How Wal-Mart "Touches" Communities

Though it has the tone (cute wordplay) and substance (as in: lack of) of your average blog entry, the following is an actual editorial printed by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel recently regarding a Wal-Mart Supercenter proposed for the community of Hartford, Wisconsin. My comments follow.

EDITORIAL: An open letter to Hartford

By Dan Kenitz

Posted: Nov. 30, 2006

For those of you who have lives and therefore don't know this, the city of Hartford has been divided recently over the proposal for a Wal-Mart on Highway 60.

The people who are for it - I'll call them the "smarties" - are saying that Hartford's recent growth logically means bigger and better businesses. The others - the "wrongies" - are hiding their wrongness behind a thick coat of anti-imperial aggression.

So here's my letter to Hartford, the city I grew up in, and especially to the section of the population that would hate to see a Wal-Mart go up. Allow me to play amateur psychologist just this once:

Dear Wrongies,

I'm usually more than a little suspicious when a person gets so outraged and offended by something relatively trivial - aggression usually betrays deeper feelings of fear and insecurity. So when you raised a stink about a Wal-Mart possibly coming to Hartford, couldn't you have stepped back and asked yourself, "Hey, is this really that big of a threat or that big of a deal?"

Bear with me because I know you've already compiled a list of a dozen bad things about Wal-Mart to e-mail to me. We all know the "evil empire" stories: Wal-Mart supports sweatshops, doesn't offer decent pay and benefits and throws cute kittens into a furnace every winter to heat the supercenter.

Did it occur to you that you might be biased? It's possible that you hate the idea of your comfortable, little town changing so much that you'll believe anything bad about Wal-Mart. This is similar to the principle in which Brett Favre could walk up and punch you in the gut, and you'd just say, "Wow, what an arm! Good luck on Sunday, Brett!"

You're against Wal-Mart because it means Hartford might change a little. Even if Jim's House of Worms on Utopos St. did go out of business because of Wal-Mart (hey, Wal-Mart has everything), would you give it any thought beyond "oh, shucks"? Have you noticed that Hartford has been dramatically changing over the past 20 years?

Opponents such as Hartford Citizens for Responsible Government - avidly anti-Wal-Mart - are against a big supercenter when it suggests a sudden threat to their small-town stability. Don't tell me you haven't driven to the West Bend Wal-Mart once or twice because Kmart didn't have what you wanted.

If the only issue here was Wal-Mart itself, we should be hearing about big stinks every time a big corporate chain came to Hartford. Somehow, you overlooked the Cousins, the Taco Bell, the McDonald's, the Walgreens, the Kmart, the Dairy Queen, the Pizza Hut, the Blockbuster, the Quizno's, the Subway, the Aurora Medical Center, the . . . you get my point.

If Wal-Mart had built a tiny franchise in Hartford and gradually added to it so it became a supercenter in 20 years, we wouldn't hear a peep; your egos could handle gradual change. It's not Wal-Mart you're against; it's the feeling of uncertainty a supercenter gives you.

Every community eventually has to grow up.

I don't know why everyone in Hartford is so afraid of Wal-Mart when we've got a sasquatch running around Washington County. Bigger fish to fry, people!

Ultimately, Hartford is just a town - with roads, farms, buildings and trees. It's the people who make up a community, and Wal-Mart can never touch that.

So all of you Citizens for Ego Protection and even the smarties have nothing to worry about. Let your tight grip on the good old days go because the past is gone forever. Today's good enough for all of us.

Plus, I hear a Target is on its way.

Dan Kenitz of Hartford is a writer who runs a political Web site, BipolarNation.com. His e-mail address is  dan@bipolarnation.com

First off, let’s deconstruct the very first sentence of Mr. Kenitz’s “letter,” a collection of words so exquisitely condescending that one can only marvel at the spectacle of it all.

I'm usually more than a little suspicious when a person gets so outraged and offended by something relatively trivial --- aggression usually betrays deeper feelings of fear and insecurity.

So, in one fell swoop, the folks in Hartford ("the city I grew up in") who have concerns about a Wal-Mart Supercenter entering their economic ecosystem have been diagnosed as "fearful" and "insecure" - -  and anyone who might bother to address the situation (present company included, I'm sure) is reminded that they are clearly wasting their effort on something “relatively trivial.” We are off on the Right (possibly far-Right) foot, aren't we?

So, thus belittled, the good citizens of Hartford - - who have been oh-so-adorably delineated as "righties" and "wrongies" - - are taken to school by Mr. Kenitz (who evidently lives in the Big City now and can therefor credibly toss nuggets of wisdom over his shoulder to the old hometown).

It's time to "grow up,' he admonishes.

If the only issue here was Wal-Mart itself, we should be hearing about big stinks every time a big corporate chain came to Hartford. Somehow, you overlooked the Cousins, the Taco Bell, the McDonald's, the Walgreens, the Kmart, the Dairy Queen, the Pizza Hut, the Blockbuster, the Quizno's, the Subway, the Aurora Medical Center, the . . . you get my point.

"You get my point" as a declarative statement - - pretty brave assumption on Mr. Kenitz's part. What is his point? That the entry of a franchise fast food place or pharmacy somehow equates with the sudden infusion of a gigantic superstore which is unprecedented in human history in terms of raw size and economic impact?

If Wal-Mart had built a tiny franchise in Hartford and gradually added to it so it became a supercenter in 20 years, we wouldn't hear a peep; your egos could handle gradual change.

Their egos? How about their infrastructure upheaval, present zoning, traffic patterns, noise levels, employment stability, ongoing tax structure and leverage, environmental impact, community interaction, etc.? Does Mr. Kenitz know how each of these elements of Hartford's community are going to be utterly (and irreversibly) changed in the blink of an eye if a Supercenter is built?

Well, maybe not ..

Bear with me because I know you've already compiled a list of a dozen bad things about Wal-Mart to e-mail to me. We all know the "evil empire" stories: Wal-Mart supports sweatshops, doesn't offer decent pay and benefits and throws cute kittens into a furnace every winter to heat the supercenter.

As evidenced by the paragraph above, he obviously does not grasp beyond the most superficial the myriad issues surrounding Wal-Mart's impact on a specific community or society as a whole.

And, finally, this gem:

Ultimately, Hartford is just a town - with roads, farms, buildings and trees. It's the people who make up a community, and Wal-Mart can never touch that.

My goodness. Unfortunately, Mr. Kenitz, Wal-Mart can do much, much more than "touch" a community like Hartford. It can (and has) bludgeoned the very foundations of what we once took for granted as the building blocks of what it means to be part of a city or town. Feel free to bring the debate over here and we can get very specific: Do you grasp the unprecedented  power, for instance, that Wal-Mart exerts over the tax base of a community? Are you aware of the enormous and costly concessions Wal-Mart wrings out of local municipalities when it comes to town? Have you noted Wal-Mart's ability to ignore local environmental and zoning ordinances because the fines incurred by each violation make no financial impact whatsoever on their monstrous bottom line? How about the huge tax liability handed to state governments because so many of Wal-Mart's employees need public assistance in order to make ends meet (note: pdf link)?

Wal-Mart is most assuredly not the lone culprit, but if you look around you'll note, for example, that we are becoming a society of detached, self-interested individuals. You honestly don't see how Wal-Mart contributes to that condition?

Above all, I'm left to wonder about the larger issue here: Why has the Journal-Sentinel printed - - as an editorial - - something so thin and unfettered by supportive facts. Is this what the blog culture has wrought? Are traditional newspapers now more accepting of some of the conventions of "blog-speak" in their pages, even in the context of a "community columnist"? Frankly, I imagine that even pro-Wal-Mart folks look at an editorial like "An Open Letter to Hartford" and scratch their heads.

"Wrongies," indeed...

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