What will small towns become?
Matt Pearl
I spoke a few weeks ago about a time when northwest Missouri was covered with small towns, a moment in the history of our region when big towns didn’t exist, with the exception of St. Joseph.
I remarked that the period of state history between 100 and 150 years back had a magic to it: no community had greatly asserted itself before the others, and each had a niche that it filled in respect to the regional economy.
After a conversation with a reader last week, a gentleman who remarked that he enjoyed reading news articles from the past, a few thoughts came to me.
This fellow noted that the community newspaper greeted businesses and individuals with an untarnished optimism, and with eloquence rarely found today spoke about individuals as having distinction and expertise — conveying a real sense that each member of the business and social community held his or her own importance.
This reader enjoyed such hopefulness and positivity in reading articles from the past.
I agreed with him.
We are burdened often by the ills that exist in our society. We hear about joblessness, welfare reform, health insurance troubles and our inability to entice talented young people to stay in our communities to build their lives and fortunes.
But the solution remains within our hands.
We must believe that our communities are destined to see brighter days ahead. Otherwise, we would all better serve our interests in moving to Kansas City, Omaha, Des Moines or St. Louis.
We must believe that good products can be manufactured and sold in a small place. And we must give our communities the chance to compete for such opportunities.
A basketball fan said to me last week, “My only request from a coach is to put the kids in position to win.” By that, he meant that the lion’s share of the work belongs to the players, and that coaches should scheme to help student athletes in the task of competing and winning. I agreed with him as well.
In guiding our communities toward growth and opportunity, we must provide a foundation: be it infrastructure, economic incentive or plain old patronage.
Our capitalist economy allows the consumer to pick winners and losers. In a world that is growing daily more globalized, we can see that the majority of our population in this state and others is heading for the cities, where more global enterprises seem to exist.
Unless we are prepared to declare our small towns as the losers in this fight, we must work to foster modern, relevant, meaningful growth.
Who says you can’t run a technology consultation firm from King City, or Stanberry, or Union Star?
The Internet solved that issue years ago, right?
Factories sit on ground — why not our ground? But they need power, water, gas and highway access. Perhaps it is time for us to bring the young folks into the right frame of mind on this issue, and lay down the ultimatum that our area truly faces:
Do you want your community to be small town in 30 years, or do you want it to be a ghost town?
Small, I can handle.
Ghost I will fight tooth-and-nail.,
We need engineers, thinkers, planners — people who can direct the flow of progress.
We need good shovelers and builders.
But most importantly, we need to get started now.
Tomorrow depends on it.
