Here’s the eighteenth annual FREE WHITEWATER list of the scariest things in Whitewater.

(The 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 editions are available for comparison.)

The list runs in reverse order, from mildly scary to truly frightening.

10. Crazed Foxes. For many years, I’ve warned the city about the dangers of a coyotepocalypse. A harbinger of that danger came our way in 2024, when a marauding red fox — infected with mange, rickets, ebola, something — arrived in town. Most of us took it in stride, and waited out the calamity until the arrival of a SWAT team or 101st Airborne or whatever. Next time may be worse. 

9. Complaints Over Pedestrian Walkways.  Whitewater is a college town, and so it has a college, and the college has students, and the students have to travel to different buildings in which they live and study, and not all of the buildings are next to each other.  The city sensibly proposed a two-week test of closing a small portion of Starin Road to vehicles during daylight during weekdays, Monday to Friday.

Here’s a map of the affected area (indicated with a black line):

The hew and cry over simple and reasonable accommodations to the students who keep this town going is confirmation of some residents’ clinical hypersensitivity. There’s gotta be a pill for that; Big Pharma works 24×7 on new concoctions.

8. Restrictions on Speech. The Whitewater School Board wants you to be very careful about what you say during Public Comment, so they’ve helpfully listed a series of warnings and restrictions on residents’ remarks:

Citizens may speak under Public Comments, but no School Board action will be taken. Issues raised may become a part of a future agenda. Participants are allotted a three-minute speaking period. A Citizen Comment Request should be filled out prior to speaking. In accordance to Board Policy 187, personal criticism and/or derogatory remarks directed at School Board members or employees of the district will not be tolerated. Should there be a number of citizens planning to speak, the President will announce the total time for citizen comments and divide the time between speakers equally with no more than three minutes allotted to each participant. The Board will not be able to respond to individual questions at the meeting. Complaints against an employee should be sent to the Superintendent or Board in writing with your signature.

Please keep in mind that students often attend or view board meetings. Speakers’ remarks should therefore be suitable for an audience that includes Kindergarten through 12th grade students. The Board President or officers of the Board may interrupt, warn or terminate speakers’ statements that are unrelated to the business of the School District or inappropriate for K-12 students or disruptive to an orderly, productive meeting. The time estimates noted for agenda items are for informational purposes only and may not be reflective of actual discussion during the meeting.

Oh, dearie me: I didn’t realize that the boardmembers were Vanderbilts or Windsors with the delicate sensibility and refinement that requires shielding from common men and women. Not one of their surnames suggests by itself a connection to the upbringing of Charles the Third, “by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories, King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith,” but ya never know. If I should ever be in a restaurant with these men & women of the school board, I’ll ponder carefully to make sure that I pick up the right utensil at the right time.

7. Fear and Anxiety Itself. Residents censor themselves, limit themselves, often by their own worry that they’ll upset someone or some tradition. No and no again. Break old traditions and break new ground: these tired old boomers f-cked the town up enough for ten lifetimes. Go ahead and say it.

6. Projection and Confession.  For some, every accusation is a projection (what they feel inside) or a confession (what they themselves have done). So they look at others and insist that everyone else is what, in fact, they have said and done. The conservative populists are constantly yammering about how everyone else its triggered, etc. If all these big, bad, tough men were what they claim to be, they wouldn’t be tantrumming in public (what, what?, what!, arms up, outraged).

5. VIs. Some towns escape this fate, but other places wind up with a maladjusted village idiot.

De idioot bij de vijver (The Idiot By the Pond), 1926, Frits Van den Berghe)

4. Annoying Obsessives. I’m not a government type, but I have sympathy and compassion for any resident who has to serve in government beside an annoying obsessive who hectors in meeting after meeting, raises dozens of trivial points, demands endless inquiries, and hijacks proceeding after proceeding.

No matter what they look like outside, they all look the same inside: 

There’s not enough Excedrin Extra Strength in the world, to be honest.

3. Fear of Referendums.  Whitewater needs more, not fewer, referendums. Residents are free to vote them up or down. The alternative is one in which an entitled boomer and his operatives, catspaws, stooges, and Trojan Horses try to run the city by manipulating boards and commissions. These types don’t care to count to 15,000; they care only to count to four on a seven member board.

Let the whole city decide. Go to voters as often as possible.

2. Auric Goldfinger and Oddjob. Whitewater is a small town of fifteen thousand people, no one higher or lower than another. That’s a truth that a few will not accept. And so, and so, in meetings where their pecuniary interest is at stake, Auric Goldfinger and his manservant Oddjob walk into the room with a combination of entitlement and bluster wholly disproportionate to their very average abilities. 

The amount of eye rolling before and after they speak would keep an ophthalmologist in business for years.

1. Nativism.   No more serious risk than this: that some would ruin the lives of others who have come here only to make a new start for their families. 

Again, this year: although I am a tragic optimist, it’s optimism that forms my fundamental outlook. We’ll come through.

As always, best wishes for a Happy Halloween.