2025 might not be that bad

If you’re reading this, there is no avoiding 2025. It can’t be that bad. 2024 wasn’t the greatest, may old acquaintance be forgot. People poking in indiscreet places, a lot of that, and realizing late in the year Iowa might be terminally insane. Donald Trump promises to straighten out the press and already sued over an outlying Iowa Poll.

The new year surely can’t be as bad as 2020, right? Cats are keeling over from bird flu and we homo sapiens are right in line. Echoes. Oh, but it ain’t so nettlesome. At least there should not be an insurrection whenever Congress declares Donald Trump the victor. RFK2 has the bird flu covered, kiddos, so long as you eat right, and it will be nothing compared to measles and polio once we stamp out the vaccines.

The first week of the year will give me a road map into my aorta that bulges and up my malignant bum as I visit with doctors. So, if fate keeps its distance those worries should give way to new ones by St. Patrick’s Day. Like, will it be okay to breathe since we cannot have a vaccine that already has been developed for the new deadly virus? The fact is, we actually can do a vaccine and won’t deploy it because people in authority are afraid or incognizant or think the vaccines are made from green cheese.

Soon we will learn what Trump and his so-called czar — very Russian, indeed — Thomas Homan will do about all these immigrants who call Storm Lake home. They are filling up the schools with bright shiny faces and our main drag with businesses that pay rent and taxes. Sen. Joni Ernst says we should not worry. She spoke with Trump. They are just going after the criminals, she said. Except, anyone without papers could be counted criminal. You would not think they could be so stupid as to shut down food processing, but you seldom go wrong overestimating stupidity. There will be enough cruelty to impress.

Which reminds us that the legislature convenes in January. Revenue will be down $600 million, which calls for elimination of taxes and eventually those whiny teachers. Perhaps they can’t get it all done in 2025 because there will be a lot of other work to do: figure out how to keep transgenders out of girls’ wrestling., how to protect chemical companies from cancer lawsuits, and how to make the blind see that property taxes are not really going up. The potential to do great harm is overwhelmingly tempting without effective opposition. We may know by April how far they go.

Congressional deliberations will begin anew over a new five-year farm bill, which was extended through September. The House Republican caucus often is ungovernable so there is no guarantee of anything but legislation frozen in time to keep the corporate superstructure from experiencing stress. Who needs soil when you have oil?

Trump continues to holler about tariffs but the president of Mexico replied that road runs both ways, and then the relationship became much more beautiful, perfect, really. If Trump wants Mexico to continue preventing refugee caravans from showing up at El Paso, he should lay off deporting Mexicans, President Scheinbaum suggested. All the big players have operations in Mexico, she reminded him. Trump gets it. There will be cruelty, enough to get TV time but not to get in the way of business. Same ol’ same ol’. The business of politics is business since the Pharaohs built the granaries.

You can only sit here in the fog and hope for the best.

Yet we plan for the worst in a way that we could not imagine heretofore. Government officials high and low will pledge on a Bible to defend the Constitution but promise to prosecute people who improperly exercise their First Amendment right of free thought and expression. They are not afraid of Hell and there is room for them. When the president-elect is suing Ann Selzer of West Des Moines because he didn’t like the Iowa Poll, we are in the darkest times. This is how it begins. Trump vowed to bring retribution and won. I hope I am paranoid, but then there are the facts.

I take comfort in the fact that Storm Lake’s meat is needed, that cures are imminent, that we might not blow up the planet despite ourselves, and that Trump could get distracted with karaoke. That we could just dance the YMCA and party like it’s 1999. Remember Y2K? It never happened. It could be the best year ever. Maybe. At least they should get the dust settled down on the road next to the soy crush plant. The city and county might settle their tax increment financing lawsuit and learn how to live together. And the Vikings might win the Super Bowl.

Or not.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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