Dispatch from a Red State
Why stay?
In 2016, the narrative about the election was that blue-state liberals lived in a bubble. That’s why they didn’t see the election coming. SNL mocked liberals with a skit called “The Bubble.”
“The bubble is a planned community of like-minded free thinkers and no one else,” said Sasheer Zamata, playing a real estate developer in the skit.
Articles from blue-state liberals who moved to red states extolled the homespun virtues of red living. If you want to make a change, move back to your little hometown in Iowa! That was the argument to liberals. Get out of your bubble.
All that advice was and is incredibly myopic.
Living in a red state presumes that your body is safe here. And many bodies are not. Queer bodies. Disabled bodies. Black and brown bodies. All of these bodies face risks living here.
Last year, a state house representative from Fairfield called the act of flying the trans flag over the Capitol the “rainbow jihad.” People laughed and made jokes. Raygun made a shirt. And it’s funny, until you realize he was dead serious. And it’s funny until you remember that he is actually in charge of voting on things like clean water and school-funding bills. It’s funny until you realize he was just re-elected.
I never fault anyone for moving to a place where they feel safer. A place where they belong. A place where they are not the one who is too loud, too gay, too much.
As a liberal who has lived in the middle of the country all my life, I have never been in a bubble. The county I live in, Linn, is one of the remaining blue strongholds in what is otherwise a very red state, but materially, that means nothing. A large number of my neighbors are Trump supporters. And yes, we talk.
After the election was called on Saturday, I took my kids to get ice cream and play outside at the NewBo Market. Even there, as we ran and played and danced, a family showed up with a small boy who was riding a dirt bike covered in Trump stickers.
The conventional logic of Iowa is that it’s purple. But as Laura Belin over at Bleeding Heartland argued, quite persuasively, Iowa is very red. “Some Iowa Democrats believed the 2016 election was an aberration, stemming from an aversion to Clinton,” she wrote. “According to that theory, we should have reverted to our norm once misogyny (or, if you prefer, Clinton’s unique baggage) was taken out of the equation. It didn’t happen.”
I have never chosen where I’ve lived. I’m a person who moved with her family and then moved with her husband. And now I am bound to this place because this is where my kids are. Some days all I want to do is move. To be very honest, I have dated the majority of available men here and even some of them twice. There aren’t a ton of jobs. And once, in 2009, when I applied for a job, my boss at the time, who didn’t know I was applying elsewhere, met the man I was interviewing with at the country club and they talked about my job application, and I didn’t get the job. Also, it would be nice to live in a state where my kids aren’t forced into school, so that maybe I could have had my sister over for Thanksgiving.
You know, sometimes it’s very claustrophobic when everybody knows your name.
Whenever I say this, I know it makes my friends here sad. People who love this town. People who are dedicated to it. People who have built incredible communities here with art, literature, and music.
But it’s a real feeling. And it’s a question people ask of me a lot. “Are you going to move?” “Why don’t you move?” Two weeks ago, as I walked out of my local bookstore, a woman I know, who is very active in local progressive politics, saw me and said, “I thought you would have moved by now!”
I talk a lot about this with my therapist. She is wonderful. But she’s also best friends with my PA and grew up with a friend of mine and knows a good friend of mine because their kids go to school together.
So, once again, last week, I was in her office, talking to her about how sometimes it’s not fun being recognized on your trip to ALDI to buy milk. Sometimes it’s nice to be not so cozy with your neighbors.
And she said something to me that I have been thinking about a lot: “This is your town, too.”
This town, this state, it belongs as much to me as it does to anyone else. I don’t know why I keep waiting around for Iowans to say I belong. I belong. I have now lived here longer than I have lived anywhere else. And truly, the problems here exist everywhere; it’s just easier to hide from them in other places. Maybe somewhere else it would feel less personal. Maybe somewhere else, I could go to a bar with a friend and not run into my divorce mediator, but also, maybe I would.
And I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the place you are, it belongs to you, too. Even if your state is run by a party that is actively undermining your rights. Even if you have to watch as local politicians annually debate your right to make your own healthcare choices. Even if you have to watch people who make your body and your life a joke get re-elected over and over.
I am here. And I love this town. And I guess, settle in, because I’m going to keep fighting for it.
Lyz, I appreciate that, and I have been there.
After 30 years, is IC my town? Meh. By force of personality maybe. It won't miss me when I'm gone. Do I belong in Iowa, is Iowa my place too? No. No, it has made that perfectly clear. There are excellent reasons why I can think of only three Jewish families, out of the hundreds I've known here, that are multigenerationally Iowan. I have, in my life, met one Black adult who grew up here, and his mother didn't. And he's gone now, off having a life with his adorable family. I can't imagine their coming back. These are very real questions as I slide into being old. In the "stay" column: Iowa is at the bottom of a housing well, I am not rich, and moving to anywhere I'd want to be is likely realistically out of reach financially, in part because of how Iowa treats single/divorced mothers. A word to the wise, btw: it is much harder to leave and go to places where the salaries are significantly higher if you're over 40-45, and much harder than that if you're over 50. Look after your future. May I point out that there are states where kids from families with incomes under "solidly middle-class" or so get free in-state tuition.
So there's that under "stay", and the fact that I've just put up solar panels and have a nice garden and can live here cheaply, and there are people here who've known me for 30 years. Also, I'm tired after working much too hard for two decades, and am not really anxious to start a new career elsewhere after convincing people that I'm not too old to work for them. Also, it's quiet, and that's a big thing; I've had enough of people walking overhead. And it's...okay. I mean it's not assaultive except in a micro, chronic way that's hard to notice day-to-day. Everything you need is here, if not beautiful. It's like a three-quarters life. And that's not going to change because it likes itself that way.
Under "go", there's...well, there's a lot, once I'm retired. The local hospital used to be a big "stay", but it's not a place anymore where I'd want to be if I weren't able to self-advocate. I'll have no family here. I have friends here, but I also have friends in other places. Most of my friends are in other places. And many of my friends here will leave. I would like to go to a real symphony without planning a Normandy landing. I would like to go to a serious museum because I have a couple hours free. I would like to be in a place where I never have to have a car again, though I will say they do a boss job with transit for a town this size. I'd love it if people wanted to visit. People don't come to Iowa from the places where most of my friends live, and frankly I don't blame them. It's hard and expensive to get to, and there's not much to do besides hanging out together. When I visit friends in cities, we see each other at night. During the day, they're working, we're out seeing other people and shopping and doing things. That's hard to pull off around here.
And yeah, I would like to feel like I'm actually part of a place. 30 years is a long time not to. For a while, I bought that garbage about how it was my problem, not somehow working myself in. But garbage it is. You go live in any actual city for thirty years, and that's your town, you belong there. Here, I don't see that it's in the cards.
You DO belong, and how funny is the idea that one must be in a certain place for a certain period of time to belong. When I lived in NYC there were two clear camps - it either took 7 years or 10 years to be a "New Yorker." I think they were all full of it.