In a city where some have had an unfortunate tendency to favor marketing over actual accomplishments, and where ‘Whitewater Advocacy’ often amounts to the laughable exaggerations of a few insiders, loss of funding poses a double risk. First, communities across the state have to make do with less, and Whitewater (with a public campus) will feel those cuts as much as most places, if not more so.
Second, what’s especially hard for this city is that the desire of officials to appear successful is so strong that they’ll make cuts that look less significant, even if they will bring long-term loss of competitiveness and quality.
In this way, they’re like struggling people who would sell a kidney so long as they could continue to buy fine clothes and a nice tan: what’s outside still looks great, but health and vigor is compromised.
Whitewater’s town fathers are particularly reliant on public money, and even more reliant on the idea that outward appearances are almost everything.
Now I’m not a medical doctor, but I did once see an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, and I recall hearing that people naturally have two kidneys, and that it helps to have at least one. (It really does pay to watch a whole program, leaving the room for snacks only during commercials.)
Whitewater’s leaders would have done well to see that same episode – over and over – until its implications became clear. Not only should organ sales be a last resort, but using those sales to persuade others that one is still healthy is likely to be ineffective. Visitors and newcomers can tell the difference between a healthy person and an ailing one.
(The profound economic confusion in Whitewater’s politics, by the way, reaches so far that some key leaders probably wouldn’t be able to determine correctly whether vital organs were more likely to represent capital or labor. Lincoln knew the answer, almost intuitively it seems.)
Whitewater may hollow out the body in a futile effort to preserve outward appearances, at least for a bit.
No matter: in any event, kidney-selling isn’t a long-term health plan.