Repaying our hometowns

Dozens if not hundreds of people will be returning this weekend for Old Settlers Day in Marion and the All School Reunion in Hillsboro.

What will they find when they get here?

Will they be obsessed with last summer’s now disavowed police raid on the Record newsroom and two homes?

Will they marvel at how a financial felon was hired by the state, promoted by Peabody, and then disappeared and was found dead?

Will they get caught up in other sordid tales, like an ambulance director who was hired without a background check having to resign after lying about his criminal record? Or a revolving door for law enforcement and city management employees?

More important, what will they do about any of these things?

Too many, we fear, will simply shake their heads and give up on the place they for years have fondly regarded as their hometown. They will think it’s hopelessly mired in controversy and far more screwed up than most communities its size.

That would be a terrible mistake, because our weekend visitors, even more than current residents, may hold the key to turning around problems that are hardly unique to Marion County.

At a time when many people want to avoid the rat race, work from home, and appreciate the type of simpler life rural communities offer, those same people often are unwilling to move to rural areas.

With more and more local businesses failing or becoming minor branches of large chains, opportunities for advancement are close to nil for ambitious young people. As a result, our best and brightest tend to leave home for opportunities elsewhere.

They have plenty of sweat to give but unfortunately not enough capital to succeed in business. They need experienced mentors and angel investors — the precise type of people who tend to return to our communities once every five or 10 years for reunions.

Marion County is unlikely to become a major manufacturing or distribution center. Our business development is likely to be home-grown, and a lot of it will come from retirees returning to the county and investing their time and money in helping it move forward.

Problems here unfortunately have received a lot of attention, but it isn’t the attention that’s to blame. It’s the problems themselves. And most of them trace to a lack of well-qualified people to fill elected and appointed roles or run the businesses that make our communities successful.

Decades ago, the senior generation in our towns did such things as invest in buildings, help young residents get started in their own businesses, and even model the type of behavior a public-spirited entrepreneur should possess.

Nowadays, unfortunately, too many come for a day or two, shake their heads, then go back to some distant home that never has quite lived up to the standards they remember growing up.

One of the ironies of the raids that attempted to silence this newspaper last summer is that they actually amplified our voice.

This month, we’ve been interviewed by podcasts by the Investigative Reporters and Editors. BBC, perhaps the single most influential news organization in the world, visited Marion a couple of weeks ago. We’ll be speaking later this week to the National Newspaper Association. Next week, a group of leading journalists from Kosovo will be in town. The week after that, we’ll be receiving an award from the Institute for Rural Journalism at the University of Kentucky. Two weeks after that, we’ll be in San Francisco to talk to a prestigious group of media funders foundations.

Yes, people other than the loyal and sometimes forgiving readers of the Record are having to occasionally put up with the rantings of yours truly. In those rantings, I’ve tried to make one thing clear: Rural America is dying, just as central cities died in the 1950s and ‘60s — and for the same reason: lack of business opportunities to retain top young people and a resulting lack of leadership that too often tolerates bureaucratic incompetency and too often proposes projects focused more on transitory creature comforts than productive investments in the future.

This weekend, while sharing tales about juvenile adventures and swapping boasts about grandchildren, perhaps a few of our returning classmates might offer help.

It doesn’t have to be cashing in an annuity to invest in a startup. It can simply be words of encouragement, a few helpful tips, or an offer to give advice whenever it’s needed.

We’ll be stronger together if the “we” includes not just those who live here now but also those who love our community equally but don’t happen to reside here right now — but might someday in the future if they want to pay forward the excellent support they received growing up here.

— ERIC MEYER