Their Atchison- Not Ours

Note: I apologize in advance for not including any pictures in this. I'm hoping that by substituting a few thousand words' worth of articles, I can paint a clearer picture of Atchison for you.

Atchison is a small Kansas town, population ~11,000 and slowly declining. It has a median income of 35,000 dollars per household. It has an average population distribution. It’s a small, quiet, conservative town where people will learn your name and use it, and where people will turn out in large numbers to preserve the name of Division Street, a relic of the segregation era. It is a town dominated by its Wal-Marts and chain restaurants.

In other words, it is just like any other town in Kansas. It is unremarkable. Oh, there’s history if you dig deep enough. The town has its heroes, some beautiful architecture, even a few major tourist traps. I hear we have a pretty nice College somewhere around here.

But here’s the thing- that’s not Atchison. Atchison isn’t the BC students or the business leaders or the Chamber of Commerce. We live and move in a different world from the majority of people in this small town, and we’d do well to remember that.

The real Atchison community is defined by a quiet struggle to survive, day in and day out. It’s no jungle out there, but it isn’t exactly middle management either. Whole generations have grown up with inadequate education, low-paying jobs, and little insurance. The social safety net no longer exists for most. People work two or more minimum wage jobs at a time, always one hospital emergency away from absolute poverty.

It’s a town with a drug problem. It’s a town with rising crime rates. It’s not a town full of crazed rednecks- just ill-educated, stressed, hard working people who want their children to have more than they did. It’s a town with rising unemployment and shuttered businesses.

In other words it’s a town just like any other town in Kansas.

These are hard things to think about, let alone address. But we cannot avoid them. In our positions, we do not often see these problems and sometimes neither do the people who experience them, because they’re so commonplace as to be unremarkable. But they are remarkable problems, and they need remarkable leadership to correct.

We in this class are in a unique place. By virtue of our degrees and our experience, maybe by birth, maybe by hard work , we may have little or no contact with this world. But due to those very same circumstances, these are inevitably the people we will be placed in charge of no matter what we wind up doing.

If we truly wish to lead- or even if we find ourselves in that position by coincidence- it is our responsibility to understand the challenges facing those we guide. We must focus on solving their problems, not simply our own, if we truly wish to become community leaders.