All In Thinking We Can

(This article is taken from the 1930 Rooks County Record and Stockton Review.)

The amount of progress a town makes and its ability to grow and prosper does not depend on its location or any exterior force. It depends more than any other one thing upon the attitude of mind and the spirit of its citizens. Look about and you will find towns that are favored in everyway, by location, natural resources and advantages that have not capitalized on any of these. They have, as it were, sat down beside the road and allowed other towns not nearly so well favored, to pass them in the race. They have become known as dead towns.

As a matter of fact, there isn’t any difference between a live town and a dead town, but the attitude of mind.

The dead town thinks there isn’t any use trying to do anything. As a natural result it quits trying. Once the spirit of the town dies, it is difficult to bring it back to life.

On the other hand, the town that gets the idea that it can prospers and grows. It gets the things that make it a modern city. They seem to come as a matter of course.

Many a town has pulled itself out of the rut and become a modern, wide-awake, progressive city, merely by changing its attitude of mind by thinking a little more along the line of “we can,” instead of always along the line of “there is no use, we can’t do it.”