Walk around Whitewater, and talk to those who are elderly, lifetime residents, and you’re sure to catch their nostalgia for an older Whitewater. About the Whitewater of their youth, and how the town has changed, I will comment later.
For now, I’ll describe how the present day residents, often Scandinavian-American and German-Americans, among our town’s elderly are mistaken to think that they embody the same industry and initiative as their forebears.
They don’t represent that settler’s initiative, and they don’t represent modern American trends well, either.
First, our past. We’re big in nostalgia, on that hazy backward glance, without the real reflection and pain that the glance might occasion.
Those who came here came to hard conditions, and faced those conditions alone. They brought their families with them, or had children here, in conditions more primitive than those on the east coast. Children were born, raised and taught, and set out on their own, in conditions that would call for the intervention of child welfare officials today.
In writing as much, I may sound like one of those elderly residents myself. I have a different point to make. Having lived here and claimed a heritage that was built on initiative and improvisation, they now find themselves opposed to others, against the initiative and improvisation of newcomers.
This is a dynamic in many places, but in ours, too: that the elderly whose place in the community owes to settlers and pioneers now contend against a modern-day pioneering spirit of newcomers, from elsewhere in America or from Mexico.
You can guess that the original settlers to this place were a hard scrabble lot. These were not fancy people. Many were rough and tumble, having come from European villages that were little more than shabby, dank hovels.
Now, though, one would think that every Scandinavian or German background was one of opulence and privilege, and that it is only others, from other parts of the world, who are vulgar.
Hardly.
Now I have mentioned the elderly, but it’s not only some of our septuagenarians and octogenarians who feel this way. There’s a certain kind of working class or middle class resident, of any age, who feels the threat of the new.
And in response to this threat, they support regulations, restrictions, and requirements that would never have been placed on them. Like graduates of a college who demand higher standards only after receiving their degrees, these residents want to raise the entrance now that they’re in.
From the individualism on which America was founded, they now espouse restrictions for others, all in the name of preserving a community that could not have come into existence under similar restrictions.
What, specifically, of the new threatens our elderly or long standing residents? They are among the greatest advantages of our town, ones that preserve us, and offer hope for the future, but are the very things that some residents find most threatening.
I’ll consider both in my next post.