America is a dynamic and competitive place. The rise of America, from defeat of a haughty empire, her expansion across an entire continent, to her current prosperity owe to individual liberty, free enterprise, and a hope for peaceful commerce with the world beyond.
A people with these values could not be expected to stand still, live complacently, or remain unchanging. The liberty we enjoy as a right requires no fixed outcome. America has no definite end, no fixed objective – liberty is a daily condition, to be exercised and expressed as each generation sees fit.
Those who founded the city lived in conditions different from our own, and we’d have had no progress at all if we lived in the same conditions of industry, medicine, and technology. Machines they could scarcely imagine – and surely could not create through planning – improve our daily lives.
America’s invitation to the American dream is not an invitation to an unchanging, white-tie affair. She is not so formal and fixed in her invitation – America sends out only come-as-you-are invitations.
There are some here, perhaps a few hundred, who are very sure that they have a right to rescind America’s genuine invitation, and replace it with a substitute. No matter how shrilly they insist that the substitution represents a genuine representation, it’s a betrayal of both Whitewater’s actual origins and America’s dynamic promise.
The students who came here more than a generation ago sometimes lived as borders in local homes, taking a room within a private homeowner’s house. Those where the conditions of student life in many places at that time, decades ago. That arrangement was surely comfortable for otherwise suspicious locals, who had students under their watchful eyes, in metaphor and practice.
Yet, beyond our small town, American college life was changing. As we grew richer, so did our children, and in their waxing prosperity they came to expect places of their own, with other students, without status as borders in a house.
Increasing prosperity for our nation changed expectations and abilities for students. You can imagine how this has affected some longtime residents – how it has unsettled them, how they long for the old way of borders and busybodies.
Too bad for those who want that older way – American success and advancing standards have swept these old ways aside, and they will never be back. Those who wish we might go back, as a city, have no hope whatever that their wishes will be fulfilled.
America extends an invitation to students with modern and prosperous expectations, and nothing a few hundred complainers will say or do can resist that changed national standard.
What these small and selfish people want – to hold others back through every addled and asinine regulation imaginable – cannot succeed. Three hundred million people across this continent have established a new standard that no one here can roll back.
That doesn’t mean they won’t try. Try they have, and will. The outcome will be the same, there efforts amounting to nothing.
And what of the many immigrants, most from Mexico, who have come here? They are more numerous than our last census count suggests, and now are surely more than one in ten of our population.
Other rural towns would consider it a deliverance that any number so large might move among them, stay, and raise families. We have the dream of so many other places, and yet a few here secretly and quietly consider it a nightmare.
There are few things more disgusting, despicable, and empty than Americans – of all people – who despise immigrants. It’s as close to a perversion of the American dream as one can imagine.
It’s also imprudent and self-destructive. Our economic future depends on attracting others, to come and live among us. We should be grateful for every last one.
When some oppose students, or immigrants, on the basis of what’s supposedly good for Whitewater, we should be clear that that opposition is in opposition to American progress and principle.
Small rural towns in America have their best chance of survival as small, rural, American towns.
By contrast, opposition to American opportunities and progress only condemns a town to comparative decline, no matter the steadfast opposition of a dimwitted, listless few.