Back to the Future

Yesterday, I took a drive to my old hometown of Portage, Wisconsin. It was a shocker, for the town has declined visibly.

At the Kwik-Trip I briefly visited with a young clerk, who said he moved there from Sun Prairie at age 3. He stated that the town has become “rougher.” I concurred.

The key is lack of jobs. The “Rust Belt” has caught up with the town. Gone are the blue-collar jobs that underwrote a healthy lower middle class, blue collars, and a vibrant middle class, white collars (in which my parents were).

I left with a realization that my links to the town are now gone, for change has happened. What was no longer exists, except in my memories.

I came also to realize that I now, thankfully, live in Mt. Horeb which is miles ahead of Portage, is economically sound, vibrant, and feeding off the nearby high-tech, billion-dollar Epic medical software applications in Verona.

Also, high-teach, bio-teach UW research park 2 is slated to take root at Junction Road, which is 20 miles from Mt. Horeb. Its prosperity, the economy of the future again, not the gone-forever rust belt cheap labor manufacturing, the stuff of old Portage, is rooted in information systems and biotech systems.

These are the engines of the coming new economy of the 21st century.

In other words, I have come full circle. I started in Portage, Wisconsin, a vibrant community of the 20th-century industrial economy, and am now ending in Mt. Horeb,Wisconsin a vibrant community of the 21st-century knowledge economy.

As I drove back from Portage to Mt. Horeb, a distance of sixty miles, I realized that I was in fact driving home on many levels.