By Jeremy Weldon

Editor

Scarlett O’Hara, as you recall, was always putting off problems with a wave of her hand, dismissing any unpleasant issue with her bubbly declaration that she would “think about that tomorrow.”

I sometimes hear our local leaders saying the same thing in a different way.

An idea is floating around now (it’s not new by any means) that Panola County, and others around us, are losing our best and brightest young people because they don’t see the value of returning from colleges and universities to start businesses and manage industries in the place they call home.

Brain drain is the label the experts put on the problem years ago. Different areas of the country have the same dilemma. How to keep their youth in the area, growing the local economy and reaping the benefits of their expensive educations?

And every few years committees are formed and boards are named so everyone can hold important meetings and roundtable discussions to produce new ideas (there is no such thing!) about keeping these all-important youth at home.

Mostly it centers on one theme – and this is where folks in charge of those meetings and discussions get off track. They assume that our youth bolt for greener pastures because they are uninformed about how great Batesville and Panola County are, how terrific of a place it is to raise families, and how lovely a life we all enjoy.

The smart kids aren’t leaving because they don’t know what we have here, they leave because they know precisely what we have here. And, generally, they don’t want any part of it.

Sure they have a deep love for Batesville or Pope or Sardis, or wherever their mama and daddy raised them and still live, but they often choose not to stay and plant roots themselves because they can see out county’s shortcomings – and worse, they understand that it’s not a temporary condition, and sadly the adage of “some things never change” comes to mind.

Some of our best youth and greatest potential gets away because they travel and find out that not every town in this country allows beggars to hang around stores, or puts up with loud, booming and sometimes vulgar music played by drivers at gas stations and public places, or learns to accept trashy roads and illegal dumping.

Instead of pretending the problem is simply a lack of marketing and enjoying a catered lunch and two hours of futile talking, why not begin to attack some of these problems at the root?

We’ve lived so long with the small problems and allowed community standards to slip so far that we, like Miss O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, have learned to “think about it tomorrow” as we continue to patch our leaking boat.

We’ve become so accustomed to poverty in our county that we celebrate with great glee the accomplishments of the food pantry. God bless the dear ladies (and a few men) who do that great work on Van Voris St., and God bless everyone that has donated sacrificially to help the food pantry, but the truth is that its very existence is an indictment of community standards.

Success, my friends, is not having the best food pantry in North Mississippi. Success, is closing the doors because there is no need. Will this ever happen? Absolutely not. But that’s what the goal should be.

How can this be accomplished? We need to recognize that we’ve put spent far too much time (and money) putting lipstick on the pig, and decide to attack the problems from a different angle. We can push workforce development and technical education till the proverbial cows come home, but all the roundtable discussions in the world won’t cure worker absenteeism, the number one problem industry faces here.

Maybe it’s time we begin thinking more regionally. Instead of competing with Oxford, Grenada, and Senatobia for industries, maybe we should consider banding together to promote the whole “live, work, and play” concept on a wider scale. No industry wants to locate in Oxford because the housing market is ridiculous, but then they worry that workers aren’t dependable in Batesville, or that Grenada is too far from DeSoto County and other retails hubs.

What if we start cleaning up the Sardis and Enid Lake areas, and devising ways to increase those property values? Drive up to Pickwick Lake and look around. Why can’t we do something similar here? May I be bold enough to say we need more good people? What about fewer bad people? Think it would make a difference?

You can only applaud the efforts taken in the past year by both the city and county to combat some of the blight – slowly but surely we will see a difference. Our test scores in schools are better than 10 years ago, and graduation rates are holding steady, even improving some. These things are good starts, but clearly something is wrong when a portion of our local workforce can’t be counted on to show up on time and sober on a consistent basis.

County cheerleaders shouldn’t pretend we’ve woven a silk purse when we are clearly clutching a sow’s ear.

Batesville can be a gem of city, and it once was. But it could be the next Clarksdale, too. Dirty, dangerous, and basically a welfare town. Let’s tighten up our community standards and refuse to be the next Delta failure.

Ask not why the best youth leave, fix the problems and they will stay. Or keep holding brainstorming sessions and “thinking about it tomorrow” like Scarlett O’Hara.

Just don’t forget that by the end of the movie, she was having to eat raw turnips and take down curtains to make her dresses.