Year of 25 Books: #24 - Methland

Methland was one of the last books I read this year and was the direct result of a recommendation a pharmacy classmate of mine made to me on Facebook. Before I read this book, I was not exceptionally knowledgeable about the meth epidemic. I knew that it was bad, that rural America had been hit disproportionately hard by it and that the pseudoephedrine laws in Iowa were a direct response to the rising number of meth labs. I figured that I would get an education. I didn't know the half of it.

What drew me to this book was the local connection. While it speaks about meth in general, author Nick Reding followed the meth problem in the eastern Iowa town of Oelwein. Oelwein is like a hundred other rural Iowa towns in that it has been pretty much forgotten in the new economy. Now that family farming is becoming a thing of the past and most of the money that is made from farming is not spent in the small towns surrounding the land, it was in danger of drying up and blowing away or alternately, exploding like so many of the meth labs inside its city limits.

Reding introduces us to a cast of characters in Oelwein - the mayor, the doctor with a serious alcohol problem and the county prosecutor whose parents still farm the land outside Oelwein are the main players in Oelwein's battle with meth. We meet meth addicts and meth producers. And what's amazing is that Reding treats all these people with compassion. He doesn't really make excuses for them, but he does understand that what's happening to rural America is very much a chicken/egg situation. Is rural America deteriorating because of drugs or are there drugs because of the deterioration? It's hard to tell.

But Methland is so much more than a story about meth in the Heartland. It's a scathing indictment of current economic policies. Reding is pretty ruthless in his indictment of "big food" - corporate farms that have bought up most of the land and the big conglomerate food producers that are now the only game in town. His tale of how Ottumwa became the meth capital of Iowa is all too familiar. Meat packing plant consolidated, union dismantled, wages slashed to 50% of what they were, benefits stripped. That hits right to the heart of a town's economic base. It's no wonder that many turn to drugs - either using or selling or both - in such a hopeless environment. (An aside: I've been to Ottumwa. It does not appear to be as bad as Reding paints it, but hey, what do I know.)

A riveting book that deserves to be read (despite a few factual details that this Iowan picked up), this was more than worth my time. Thanks to Alisa Shields for the recommendation!

Is it over yet?

I think this has been the longest election season in history. Tomorrow is Election Day and I have had enough of this. I almost don't care that the Democrats are going to get crucified in the election tomorrow. I just want the whole bloody thing to be over with. That way, the ads (which I think have been particularly horrible this year) will finally be off the airwaves. Seriously, they have been the worst ever. You can see it even on the local level. One ad I heard on the radio today was talking about how a candidate for either the Iowa House or Senate was a wife beater and a deadbeat dad. Now, if this is truly the case, well, sure he probably shouldn't hold elected office, but how much of it is true and how much of it is typical election season hyperbole? You really can't believe ANYTHING you hear any longer.

I was talking with Matt last night who is a political junkie. We talked at length about what is probably one of the more heartbreaking races here in Iowa - the vote to retain three of Iowa's Supreme Court justices. As most everyone knows, in April of 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously struck down the state's marriage law defining marriage as between one man and one woman, making same-sex marriage legal in Iowa. This (predictably) got the social conservatives' undies in a bunch, particularly perennial also-ran Bob Vander Plaats. After losing the Republican gubernatorial primary to Terry Branstad, he made ousting the three Supreme Court justices who are up for retention this year his raison d'etre. Never mind this won't change the law. Never mind that no justice has been ousted in Iowa history. NOT ONE.

It's no secret around these parts that the Supreme Court decision that allowed all Iowans to enjoy the benefits of civil marriage and not just the ones that happen to be heterosexual made me very happy. So the fact that 37% of those polled favored ousting all three judges vs. 34% who favored retaining them made me a little sad. (10% favored retaining some and I have no idea what the remainder would do.) What this really is is a referendum on marriage equality - make no mistake about it. Put to a vote now, I have a feeling that a constitutional amendment would pass. It would be a squeaker, but I think we'd succeed in putting discrimination into the Iowa Constitution.

But it's not just the question of judicial retention that has me on pins and needles. House and Senate Democrats have been pretty successful at blocking a vote on a constitutional amendment defining marriage as one man-one woman. Republicans promised to make it a campaign issue and honestly, I haven't seen it much. Granted, my House district is heavily Democratic so we're likely to re-elect our current representative. Our Iowa Senate candidate is a bit more of a toss-up. If you were to go by yard signs, I'd say that he has a bit of a fight ahead of him. But that's the thing - polling numbers for races like that are virtually non-existent. So we won't really know until tomorrow night. The CW says that one of the chambers has the potential to flip to Republicans, and the other is safely Democratic (I forget which is which.) But even one chamber going Republican forces a vote in both chambers and I'd rather keep pushing that off. The longer we wait, the more likely an amendment vote is to fail.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a one issue voter. But this is a HUGE issue for us and one that we're heavily invested in personally. I take solace in knowing that I'm on the right side of history when it comes to this. But just because the rest of the country isn't ready for it doesn't mean that we should have to wait for them to catch up with us.

I've been saying over the last few months that Iowa is better than this. And we are! But tomorrow night I think I'll be watching election returns through my fingers as if it were a horror film. Wake me when it's over.

And just think, the 2012 presidential campaign will begin in earnest early in 2011. I can't wait.

Not what you'd expect from an amusement park

Every year we make the trip to Adventureland, an amusement park located just south of here near Des Moines. We've gone there ever since I was in the 6th grade when I went along with the safety patrol at the end of the school year. Like I have written before, my first encounter with Adventureland was the first time I'd gone to an amusement park that didn't require tickets for rides. You pay the admission, you ride till you're done or you puke your guts out - whichever comes first. I get massively discounted tickets through work so we go pretty much every year. As Anna said to me earlier this summer "Dad, it's kind of a tradition that we go to Adventureland." Yes, Anna, it definitely is.

We were supposed to go yesterday, but we got rained out. Fortunately, I had today off as well, so we simply rescheduled for today. The only hiccup was that tomorrow is the first day of school and Anna likes to stay until the very last possible minute. This was not going to happen today. So we got up early and got there not long after the park opened with the caveat that we were leaving at 5pm sharp. After some initial grousing about not being able to stay as long, she saw the light and agreed to the terms. This was a good thing as it was not a negotiable point.

She brought a buddy with her so she didn't have to hang with us oldsters and in the end, it was an especially smart move. I used to ride those rides like crazy. When I was a kid, there was no ride I wouldn't get in line for, even if I really was a little bit scared. I did take a long time to really warm up to roller coasters. I didn't actually ride the Tornado until the year after I boasted to my friends that I had done it, only to give a completely inaccurate account of the ride (based on the cartoon depiction of the coaster on the Adventureland map.) My deception revealed, I vowed to ride it the next year, which I did. After that, I rode everything and mocked those who didn't as sticks-in-the-mud.

Well, karma's a bitch because now it's me that's the stick-in-the-mud. Each year, I ride less and less. This year, I rode exactly four rides - the Giant Sky Wheel (100 foot tall Ferris Wheel), the Tornado, the Space Shot and the chair lift across the park. You can forget anything that goes rapidly around in a circle. My innards just can't take it. The Silly Silo (aka The Human Centrifuge) was the first to go. Now, even something as innocuous as the Tea Cups (modeled after the Mad Tea Party in Disneyland) leaves me feeling nauseous. As I have said before, I will not continue to ride that stuff just to say I can do it. I am over that shit. And Heidi, with all her aches and pains that randomly come and go didn't so much as set foot on anything save the chair lift.

So this year, Adventureland felt more like a sentence than something we were looking forward to. But Anna does love it so and as I have said, being a parent really teaches you the true meaning of the word "sacrifice" so we muddled through. We turned the girls relatively loose and sat on benches, talked a lot, ate crappy amusement park food, listened to late 90s music coming from a speaker near the Falling Star and really, despite our expectations, enjoyed the hell out of it. We enjoyed being together so much today. After a summer that has really felt like the Lost Summer, with me working a fantastic number of evenings and during which we never really established a good routine, it was nice to reconnect, even if it was over our lack of desire to spend one of the last free days of the summer at an amusement park we've been to so many times I need scientific notation to express it succinctly.

Heidi said to me today "you know, I feel like I should feel bad about not wanting to ride and not really liking this anymore, but honestly, I don't." I know what she was saying. We used to make trips to Chicago to go to Six Flags Great America and even up to my late 20s, I was still loving rides and all that. We kind of decided that we were glad we enjoyed it then. It's just like anything else, you grow up. Even this perennial boy-in-a-man's-body has realized that that part of me really isn't there any longer. It only exists in memory. I can still fake it a little bit, but each year it gets a little bit harder. My long-running joke is that I am 3 years away from having to sit in the car while everyone else goes in. The fact that I've been making that joke for 10 years should tell you that it's deliberately melodramatic. However, there is a kernel of truth in it.

I always remember my grandparents taking the entire extended family to Adventureland through my teenage years. They, of course, never rode the rides - at least not that I can recall. They were well into their 70s by then so it's no surprise that they didn't. Still, they went religiously, year after year just to be with family. Those are some of my most treasured memories of my grandparents, even though one year my grandfather did inadvertently belch in my face - something that was mentioned several times at his funeral a couple years back and still comes up in conversation to this day.

So here's to family and relationships and all that. Who knew that an amusement park had such a binding effect? We're not grandparents yet, but Lord knows I have enough gray hair to pass as one!


(I actually had to buy that hat today as I couldn't find my sunglasses and needed something to keep the sun out of my eyes. It's the first piece of distressed clothing that I've ever purchased unless you count stonewashed jeans in the 80s.)

Hyperbole

Things have been quiet around here over the last few days - on the blog at least, but not in real life. There's a really good reason for this - actually two, but they are related. We are working our tails off with One Iowa to make sure that a repeat of Prop 8 does not happen here in my home state. Also, I have hesitated posting here because this fight is very all-consuming right now and I don't want to fill this blog with daily posts re: marriage equality. That's why Heidi and I created this blog, which is where we're putting all of our activism for right now.

I posted this over there, but I simply must put it here. In reading through the news links this morning regarding marriage equality in Iowa, I found this. It is definitely in the running for the most blatant hyperbole I have seen yet on the issue. While I will give him props for mentioning how much marriage has been "attacked and dishonored" by heterosexuals (something sorely missing from most of the virulent anti-equality folks here in Iowa), the basic point is that his only argument against gays getting married is some moral imperative from an imaginary friend that I don't believe in.

Bottom line here is their only arguments are religious, and newsflash! - not everyone shares their religious views, and as such, the whole population of Iowa should not be subjected to their religious views being written into law. Conversely, the arguments for marriage equality are based on the rule of law and the Constitution of the state of Iowa, which was modeled after that of the United States, something that all of us as citizens should rally around.

Add that to the fact that the Republican caucus in the Iowa House yesterday simply redefined obstructionism by insisting that we not vote on the state budget but instead, vote on the marriage amendment. Fortunately, the Democratic majority stood strong, but they will be vulnerable next election cycle, especially with out-of-state money coming in for the opposition.

We have not yet begun to fight, but I will be there fighting every step of the way. Marriage equality is just the right thing to do and I'm proud to be on the right side of the issue.

In the meantime, ponder this. Which is more destructive? Loving people committing to each other and creating new families and social networks, or this?

It's no wonder I left organized religion. This kind of thing is just disgusting.