Flood

Last Friday, my sister and I spent hours mesmerized by footage on CNN that showed our home city in Iowa being decimated by the worst flooding it has ever known. The streets of downtown Cedar Rapids were under something like 15 feet of water. Traffic lights appeared to be floating on top of it. Movie Theater marquees were drowning in it. Cars and trucks were spinning around with metric tons of other debris and thousands of people were evacuated and subsequently lost their homes. It was all over the national news, and of course, being that the disaster happened in Iowa, the news editors featured only the most fat and backwards people they could possibly find.

Faded prison tattoos competed with farmer tans and beer bellies in newspaper photos of shirtless men with mullets rowing their canoes down the street. A morbidly obese woman with about eight grubby children was interviewed on CNN for a full minute. And, my personal favorite, the New York Times, bastion of unbiased journalism, made sure to mention that Leroy Shitkicker down on 19th Ave. had to pay his neighbor $10 to rescue him in a canoe. I am really glad that their readership now has such a true picture of the people I grew up with.

Let’s NOT mention the thousands of volunteers, many of whom had already lost their homes and businesses, sandbagging other peoples’ homes and businesses round the clock to try and save their neighbors from the fate they themselves had suffered. Let’s NOT mention that the evacuation was so well organized and the people so attentive to instructions that casualties are still only in the single digits after almost a week. Let’s definitely not mention the countless folks who went without showers, laundry, cell phones or excess drinking water for days to make sure those who were worse off than they were would have what they needed. Let’s not mention people like my Mom, who used her public relations budget at Barnes and Noble (she is a CRM at their Cedar Rapids store) to buy children’s books and puzzle magazines to take to all the shelters around town so people would have something to distract them from the loss of everything they have. No, let’s not mention that stuff. I know what we should write about! Did you hear about that dude who had to pay his neighbor $10 to rescue him? Those Iowans are sooooo backward….

Sadly, I am quite accustomed to my home state getting bashed, poked fun of, disregarded and otherwise marginalized. Usually by people who couldn’t find it on a map if it was the last round of “I Want to be a Millionaire” and they were up to the Grand Prize. (And their Lifelines probably couldn’t find it on a map either.) Iowa, like every other place, has its shortcomings, and if people want to bust its balls I guess that’s their business. I mean, obviously, I left for a reason. There isn’t a lot to do there. There are not enough different skin colors and there isn’t a whole lot of religious tolerance. There are billboards about Jesus and people picket the abortion clinics and it’s not that easy to get a good vegetarian meal. These things are true. But what is also true is that Iowans are some of the most pragmatic, big-hearted, neighborly people in the world, and if there is any group of people who can survive a disaster like this with grace and aplomb, it’s them. As much as my heart hurts for all the destruction and loss in a place that is as much a part of me as San Francisco will ever be, I know in the end it’s going to be OK for Iowa. And I hope that the media pays attention to what happens now, when the people bond together and work hard and steady and strong and rebuild everything they’ve lost. Maybe then people will start to get a true picture of that backwards place that is so easy to make fun of.

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