Could we just not be so mean?
Round and round the circular conversation goes, right down the drain between my neighbor and me:
“I like that DEI ban.”
Okay, I can work with that. We can just call it something else and look the other way. Now, could we please knock off the gay shaming and the book bans?
“I really like that DEI ban.”
Pipelines. Eminent domain. I’m okay with ethanol as a gateway to a renewable energy economy. California is burning down — it’s the climate, stupid! If you’re going to have ethanol, you need a pipeline for the CO2. Still, ethanol probably is not long for this world except in a bottle. And the whole schmear reeks of fermented big government. So I dunno. How bout you?
“I like that DEI ban.”
He was born and baptized into the Farm Bureau and bears a college degree. This DEI stuff means White Iowa kids don’t get the same breaks as Blacks or what have you. I have seen an entire regiment of doctors over the past year — surgeons, oncologists, cardiologists, urologists and my local doc. Not one of them was Black. I had a Black nursing aide inside the beating heart of DEI at the University of Iowa. And a Black hospital room maid.
So I really don’t care if you wear pink panties. Couldn’t we just agree about that? My property taxes are killing me.
“Banning DEI, I like that.”
This is sort of how it went. I could not push him over that hump: Can we get back to business? Our roads are not good. Where does the money go?
He was not saying that he tolerates queerness, probably because we just never have around here. He believes that the state is giving undeserving people a leg up. He quoted MLK: Content of character is what counts.
That was MLK wishing for the mountaintop, not a reflection on how far Blacks had come — if only you could imagine that the field were level, where character and merit were the considerations. No White person with desire and accomplishment has been denied his PhD by a Black Muslim woman in Iowa, where a Black woman is an aide or a maid, in the main. She is not a doctor or a lawyer or a druggist. Not in Storm Lake, for sure.
Thus it has been. I understand. I can nod my head as if I can appreciate the veil of tears worn by a White man with a quarter-section or more free and clear. His dad made it fair and square. Okay, I will stipulate. You’ve had it tough out there living off the farm bill in the wind and the rain.
So could we just not be so mean?
Nice fella. His handshake is solid, calloused and good on a promise. He would pull you out if you slid into the ditch. Way down deep he has differences with people who are different. He will take a government check but can’t abide it for lesser souls because he has this sense that somehow he is going to get screwed.
Sure enough, the power company is going to get the better deal on the solar or wind farm contract even though you stand to make 10 times as much than you would growing 200-bushel corn on that acre. If there were goats grazing you would just have to chase them. So if you want to forego that land payment, and you are committed to saving our precious topsoil to grow food for people in Sudan, I can roll with it. Call it common ground.
Such a shame that the City of Alta and the Alta-Aurelia School District had to break up their shared library because of this book-ban business. Alta might build a new library in the park. They had a good deal going, too bad, eh?
“That DEI stuff is no good.”
Does that mean that you would deny rights to a class of people? Just sayin …
Yeah, I think it does mean that, and I think it means we were reared to think that way around here, and I think that it is high time I quit thinking that this cultural dead weight is something we all are obliged to bear.
We are acting like right-wing nutcases. We are trying to turn back the sun dial and stuff gays back in the closet, denying civil rights to certain kinds of people. If DEI were a real thing, I would run across a Black doctor. So far, their lot in the hospital is to wipe my bum and change the sheets. That was with the full force of DEI and affirmative action at play.
If you can’t see that, and you think that it is okay what we are doing to your brothers and sisters in the Lord, then I honestly don’t know what we are talking about anymore. What is it that our troops are defending?
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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It must be tough to attempt a conversation with your neighbor. Back in 2000, my husband's life was saved when an Indian doctor (whom your neighbor would consider "Black") performed emergency surgery in the ER in a small town in Iowa. These days we're reminded of White privilege as we remember the awful way George Floyd died 5 years ago, begging for mercy, and after 9 and a half minutes, expiring under the knee of Derek Chauvin. We also know that Chauvin would not have dared to do the same thing in front of a crowd to another White man. This anti-DEI movement is what one might expect of a second Trump term: he's flailing about, wrecking the economy, attacking the universities, the courts, freedom of speech, while inwardly raging at his predecessor, Barack Obama, who despite"blackness" was and is infinitely superior.
Exactly..."What is it that our troops are defending?" The Democracy that never was...an experiment that failed...an idea that never came to fruition. Blame someone, the "Others" did it. Forget the roads that almost tear the tires off your car; forget the books being burned that you read in high school; forget the pipeline that will take you land; forget hungry children and lost jobs. We have priorities...right? A perfect depiction of an attempted conversation about reality, Art!!! What are we defending??? Thanks for always summing up my week! Good, bad, or ugly.