My question to the citizens of Bloomington — and I mean this in the highest and most constructive way possible — is this: What are you fighting for?

First, desipite all our Portlandia-alia, we have the hidden Bloomington tax. For a lot of people – whatever job you have in Bloomington, you could probably make much more money doing it in other cities. It’s a tax worth paying, but it is a bit of a fight.

Bloomington isn’t fighting to survive. It’s fighting to not lose the small town, the woods, the “Howdy Bart” – “Howdy Paul” friendliness. The “Let’s take turns in traffic.” nature of the city. It sometimes seems to be growing a bit too fast, and we have a big bunch of people with power with their right foot firmly on the brake pedal.

And in this growth, we’re fighting to keep it the nicest growth we can get, with some pretty stringent zoning requirements and a watchful planning approval process, and a vision many elected leaders have of a “live-able city”.

We’re fighting to keep the “have-a-lots” and the “haves” from being too far ahead of the “have-nots.” Our billionaire lives in a house the same size as my house — and I’m middle middle middle class. We want everybody to be able to afford the best patchouli-infused tofu-burger every once in a while. We want everybody to be able to afford theater and concerts. We want the corporate CEO and the janitor to be visually indistinguishable while waiting in line with their kids outside the local production of The Adventures of Frog and Toad. We don’t want to be like those other notable small towns Aspen and Manhattan where class differences are endlessly manifest.

And we’re fighting to keep the cool kids from having to move out. Every year we lose human cultural treasures such as you and Christy to economic pressures. It’s that Bloomington tax again. More recently, one of Bloomington’s most creative visual artists just left and I’m bummed.

And, at least to me, we’re fighting to keep architectural diversity alive, so we don’t turn into the storybook village of yesteryear with almost every new building at IU pretending it was built by the WPA, and every new building in town looking like a 20s bungalow. (Don’t get me wrong, I love 20s bungalows and WPA architecture, but I love ice cream, yet I don’t want it as my only food.)

And, as Becky observed, Bloomington needs to fight to get an ocean. And a mountain range would be pretty nice too. We’ll just have to console ourselves with hundreds of square miles of forest, stream, lake and river.