O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.

Robert Burns , Poem “To a Louse” - verse 8

Troup County has not been immune to the strains and struggles of the economic downturn and the Kia construction process has not been without its challenges and controversies. That’s a fact.

But folks in other parts of the nation look at West Point and the coming Kia job surge and see “a rare ray of hope.”

That’s the headline - and the message - of an April 21 article in the New York Times, the venerable “Gray Lady” herself.

Reporter Michael Luo, writing from West Point, describes opportunities for everyone from a handyman hired to “a lucrative job” hauling pallets away from the Kia construction site to a car wash that reports business is up 70 percent in the past year.

Debbie Williams, co-owner of Roger’s Bar-B-Que, says they upgraded to a new hardwood floor, thanks to the steady train of new customers. “It’s hard all over the place,” Williams told Luo. “But in this little bitty town, we’re so fortunate.”

That’s a fact, too. And a good perspective to cultivate.

Here are a few excerpts from the Times’ article. Think of it as a chance to “see ourselves as others see us.”

“While much of the rest of the country remains mired in the depressing grey of recession, this rural town (West Point) of fewer than 3,500 people on the Georgia-Alabama border, about 80 miles south of Atlanta, has somehow managed to draw the winning ticket in the nation’s economic lottery.

“A new Kia Motors Corp. automobile manufacturing plant is opening here later this year, an event that many residents of this former mill town, where life had slowly been ebbing away, can only describe as heaven-sent.

“Foreign automakers have flocked to the South, drawn by huge incentives offered by state officials, cheaper labor costs and the non-union environment. (In the case of Kia, which is based in South Korea, state and local officials doled out some $400 million in tax breaks and other incentives.) But this year, Kia’s will be the only car factory to open in the country, drawing workers to one of the few regions in the country now with concrete hopes of quickly escaping the economic downturn.

Kia has only hired 500 people at this point but is working its way through more than 43,000 applications it accepted online last year. Supplier companies that will feed the plant are ramping up their hiring in the area, too.

“We’re the only place in the nation that is fixing to put between seven and 10,000 manufacturing jobs online,” said Mayor Drew Ferguson IV, a 42-year-old dentist who is now charged with managing the town’s growth. “We are the place that has the light at the end of the tunnel.”

The wave of jobs is arriving just in time for a community that had reached a nadir after the textile mills that once anchored it began shuttering in earnest in the 1990s. When the Kia deal was sealed three years ago, Darren Kelley, a city council member, rushed over to the First United Methodist Church to ring its bell. Annie Davidson, 65, a lifelong resident, erected a sign on her front lawn, now visible to all driving down the community’s main drag: “Thank You Jesus For Bringing Kia to Our Town.”

Although the plant is not scheduled to open until the end of the year, the signs of revival are already unmistakable in West Point, which is set amid rolling forests of sweet gum, oak and pine, and is bisected by the Chattahoochee River. There is the bustling new Irish Bred Pub in the previously moribund downtown; the earth now being leveled for the town’s first new subdivision in 25 years; the new Korean restaurants, with their smells so strange to Southern noses, crowded with Korean workers and the occasional enterprising local, gingerly sampling the kimchi jigae.

“It feels like on the map we’re this little dot of hope,” said Dana Pope, the owner of the Twisted Daisy, a gift shop that is among several new businesses to open downtown. “The rest of the world is doom and gloom.”