Dear President Obama:
Welcome to Elkhart County. We are honored you chose to visit our community for your first trip outside the Washington area as president.
Now, we know you came here because in an ailing nation, we are among the sickest. Our unemployment lines are long, our food pantry shelves are empty, and some of our neighbors have lost faith that good times will ever return.
But please, don't judge us as a community by our current condition. Our hearts are open, our hands are on our bootstraps, and we are trying to pull ourselves up. We did it before -- in the 1970s, during the oil embargo, and the early 1980s, when a recession choked the country.
We are weak. We are tired. We are frustrated, and sometimes the burdens of our struggles cause us to stop and cry.
The tears come because of the condition of our wallets, the condition of our factories, the condition of our neighborhoods. The weakness and anger come from filling out job applications but getting no response, from waiting for unemployment checks and from having to ask for help.
That is our condition. That is not who we are.
As a community, we are entrepreneurs and innovators. Starting in our garages we built recreational vehicles, manufactured homes, musical instruments and audio equipment. During the flu outbreaks at the turn of the century, we concocted a medicinal product that later became known as Alka Seltzer. Many of the industries that we nurtured are listed on the New York Stock Exchange, being exported around the world and adding to people's enjoyment of life.
As a community, we rebuilt tornado-ravaged Nappanee without assistance from the federal government.
As a community, we give even when we have little. Families who go to the Middlebury food pantry for canned goods when their unemployment checks are late, return to make a contribution when their checks arrive.
As a community, we are already back in our garages, creating the next industry. We make things and we are ready to work.
When you pulled your campaign bus into town in May, the county's unemployment rate was 5.9 percent. When you returned in August, RV companies were shedding workers, some were closing and the jobless rate had jumped to 8.9 percent.
Today, our unemployment rate stands at 15.3 percent.
This economic crisis has stopped our hands and idled too many local businesses. We don't want charity. We want the tools and the opportunity to form a new vision and build prosperity again.
Our optimism is tattered but not broken. Our history tells us we will get better, and when we do, we hope you will come back to see how we are as a community.