Kansas City in the news

Our fair city came up in the news this afternoon, in a couple different ways.

In the first one I saw, it called us out for our school district shrinking. It had some big, tragic headline about how desperate we are--"Kansas City Schools Crisis" was the headline.

I beg to differ.

From the outside, maybe this looks and seems desperate and crazy but for those of us looking on, this shrinking of the KCMO School District is just the obvious thing we need to do right now. In a district that used to have 75,000 students, we now have about 16,000 so close schools we must.

Get over it.

Then, in the 2nd article about KCMO , it pointed out how we rank tenth, nationally, for not doing too badly in comparison to other cities regarding this worst recession in 80 years.

So good on us, eh?

Finally, not about Kansas City at all, there was an article about Detroit, Michigan and their problems.

Think we have it bad?

Think again.

The leaders of Detroit have proposed bulldozing up to one quarter of the city, in an effort to save it.

Detroit is collapsing from within. (Thanks, General Motors, for outsourcing all those jobs!).

We, by sharp contrast, while not exactly soaring, are nowhere close to that bad a shape.

I say again, too, that, come 2011, when the downtown Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts opens, the nation will come calling on us and we'll look pretty good, by comparison to a lot of other places.

Cheer up.

It could be a lot worse, for sure.