In my last two posts, Whitewater’s Best Hopes and The Invitation to Come to Whitewater from Contemporary America, immediately below, I discussed the opportunities that immigrants and students offer Whitewater. Although they’ve been met with acceptance in many quarters, they’ve been met with stubborn and self-destructive opposition from a few.
Once here, and living and working and studying among us, we should see these newcomers as we see ourselves, and treat them no differently from how we treat ourselves.
A reader wrote in, with remarks on these last two posts, and remarked that terms that divide based on ethnicity, such as a hyphenated ancestry, are unwelcome to him.
I agree: it’s a hard subject, not easily addressed, and there’s little good for a small community in such distinctions. There is a jarring quality to the subject.
People are free to describe themselves as they wish, but Whitewater is a small town, and it need not make itself smaller still. There’s a sadness in a small town, that has suffered economic collapse in the past, where some seek to exclude others who are new but different.
The differences are nothing as against the common value of new and vital neighbors.
There’s a question that one sometimes hears in our small town, that’s well past mattering: How long have you lived in Whitewater? It’s posed in an exclusionary way, as though tenure in town were any advantage to us.
The opposite is more likely true: that those who come here without the constraints of the past are as likely to be productive as any long-standing resident.
Small rural places stay vital and productive when they attract newcomers, and barriers and rejection based on ethnicity are contradictory to the American character, and self-destructive.
So, how might this happen with us, even for a few of us to stand outside the American promise of equality of opportunity?
If anyone can offer a simple answer, then he can say more on the matter than I can. Look around, at the beauty of this small town, and one cannot imagine how one person might be seen as more or less than another.
For rural America, though, it is enough to see that we have advantages that other towns lack, however we might overlook them. Students and immigrants are among those advantages.