Brains drain along our roiling rivers

At least we will have a 1,200-pound boar after the smart people bail. That’s Iowa.

We’re walking across the Iowa Women of Achievement Bridge over the roiling muddy river in downtown Des Moines when Sarah Booz says she is bailing if the midterm elections go sour.

She has had a snootful of right-wing.

Booz moved here from New York City with her fiancé so he could pursue art. They looked around. Des Moines is easy and cheap. They since found out that Iowa can be extreme in more ways than the weather.

Minnesota could be their next destination despite income taxes. Rochester is nice, she thinks. Booz believes the Land of 10,000 Lakes actually cares about whether the water can kill you.

Sarah says the state is forcing young people out.

Booz strolls with her bestie, LizFromIowa, known in Dubuque as Liz Fleming. They are “social influencers” being interviewed by a goat with receding gums. A dude with a backpack and manbun hails “Hey LizFromIowa!” as they meet on the bridge. So yeah, she’s firmly planted in Des Moines. She has a local @handle.

“I’m staying out of spite,” LizFromIowa says.

She has a TikTok following of more than 100,000. We should listen:

Young people think Iowa is Hicksville.

Yeah, well, so what else is new?

It’s getting worse. Our small towns repel young people. They can scarcely afford to pay off the student loans. Plus, you don’t dare swim at Saylorville with a toxic algae bloom. The people who actually choose to move here we scare off with our passive-aggressive politics. If you’re queer, keep it to yourself. If you’re Black, forget about it. If you’re an immigrant, Gov. Reynolds just called in the National Guard again.

We’ve never been that much to speak of, Idaho or Ohio or someplace just north of the Ozarks and Wichita. Let’s just be a pig sty so our excellence can stand out.

If you like hogs, well, let me show you the big boar at the Iowa State Fair! Twelve hundred pounds of who we are: stuck in the mud, waiting for a prod.

It’s not rock and roll but we profess to like it. Dubuque is a pretty place to be from, with a bar and a spire on every corner bluff. It’s familiar and old, like Chuck Grassley. They root for Caitlin Clark, who had to move to Indiana to make a living alongside the McCafferys. Hayden Fry caught the first train to Vegas to avoid income taxes.

They leave us behind, the ones stuck here because we wouldn’t know how to make it someplace classy, and took on debt to invest in rural Iowa. We’re getting stupider according to the standardized tests that actually are preferentially written for Iowans in Iowa City. Must be the socialist slant that is throwing us off. It couldn’t be that we drive interesting and smart people out — gays, for example, or young women from New York, or Mexican folk dancers, or gynecologists — and leave behind the dullards who cannot read and write so good.

We hate to admit that people are avoiding us. “Well,” they say as they stand and stretch, “places to go and people to see. Write when you learn how!” We lean on the shovel and watch them off. The Twin Cities are a hop and a skip from Rochester. Our daughter lives in Chicago along with her cousin from Dubuque. They are not coming back. They had their fill of backwards.

It was not always so. We did not forever foster a culture of stupidity whence Storm Lake can barely keep the library lights on. Iowans were not the sort to ban books. Or call out the National Guard because Salvadorans are stealing your job laying sod in Clive. (If you don’t put your foot down, pretty soon Salvadorans will be living in Clive. They will put cilantro in your food if you don’t stay on the lookout.) LizFromIowa was raised Iowa Nice, when we used to be the Education State, and the government was not making threats against Loras, Clarke and the University of Dubuque. Here is the really stupid thing: Catholics and Presbyterians are cool with it.

Not Sarah Booz and Liz Fleming, or countless other young people who don’t need a preacher watching their bedroom or a state telling you that Native American history is too divisive to teach our children. Or that the Des Moines River below is a toxic mess that might give you the heebie jeebies or cancer. Booz just bought a reverse osmosis system for her kitchen because she knows the water is not safe. All you have to do is look below for a clue. Unless there is change, she thinks she may just keep on walking. Iowa loses another woman of achievement and a young couple hoping to rear a family.

Okay, so they are your woke types. Who cares if either of them leaves? The big boar isn’t going anywhere. Our culture is undisturbed.

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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