What Republicans do

[Odin]

I ran into this Reddit post that I thought was relevant:

Quote:I spent the latter half of my childhood in Crawford County, Iowa - part of his district, and even handed out signage for him at the behest of a friend's family who had taken me in for a little while. That was probably his first reelection campaign, but I don't really remember.

This was all a while ago, and I haven't lived there since around that time, but it needs to be said that the Iowa that I am familiar with has a massive racism problem. This problem, at least at the time I was living there, was primarily directed at Mexican immigrants that flooded the area in the mid to late 90's to work at the many meat packing plants in the area.

Many of the "good people" I know from there are warm and generous with each other but still casually drop racial slurs and fail to see the problem with it, and refer to anyone who isn't white as if they might as well be a different species entirely.

I've just started John Darnielle's new book Universal Harvester, which is set in late 90's Iowa, and it sort of gave me an epiphany. The place isn't just rural and insular, but a lot of rural Iowa small talk and culture is based upon tracing genealogies back to each little parcel of land. The Iowans I know love nothing more than to talk about who used to do what, where they are now, who sold their farm to who. The idea of new genealogies mixing with the old; people they can't trace and places they can't find on a map - this is antithetical to the way some of them tether themselves to their world.

I don't agree with them, basically on any level, but it doesn't surprise me that King gets their votes, or that this racism has not gone away in the past 20 years despite immigrant communities being more established. The world keeps getting bigger, more mixed up and more connected, but if given half a chance I know a lot of Iowans who would reset the clock back to 1992 and merrily sip their gas station coffee while talking about their neighbor's uncle who moved in with his girlfriend in the next town over. That's all the world some people want to know.

The bolded part struck me because it reminds me so much of where I grew up in western Minnesota.