Welcome to Whitewater, Wisconsin. I’m sure our city will be better for your presence.
In these weeks and months ahead, so very many helpful people will offer advice and guidance to you. A few others, unhelpfully, will draw close and whisper ever so softly about how you should think, feel, and act to be a proper part of Whitewater.
I’m part of neither group. I’ve no interest in the private and personal; it’s the public and political that concerns me.
Having chosen Whitewater, I hope for your success. More precisely, I hope for your success as you wish it to be, a success that’s sure to be different and better than anything I could imagine for you.
It makes sense to try to fit in; it’s even better to shape the city in ways more creative than those we’ve yet devised.
I may have no advice of my own to offer, but I am reminded that a noted twentieth-century philosopher once advised that one should always let ‘your conscience be your guide.’
My late father told me a story, a lifetime ago, of a widow and her disabled son. I’ll share that story today.
The boy’s name was Charlie Schadler, and he was born with a condition that caused his eyes to discharge incessantly. That family was poor, and Mrs. Schadler had money for neither nurse nor nanny; it was she alone who cared for her child. Day after day, without fail or complaint, she dutifully dabbed away the fluid that ran from her small son’s eyes onto his cheeks.
I received the story from my father, intelligent and serious, well-read and thoughtful. Years later, I shared the same story with someone, intelligent but mercurial, well-read but socially-motivated.
For my father, the story was one of patient devotion, of love: the widow had nothing but a disabled son, yet in him she rightly believed that she had everything. Attending to the child’s affliction was her loving duty. Charlie was altogether a blessing to his mother; his mother was altogether a model of parental love to others.
For the woman to whom I told the story, by contrast, it was a tale of disturbing misfortune, not principally of the boy, but for her mother: how sad that the mother had been consigned to that role, to caring for her child without additional support. Worse, in the woman’s eyes, was Mrs. Schadler’s condition, itself, as an unwitting victim of her son’s circumstances.
You, of course, may choose to think of the story as you wish. Perhaps, you’ll choose one view or another, or instead reject both.
Regardless, one cannot with sincerity hold both views with equal conviction. One view precludes the equal embrace of the other.
In your work, you’ll likely encounter children with circumstances nearly as difficult. What you think upon encountering them is your decision alone.
Yet, this much is already decided: our community will be stronger or weaker, depending on your choice.
