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It sounded like the roof was going to rip off at 1 a.m. Friday. Ferocious straight-line winds knocked out power to some 6,000 households in Buena Vista County. When daylight broke we could see the damage: power poles and lines down, huge trees uprooted, the roof ripped off big buildings.
It came without warning yet nobody was reported hurt. Given the number of trees down you would think property damage would have been more severe. There were many close calls.
Emergency crews worked to restore power quickly. Irving Street had lights on by noon Friday. That’s pretty amazing with all the damage. Fortunately the temperature was moderate. The outage reminds us how vulnerable our systems are to increasingly extreme weather. Resiliency should be top of mind but it has a price. Twelve hours without power makes you think in the dark about the investments we have not made in our energy security.
Chain saws sounded with the light. Neighbors came out to help each other. Men roamed the sidewalks offering assistance. It brought out the best in us. Goodness prevails. You can take comfort in that on a Good Friday that certainly invoked self-denial and supplication — please, God, let there be electricity and light.
Our congratulations and gratitude go to Rep. Steven Holt, R-Denison, for shepherding legislation that will protect free speech from frivolous litigation. The Iowa Senate last week approved legislation that Holt has pressed since 2018 protecting speech against the threat of “public participation” lawsuits.
Pipeline opponents, including former Congressman Steve King, R-Kiron, have been threatened by corporations with lawsuits for advocating their position. The Carroll Times Herald was nearly sued out of existence by a defrocked police officer on a meritless claim. Politicians have taken to suing critics instead of debating them. The truth cannot afford its own defense.
The House passed several versions of the bill but it could not pass the Senate. This year it finally did. It is a victory for vigorous debate in a free society. Fight speech with speech, not lawfare.
The Trump Administration is arresting people for exercising their First Amendment rights. Immigration agents have been rounding up international students with visas and threatening to deport them for participating in campus protests over war in the Middle East.
Men who simply wear the wrong baseball cap have been swept up and shipped out to a prison in El Salvador without a hearing. You can disappear into a black hole for wearing the wrong clothes.
People who are Brown are on notice: You could be next if you say the wrong thing or don’t toe the line. Our friends tell us they feel it. They lie low. They don’t go out or speak up.
President Trump has said that he wants to eliminate birthright citizenship. That suggests anyone could be deported anywhere for any reason if it pleases the regal authority. He wants to deport American citizens to foreign prisons, never to be heard from again. Citizenship becomes arbitrary.
The administration is thumbing its nose at judges who demand the return of those deported without due process. It insists that federal district court judges cannot regulate what it does with immigrants. The supreme court has been reluctant to wade in as appeals courts express their disdain repeatedly in formal opinions. It doesn’t matter. The wrongly deported are not coming back, the White House proclaimed.
We aren’t approaching a Constitutional crisis. We are in one.
We are setting aside basic legal rights — the right to a hearing on criminal charges, for example —that the Constitution extends to all persons, citizen or not. We are dissolving the concept of separation of powers as Congress cedes authority to the executive, and the courts are left ignored. Trump claims immunity from wrongdoing.
Wishing immigrants away reflects well in polling, but denying our rights is disturbing the body politic. Millions of people are taking to the streets to protest a king in the making who can send his subjects off to a penal colony at his whim. We fought a Revolution over that, and its spirit cannot be doused by this maladroit president drunk on power. Elections in 2026 can restore Congress as a check on this reckless abuse.
City officials want to blame the state for the fact that they cannot manage to keep the public library’s hours intact. The budget whacks $37,000 from library operations next fiscal year, which will result in a 2,000-hour reduction in service. We do not have sufficient funds for a normal library. Let that sink in.
We do have funds for a kiddie festival and breakfast with Santa but not the library or its housemate the Witter Gallery. Each long has been abused by city hall because they are not of city hall. This is Storm Lake, one of the leading communities in Iowa, and we are not committed as a community to a modest art gallery. Patrons of the library have a voice that is not heard.
The point of a library is to make books and such available to the public. If we ran government like a business, as so many people insist, then the library would be open until 10 p.m. like a Casey’s General Store. Or at least 9 to 5 like a Main Street operation. If may be forgotten by those setting up the breakfast with the jolly old elf that working people would like to use the library in the evenings and on weekends when they are not grinding it out.
Other communities our size can run a decent library and not choke you with water rate increases and increasing property taxes. The city says that its budget is hamstrung by property tax conundrum. The city can hardly claim that it is not managing its resources well.
Libraries are luxuries for the ignorant, necessities for a democracy, which is why they suffer at the hands of the Storm Lake administration.
“It needs to be said clearly: There are those who systematically work by all means to drive away migrants, and this, when done knowingly and deliberately, is a grave sin. nn“I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of goodwill, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters. With charity and clarity we are all called to live in solidarity and fraternity, to build bridges that bring us ever closer together, to avoid walls of ignominy and to learn to give our lives as Jesus Christ gave his for the salvation of all.
“The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all — as I have affirmed on numerous occasions — welcomes, protects, promotes and integrates the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable.
“There has been a tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation. They are not recognized by international conventions as refugees; they bear the loss of the lives they have left behind, without enjoying any legal protection whatsoever. Sadly, there is widespread indifference to such suffering. Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded.
“God asks each one of us: ‘Where is the blood of your brother that cries out to me?’ Today no one in the world feels responsible for this; we have lost the sense of fraternal responsibility; we have fallen into the hypocritical attitude of the priest and of the servant of the altar that Jesus speaks about in the parable of the Good Samaritan: We look upon the brother half dead by the roadside, perhaps we think ‘poor guy,’ and we continue on our way, it’s none of our business; and we feel fine with this. We feel at peace with this, we feel fine! The culture of well-being, that makes us think of ourselves, that makes us insensitive to the cries of others, that makes us live in soap bubbles, that are beautiful but are nothing, are illusions of futility, of the transient, that brings indifference to others, that brings even the globalization of indifference. In this world of globalization we have fallen into a globalization of indifference. We are accustomed to the suffering of others, it doesn’t concern us, it’s none of our business.
“We ourselves need to see, and then to enable others to see, that migrants and refugees do not only represent a problem to be solved, but are brothers and sisters to be welcomed, respected and loved. They are an occasion that Providence gives us to help build a more just society, a more perfect democracy, a more united country, a more fraternal world and a more open and evangelical Christian community. Migration can offer possibilities for a new evangelization, open vistas for the growth of a new humanity foreshadowed in the paschal mystery: a humanity for which every foreign country is a homeland and every homeland is a foreign country.”
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