps last year. Centered on hands-on experiments and the engineering design process, Bloomer said she aimed to bring something new to Madison to add to the “really great STEM programming already in Madison.”
“There’s so much more to engineering, learning how to problem solve like an engineer and learning how to build things with your hands out of materials,” she said. “Basically, how do you start from just a problem and a blank sheet of paper and end up with something that you made yourself that works the way it’s supposed to work and that journey to get there is what it means to be an engineer.”
That’s the process Elizabeth Younkle got to see last summer, walking into a space that greets students with a colorful sign reminding them that “the future is yours to create.”
Younkle, now a seventh-grader, has been interested in STEM “forever, basically,” she said, but camps she attended before Stellar Tech Girls were dominated by boys. In those situations, the group doesn’t always “accept me as one of them, which is a bit hard,” she said, so being surrounded by girls “was really amazing.”
“I got to meet people who had the same interests as me and that’s not a thing that usually happens, it’s usually me and a whole bunch of other people who either don’t want to be there or are guys,” she said. “So it’s awesome having people who I identify with and who I feel like understand me.”
This summer, there are three weeklong sessions in June for “Stellar Explorer” camp, three in July for “Stellar Chemistry” camp, four in August for “Stellar Space” camp and two at the end of August for “Stellar Energy” camp. The camps cost $250 in early registration by April 1 or $280 after, with some scholarships available, with three-hour sessions each day in either the morning or the afternoon.
Whitewater won’t succeed on the basis of Old Whitewater’s boosterism, toxic positivity, or yesterday’s mediocre work. To meet both basic human needs and aspirations, this community should put government in its properly limited place, discard tired hangers-on who treat government as a special account, and turn away from nostalgia sufferers who think the past was just dandy.
Find new, promote new, and we will have a new and better Whitewater.
Sun protection in fashion as Beijing sweats: