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Waiting and wondering

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My friend has never voted in over 20 years. He is smart, socially engaged, follows the news closely, owns property and pays plenty in taxes. He has issues with government, for sure.

He thinks his vote doesn’t matter.

It’s the morning after by the time this reaches you via the US Mail. The results are not even close to in as this is typed. Except for the weather, Storm Lake rose the same today as it did on Friday. The last of the corn gets harvested. Hogs meet their maker. Basketball practice starts.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Nobody came for our guns. Nobody stopped the shootings in school, either. Democrat or Republican. The inexorable rural loss continues no matter the administration.

Cairo, Ill., watches the rivers run, where the Ohio meets the Mississippi, and as such was a bustling shipping point until shipping changed. Nearly 20,000 people lived there, now it’s 1,700 people, a broken-down historic town walled by levees. Paul Farhi, recently of the Washington Post, filed a report from the southern tip of Illinois for the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University about Cairo being in a county without a local news source.

“First impressions of the place aren’t promising. The highway through town and the main drag, Washington Avenue, are studded with crumbling storefronts and abandoned brick buildings. Commercial Avenue, once the heart of Cairo’s retail and business district, isn’t so much abandoned as vaporized. Grassy lots stand where local stores and chains like JCPenney and Kresge opened their doors,” Farhi wrote.

On a drive through the region last spring I was stunned by the abandonment and decay. You see the same thing happening on the Great Plains, isolated rural towns hollowing out. It is something of a natural ordering, we could suppose. The river rolls past Cairo and the wind blows over western Kansas.

Two-thirds of Iowa has been slowly emptying out over the decades. Elections tend to confirm the trajectory. These are places that the benefits of all that free trade have a hard time finding. The median income in Poplar Bluff, Mo., not too far from Cairo, was just $37,000 per year in 2022, half that of St. Louis. I was there on a May Saturday afternoon, the only vehicle downtown.

What have politicians done for Cairo or Poplar Bluff? Or Quimby and Washta?

People in the Walmart economy feel like they are grinding it out. That isn’t changing, some 40 years in the making. We won’t run off the immigrants anytime soon. They will be kept in the system’s limbo for its convenience, supported by both parties. There is little evidence of any great appetite by either party to upset the corporate apparatus.

Hurricanes will blow off the hilltops and we will frack for oil in North Dakota. Guaranteed. I do not need to see the election results to know.

Property taxes will go up. So will your water and sewer bill. Income taxes may go down except for folks like me who can’t scratch up enough income to merit taxation. We get to pay in sales taxes and stiff rents for high property taxes in Storm Lake. That equation is pretty well set. There were no courthouse races or legislative races. Status quo. Congress eventually will pass a farm bill that protects the existing corporate structure, if bipartisan history is our guide. You get what you got. The parlor game question in Iowa becomes: Will Gov. Kim Reynolds run for re-election? Will Sen. Chuck Grassley serve out his term? We are now into the 2026 midterm cycle.

My friend follows most of it but stays sane through indifference. Que sera. Make the best of it. They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. He is not without hope. He just believes that money orders things. He did not have to stay up late Election Night. He worries about climate change and drives a hybrid electric, he likes conservation programs that promote wildlife so he can shoot at them, and he can’t stand bullies. He just can’t see how he fits into a political system controlled by money. Why get your undies in a bundle?

It’s a vantage point few consider, but which makes some sense the morning after as you wait and wonder what is next.

Editor's Notebook, Art Cullen

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