Centrally Located

I didn't know whether to giggle or gag or snort, so I did none of the above, and went right on quietly eating my pancakes and sausage at the Custom Mills/Midwest Farm and Dairy Supply annual customer appreciation event.

I didn't hear it clearly, but one person near me had apparently just made a pleased comment about the new school site that 75% of the people in our Beachy churches had voted for. The response from the person across the table was what got to me.

"Oh, I'm so glad too. It's so much more centrally located."

Yeah right.

Some time ago, when preliminary work was being done to select a building site, someone studied a map and located the residences of our church families, and determined that the center point, when all the extremities are plotted, comes out at the West Center Amish Cemetery. "The cemetery is where you end up," the moderator in a public meeting replied when someone asked where the center point is. (Very punny.) Obviously, to be centrally located, a building site should be near the cemetery.

I was pretty sure that the chosen site is no closer to the cemetery than the other options. The salient point in the comment I overheard, of course, is that the chosen location was much closer to the home of the person speaking than the others were. She is one of the many people who live between Pleasantview and Hutchinson. To many like her, who probably seldom travel west of Pleasantview, the area outside of Hutchinson beyond Pleasantview seems to them like the hinterlands. It's hard for them to believe that we who live here live as close to the center of the community as they do.

So tonight, with a ruler and the Reno County Farm and Home Plat Directory in hand, I checked it out. The selected site (which I will call option A) is, in fact .26 mile--one-fourth mile--closer to the cemetery than option B. It is closer by .7--less than 3/4 mile--than option C. So, technically, yes, the selected site is more centrally located. But so much more centrally located? Nah. Only seven tenths of a mile closer than the farthest-away option would have been, and one-fourth of a mile closer than the nearer location.

The person I heard talking was not showing ill will in the comment I overheard. Just ignorance, and revealing the tendency we all have to think that the part of the world most familiar to us is the most important.

I noticed the same thing in the maps in some of Hiromi's Japanese books. Guess what's right in the middle of the page on those maps. Asia, which includes Japan. The Americas are split vertically and appear at the left and right edges of the map.

After all the fussing I've done here, I should make clear that I am quite content with the school site 75% of the voters chose, and have no plans to circumvent the decision in any way. Even if it's not so much more centrally located than the alternatives, I believe it can serve the community well.