Iowa City Press Citizen November 27, 2013

This year is my eighth Thanksgiving since I moved back to Iowa City, and I’m giving thanks for that.

How did a Pennsylvania boy get to Iowa in the first place? In 1977 I was in Ghana in the Peace Corps when a professor I worked with there invited me to study for a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa.

I’d visited Iowa before back in 1966. I’d taken a summer off from my education at Yale to try to “see the world” by hitchhiking around America. I’d crossed the country, been up and down the West Coast, and was heading back east when the $135 I’d left home with ran out. I was hitchhiking south from Sioux Falls, South Dakota when a driver from Jefferson invited me to roll out my sleeping bag in his town and earn some money selling subscriptions to a farm newsletter.

I’d say people in Jefferson found me a curiosity. On weekday mornings I borrowed my host’s old Buick to drive from farm to farm peddling “The Hotliner,” a newsletter aligned with the National Farmers’ Organization. And it wasn’t everyday that people in Jefferson had an Eastern Jew from Yale sleeping on their neighbor’s front porch, and attending Sunday morning Church and Wednesday evening Bible Study sessions as a guest of his host’s children.

I met a lot of good and thoughtful people during my weeks in Jefferson. Everyone treated our differences with respect and curiosity. When I left Jefferson three weeks later I felt that same respect for the Christian way of life that was so much a part of their values and existence there.

My wife (from Ghana) and I were fortunate that in 1978, for her first residence in the United States, we landed in Iowa City. Interracial families like ours weren’t all that common in those times, and we found Iowa City a welcoming and tolerant community. We spent six years there before I went back overseas for 22 years of humanitarian work around the world. At the end of that time, we still felt like Iowa City was home and decided to come back.

“Idaho?” my international cosmopolitan acquaintances demanded when they learned of my decision. “You must be kidding!”

“Iowa,” I would correct them, and try to defend my decision. They refused to believe my glowing accounts about Iowa, however. It seems that even in far-away lands people get some news of Iowa, usually accompanied by a picture of the state’s self-appointed spokesperson, Rep. Steve King.

“Oh, he’s from Western Iowa, it’s different there,” I wanted to answer, but remembering my stay in Jefferson, I had to wonder whether that was really true.

I don’t know why King seems so addicted to controversy. I suppose that like Paris Hilton and the Kardashians, he’s learned that being outrageous is the fast-track to national and even global headlines.

Personally, I can understand and respect the conservative political philosophy and traditional values of many Iowans, east and west. I don’t understand the apparent pleasure King takes in demeaning others and giving a kick to those already down, however. Where, I wonder, did all that anger and hatred come from?

There’s an earthy proverb from my wife’s Nzema people in Ghana that roughly translated says, “Hate someone enough, and you’ll shit in your own pants.”

That’s what almost happened to America last month when King and friends convinced themselves they should close down the federal government. They also took us within a day of a default that would have thrown away America’s global economic leadership.

I’m giving thanks they stepped back. I spent a lot of years in parts of the world where civility and good governance had unraveled. Such experiences make you appreciate the blessings that Americans inherited, and that too many today seem to take for granted.

Let’s hope this time next year we can also be giving thanks for greater wisdom and compassion among those who represent us!