iowa I
I think it’s safe to say that I was totally unprepared for Iowa. In a way, I guess that’s akin to saying that one was unprepared for the moon- it’s hard to know how to be prepared for something so unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I arrived Friday and drove straight to Ames for lunch with two wonderful friends, and spent the car ride up there trying not to hyperventilate. Perhaps it’s my mountain blood, but the flat landscape unnerved me in a way I hadn’t expected, made me gasp theatrically at every field of corn and soybeans I passed (and believe me, they really do go on forever, and fill every available space. Even the strips along the highway are that deep green or gold-topped hue). Like the dumbstruck east coaster I am, I stopped along the highway to take pictures.
I came for the conference of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a group that I can honestly say is the most energetic, passionate group of activists I’ve ever been around. (I know- I’m waxing hyperbolic. I think Iowa does that to you, though; once you’ve tried (and failed) to accurately describe how much corn there is, there’s just no way you can go back to words of a normal scale). Friday night started out with a dinner and speeches by a few long-term ICCI members who blew me away with their energy. In a complete 180 from the activist groups I’ve been part of in the past, I was by far the youngest person in the room, aside from a few kids whose parents brought them along, and a few of the younger ICCI staff. The group began 31 years ago working on redlining in Des Moines and has expanded to work on other urban issues like predatory lending, and on rural issues as well (helping communities keep out factory farms, resist eminent domain takeovers that benefit private developers, etc). In recent years, they’ve created a program focused on issues specific to Iowa’s growing Latino population. That means lots of work on labor conditions and labor rights, often in meatpacking and other assembly-line plants.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the group is how it’s clearly grown and transformed over the years to accommodate new but parallel issues (predatory lending work evolving into resisting exploitative livestock growers’ contracts, for example), and how the members have evolved as well. At a barbeque on Saturday night at the director’s house, he described it to me as the slow expansion of each members’ sense of what constitutes their community. People get involved because of something that’s happening in their town, maybe even next door, but they stay involved because they recognize the parallels between their own experience and the experiences of others. That awareness broadens their sense of community to include other towns fighting factory farms, and then urban residents being taken by banks, and then-- now-- immigrant laborers with whom they often don’t even share a common language. Even looking in from the outside, I sensed the power of the members’ understanding that universal structural inequities bound their individual experiences together. They act on that understanding collectively, too, which is one of the reasons they’re so effective. Lewis Lapham, the keynote speaker on Friday night, chose a great quote from William Sloane Coffin to describe this phenomenon: “To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.” ICCI, he said, was definitely loving. The democratic party was sentimental. Touché.
I came for the conference of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a group that I can honestly say is the most energetic, passionate group of activists I’ve ever been around. (I know- I’m waxing hyperbolic. I think Iowa does that to you, though; once you’ve tried (and failed) to accurately describe how much corn there is, there’s just no way you can go back to words of a normal scale). Friday night started out with a dinner and speeches by a few long-term ICCI members who blew me away with their energy. In a complete 180 from the activist groups I’ve been part of in the past, I was by far the youngest person in the room, aside from a few kids whose parents brought them along, and a few of the younger ICCI staff. The group began 31 years ago working on redlining in Des Moines and has expanded to work on other urban issues like predatory lending, and on rural issues as well (helping communities keep out factory farms, resist eminent domain takeovers that benefit private developers, etc). In recent years, they’ve created a program focused on issues specific to Iowa’s growing Latino population. That means lots of work on labor conditions and labor rights, often in meatpacking and other assembly-line plants.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the group is how it’s clearly grown and transformed over the years to accommodate new but parallel issues (predatory lending work evolving into resisting exploitative livestock growers’ contracts, for example), and how the members have evolved as well. At a barbeque on Saturday night at the director’s house, he described it to me as the slow expansion of each members’ sense of what constitutes their community. People get involved because of something that’s happening in their town, maybe even next door, but they stay involved because they recognize the parallels between their own experience and the experiences of others. That awareness broadens their sense of community to include other towns fighting factory farms, and then urban residents being taken by banks, and then-- now-- immigrant laborers with whom they often don’t even share a common language. Even looking in from the outside, I sensed the power of the members’ understanding that universal structural inequities bound their individual experiences together. They act on that understanding collectively, too, which is one of the reasons they’re so effective. Lewis Lapham, the keynote speaker on Friday night, chose a great quote from William Sloane Coffin to describe this phenomenon: “To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.” ICCI, he said, was definitely loving. The democratic party was sentimental. Touché.
posted by elanor starmer at 8:26 PM
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