by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
West Plains, a small city in southern Missouri with a population of roughly 12,000 hearty souls, is one of the more progressive enclaves in the Ozarks. True, the people here like their guns, go to church on Sundays, tend to only elect Republicans to office - and would certainly take offense at being referred to as "progressive" or "woke," but many are surprisingly enlightened nonetheless.
A few years ago West Plains partnered with Evergy Corporation out of Kansas City and created a forty-acre solar farm which is located just down the road from my house, a project that helps to provide the city's electric customers with their power. Over the past couple of years there has been a lot of buzz in the city government promoting the expansion of internet services across the community, and those services are being steadily enhanced. The schools, a dependable measure of a community's commitment to the future, are above average for the area as well as statewide, and the local parks are well maintained and undergo regular improvements.
Clearly, regardless of how the local citizens choose to think of themselves politically, at their core they have a very progressive nature.
A few years ago I let my local newspaper subscription expire - no excuses - just something that happened which I failed to get corrected a long time. Last week I went into town and fixed that lingering oversight. I figured that by subscribing to our five-day-a-week "daily" I could better monitor what was going on around me.
And I was right!
The second issue that arrived in my mailbox had a fascinating story on the front page about a project for my town which has been being developed by a task force for the past two years - and I had no idea of its existence.
A total eclipse of the sun will occur in this area on April 8, 2024, something that is exceedingly rare and will not happen again until the year 2178. I had heard about the eclipse, but what I had not heard until I saw it on the front page of our local newspaper, "The West Plains Quill," was that the city is planning a festival to to commemorate the event - and a task force was created in 2021 to plan the four-day celebration.
(The celebration of an event rooted in nature almost sounds Celtic, perhaps even something that a delegation of visiting Druids would enjoy - as long as none of them claim to be "woke!")
Interestingly, our state representative (a Republican, of course), had his weekly column from Jefferson City on the inside of that same edition of the newspaper, and he used that forum to pat himself on the back for the area's advancement in solar energy, expansion of wifi and internet services, and the eclipse festival and recognition in West Plains. "Progressive" or not, these activities are clearly popular with voters, and smart politicians are in there grabbing credit for these programs as fast as they can.
But, politicians aside, I am proud of my community - and on April 8, 2024, I will be in town among my friends and neighbors standing in total darkness for more than three minutes while appreciating the wonders and awesome power of nature. Then I will go home and use partially solar-generated electricity and government-subsidized wifi to blog about it!
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