An Open Letter to Iowa

There is sad absence of candidate voices that offer any real connection to a nervous America this season.  Regardless of party loyalties or economic demographics, we share a common tension this week as we watch the early polling.

Publicly we smile and show confidence in our chosen party or candidate, while privately we all mourn a light that has dimmed considerably. Iowans alone may determine who is the next President. This circumstance is a wonder to the remaining 298 million of us.  You will choose based on a campaign media onslaught the likes of which the rest of America has never seen.

But we know.

We know and we grow quiet this week as we watch and we wonder. We wonder if you even live in the same America as we do.

We wonder: Do you see through the posed Life Magazine style head-shots? We wonder, can you sacrifice a vote defined by faith in your religion, to cast a vote for a leader more likely to understand and thus protect the best interests of all Americans of all faiths? Do you parse out the shallow moments of smiling likability to see the rough insolence of effective warfighting global leadership?  Do you have the integrity to cross a line of loyalty, because you know in your heart that what is right is so distant from what is easy ? Can you look through the needle eye and distinguish a wealthy egoist from a humble honorable patriot? Will you in end vote for someone, or will you remain caught up in the storm of allegiance to party clique, and vote against  those you are now so well trained to despise? 

We offer you Iowans our hope this new year. Hope we cannot find in the embarrassment of dissemination our party machinery has become.  We drive through cities that have more cars than your entire state; more jobs; more criminals; more unemployed; more wounded veterans; more advertising signage; more poluution; more arts; more corruption; more greed; more steel; more churches and more sin than all of Iowa (and New Hampshire) combined.

We walk seashores you only see in fleeting visits and from them we watch the sun turn across a horizon shared with our allies, our rivals and our savage foes. We look across the empty place where the World Trade Center was, over a polluted bay to see Liberty's maternal host standing in darkness, shuttered by politicized fear. We watch over the parched borderlands and witness daily a human wave of (almost entirely christian) refugees from failed and failing nations to the south.

We close our eyes, and we feel sad, and we are nervous. It will be a tough year for America. It will be a tough decade. We hope you know that. We want to make certain you do know that we believe in Iowan's ability to choose, and choose well, because, for just this moment, you are all we can believe in.

Thanks for your consideration.