The devil is working overtime

Children are dying from gunfire in school. Waves of refugees uprooted by drought and famine are knocking at the door. And we find ourselves obsessed with drag queens and legislative decorum. Jesus rolled back the stone to get our attention: Love your neighbor. The Savior walked on water and we crucified him. Still, he came back for a brief visit with skeptical apostles to reinforce the message that it’s up to us mere mortals now, and that all things are possible. On Holy Thursday the Tennessee House expelled two Black representatives for staging a protest from the House well over a refusal by Republicans to consider gun safety laws following a mass shooting in Nashville. A third representative who joined the protest, a White woman, was not voted out. The House had denied them the opportunity to speak, so they grabbed a bullhorn. They were guilty of being Black and trying to be heard. That night, I was fortunate to be asked to go on The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC. She wanted to talk about the crazy things going on in state legislatures in Florida, Iowa and Idaho. The Iowa Legislature has been busy bashing gays and the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Waterloo native Nikole Hannah-Jones on the history of Blacks in America, The 1619 Project.  Meanwhile, over the past several years of Republican control Iowa schools have fallen from near the top of the nation to the middle. Our rivers are polluted and we are losing soil at an alarming rate. The Newell Good Sam nursing home closed, along with dozens of other rural eldercare facilities, over insufficient Medicaid reimbursement rates. If we are consumed with the topic of who is using the women’s room, or if Susie might be bothered by learning how we obliterated Native Americans who lived here, then we don’t have to talk about how the Raccoon River ended up on the most endangered list from pollution. Jesus washed the feet of everyone. Pope Francis recently said that gays are not criminals, so why do we have to pass a law to preserve our moral order? He also said the Doctrine of Discovery, which legitimized slaughter of the Native people, is in fact illegitimate. It follows that our idea of dominion — of asserting control over people we deem as lesser (gays, trans people, Blacks, refugees) and all that we survey is illegitimate. I had just returned from a trip across the Great Plains, where the future of food production is under assault from decades of heat and drought. That’s the issue that nobody really wants to talk about. It cannot get a hearing in Iowa. Although transsexual rights had never been a political issue in Iowa, all the sudden I am on TV talking about it. The moment demanded that we discuss how a national template to divide and conquer has been laid on our state so Gov. Kim Reynolds can be an attractive vice presidential candidate. While we’re banning books, your residential property assessment just jumped 30%  because of new rules from the Iowa Department of Revenue (a Reynolds operation). We did not have the chance to talk about how climate is driving a world food crisis, which drives refugee migration. That’s why Cubans and El Salvadorans are coming to Storm Lake, not because they are protected from being in the presence of gays. The trending news is not whether we are itching for a shooting war with China. It was whether Bud Light had gone queer. Jesus raised a glass with women of ill repute and surely would drink a Bud Light with Kid Rock or a drag queen. He would tell them to treat each other with a little decency, bring the children unto him and don’t mess up what God left you — everything you need if you only could see it. The devil is in the distractions. Art Cullen is the publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot. He won the the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 2017 and is the author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.” Cullen can be reached at times@stormlake.com.