Spring Break
CQ does not count what counts
Letter to the Editor
Whit Waide
Issue date: 4/11/08 Section: Opinion
It seems a default response to the latest study painting us as poor and doomed is always to rush to point to what some politician has done to lure industry and create more jobs so as to contribute to the bottom line so that we might rise up from the bottom of all the good lists. Without discounting the considerable economic development achievements of Gov. Barbour, I believe that all the car factories in the world are not going to cause our stock to rise. Move the Silicon Valley to the Mississippi Delta and we might climb a couple of ticks up the rankings. Maybe.
Mississippi needs more jobs, but what Mississippi really needs is to believe in itself. To realize that what exists here is worth fighting for, that all of our immeasurable [traits] amount to something good and true, that we may be last on a lot of lists but we cannot forever continue to let others paint our skies gray and demoralize us all. We need a true infrastructural overhaul in Mississippi if we want off the bottom of all the good lists. Not highways, school systems, factories or strip malls, but a creative infrastructure that will begin to stop the bleeding. We need an infrastructure for life, where there is greater comprehension of the phantoms that forge us. We are at the same time products of our stagnant environment and also accountable for the stagnation.
We provide so little culture and sophistication for these children that we spend so much to poorly educate. Yet we gave America most of its music, art and literature. And through our considerable faults held a mirror to the larger country so that it might see its own ailments. We need an infrastructure that transcends money. We need pure and simple creative support, an intangible, unquantifiable path to firm our ties that bind. We are a state of many creative people, people with an amazing capacity not only to preserve, but also to thrive despite. Mississippi must stop throwing so many of her children away in prisons and inadequate schools. Those things are fixable, not with more money, but by paying more attention. The money is there. The stewardship is not.
Mississippi needs more jobs, but what Mississippi really needs is to believe in itself. To realize that what exists here is worth fighting for, that all of our immeasurable [traits] amount to something good and true, that we may be last on a lot of lists but we cannot forever continue to let others paint our skies gray and demoralize us all. We need a true infrastructural overhaul in Mississippi if we want off the bottom of all the good lists. Not highways, school systems, factories or strip malls, but a creative infrastructure that will begin to stop the bleeding. We need an infrastructure for life, where there is greater comprehension of the phantoms that forge us. We are at the same time products of our stagnant environment and also accountable for the stagnation.
We provide so little culture and sophistication for these children that we spend so much to poorly educate. Yet we gave America most of its music, art and literature. And through our considerable faults held a mirror to the larger country so that it might see its own ailments. We need an infrastructure that transcends money. We need pure and simple creative support, an intangible, unquantifiable path to firm our ties that bind. We are a state of many creative people, people with an amazing capacity not only to preserve, but also to thrive despite. Mississippi must stop throwing so many of her children away in prisons and inadequate schools. Those things are fixable, not with more money, but by paying more attention. The money is there. The stewardship is not.
Be the first to comment on this story