7/8 column: make healthy lunches a priority

Eight weeks after planting our victory garden, we are happily munching the fruits of our labors.

Oh, we’re a long way from homesteading. The radishes, for example — planted too many, too late and too close together — have the shape and consistency of a No. 2 pencil.

But we’ve had our share of successes.

The corn was shoulder high on the Fourth of July, and that eerie stillness you feel is a coming storm of tomatoes. The lettuce was delicious and abundant, and the nightly addition of salad to our dinner plates has done us some good.

But that darn Michelle Obama upstaged me again.

At a recent White House event, kids harvested 73 pounds of lettuce, 12 pounds of peas and one cucumber from her South Lawn garden, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in the 1940s.

Obama said she wants to help those kids, and all of us, understand the connection between our eating habits and our health.

Not to be outdone, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has signed off on weekly summer gardening workshops at the People’s Garden outside USDA’s Washington headquarters.

But the kitchen garden can be only one strategy in the fight for better eating. Not everyone has the time, space or the inclination to grow vegetables.

That’s one reason slow food advocates are ramping up efforts to change the way we feed our kids at school. The Slow Food USA organization is pushing for meaningful changes to the National School Lunch Program, which sets the standards for school lunches eaten by more than 30 million children each school day.

Iowa City slow-food guru Chef Kurt Michael Friese, a member of the Slow Food USA’s national board of directors, told me he wants schools to serve fresh, local foods, to get rid of on-site vending machines and go one better than just offering a few healthier choices — serve healthier food across the board.

We teach our kids about nutrition in health class, he said, then march them down to the cafeteria where we feed them cheap meats, over-processed carbohydrates and corn syrup.

He’s got a good point.

Naysayers say it would cost too much to serve healthier lunches, but I’m with Friese. It’s a matter of priorities.

“If you can think of anything in the world more important for the health of our children, I’ll be happy to sit down and listen,” he said.

How much is it worth to you to raise a healthier generation of kids?

7/4 column: the vision of independence

This Independence Day, I’ve been thinking about freedom and democracy, of course. But I’ve also been thinking about language, and about the act of thinking itself.

My friend Tina started it. That poor hostage to bureaucracy has been through more visioning sessions than any human should have to endure.

Which led her recently to ask me a funny, rhetorical question: How did the Founding Fathers set up this country’s framework without a mission statement, strategic goals, or a single MBA between them?

I laughed, then I thought, she’s right.

How did they drill down to those unalienable rights while maintaining targeted efficiencies?

How did they calibrate the brand to incentivize end users’ empowerment? What were their metrics? Who was their target?

The big three founding documents – The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights – are still powerful today because of their ideas, not their jargon.

They’re the products of study and reflection, of argument and debate. But most importantly, they’re the products of thought.

It took Thomas Jefferson more than two weeks to write the Declaration of Independence, an elegant document that not only still makes sense 233 years later, it can give you chills. He wrote:

“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

And then he did, laying out colonists’ grievances against old King George III in simple, declarative sentences: He has refused … He has forbidden … He has dissolved … He has obstructed … He has plundered …

And when the founders presented the document to the colonists, they didn’t hire consultants. They didn’t take a poll or target the message. Those Colonial Empty Nesters, the Fast Track Families, the Young Influentials all received the same Declaration – the one we celebrate today.

And today, every market segment is blurred into one big American mass, eating hamburgers, planting lawn chairs along parade routes and celebrating those founding principles.

We hold these truths to be self-evident – it’s not the visioning that matters.

It’s the vision.

7/1 column: give chickens a chance

Is Iowa City going to join the growing ranks of urban chicken communities?

Early signs are favorable.

Poultry proponents expected to hand over at last night’s city council meeting more than 700 signatures petitioning council members to allow chickens inside the city limits.

They want council members to approve up to five backyard hens, no roosters, in residential areas.

I can’t tell you how council members responded — the meeting happened after this column was put to bed — but it’s safe to say they won’t dismiss the idea out of hand.

I saw council member Amy Correia at a Saturday screening of “Mad City Chickens” — a documentary about Madison, Wis., chicken owners who pushed the city to allow the fowl there several years ago.

“I wasn’t really sure before going, but the movie made me think it’s a definite possibility,” Correia later told me. She said she’ll bring up the idea to council.

About 35 people attended the screening — kids, gray hairs, long hairs and others — evidence that more than a few people around here are interested in raising their birds.

I’ve never owned chickens, but I’ve baby-sat them for a friend. They are no more a nuisance than other common urban animals. You could favorably compare them to some — no offense, dogs.

Iowa City Animal Services Director Misha Goodman also has been looking into the idea, checking with other cities that allow backyard chickens.

There are more than you might think. According to the folks over at City Chicken, the birds are allowed in Des Moines, Sioux City and a few other Iowa towns, along with dozens of farther-flung cities as big as New York, Chicago, Albuquerque, N.M., and Portland, Ore.

Goodman wouldn’t comment yet this week on what her recommendations to council might be. She and Correia reminded me that nothing in city government happens overnight. So I’ll try to contain my excitement.

But I hope council keeps an open mind.

It wasn’t unusual for people to have chickens in town before World War II. In these modern times, people are becoming increasingly interested in knowing where their food comes from.

Raising your eggs is a logical step toward local and sustainable eating. Advocates say those homegrown eggs taste better, too.

You can find out more from IC Friends of Urban Chickens at www.iowacityurbanchickens.ning.com

6/27 column: Town still looking to Thomas for guidance

Across the country, hearts went out this week to the people of Parkersburg who lost a community leader, hero and friend.

Our hearts go out to Ed Thomas’ family, and to the Aplington-Parkersburg students who learned too early in life that good guys don’t always win.

Thomas wasn’t only a great football coach. He was a great man. His senseless murder, apparently by a former player, has shaken people who never even knew him.

Even worse is that the incident happened at the top of the town’s long, hard climb back up from last year’s devastating tornado — a recovery during which Thomas often led the way.

It defies explanation.

Most of us try to teach our kids good things will happen if they work hard and live an honorable life.

We teach them that, even though we know it’s not always true. Too often, circumstances are out of your hands.

Still, for as long as we can, we try to give them a world that is orderly and logical and fair — more or less. In Parkersburg, that simpler world was ripped away last week in a makeshift high school weight room, giving us one more reason to mourn.

The kids in Parkersburg will need extra support as they struggle in coming days and weeks to make sense of this violent and unexplainable loss.

Doubtless, it will take a long time for many to recover their sense of safety. Their faith in right and wrong.

But, like the coach told a New York Times reporter last fall: “You get beat up, battered, but you get back up off the ground.”

It’s no coincidence that people are using Thomas’ own words to comfort each other as they try to understand his death.

He was a man whose commitment, faith and ethics have inspired more people than he ever could have known.

He taught his players to be leaders, to support each other. “Do the right thing,” he would say. They listened, because he walked the walk.

Thomas knew the importance of being a role model, and this week there has been so much evidence of his influence.

You hear it in his family’s compassion for the family of the man accused in his murder.

You see it in the ways the community has come together in its grief.

You feel it when former students, colleagues, neighbors and friends describe how much he taught and how he inspired them.

Even in the face of this tragedy, you have to stop and wonder at a single man who made so much difference for so many.

It’s enough to make you believe in the good guys after all.

Local help on the payday loan front

In Wednesday’s column, I wrote about developing a better product to meet the local demand for payday loans.

Those short-term, high-interest loans are widely used in Iowa, but they can send cash strapped families into a financial tailspin.

In Des Moines, Citizens for Community Improvement and Bankers Trust partnered this spring to offer small dollar loans to low- and mid-income borrowers with less than stellar credit. I wondered if someone would be willing to do the same here.

Well, first thing this morning I got an e-mail from Scott Shook, Director of Horizons Consumer Credit Counseling Service.

He said that agency is willing to take an active role on this issue and he’s talking with staff this week about what that will look like.

The service already offers budget counseling and financial literacy programs in Iowa City/Coralville and in Cedar Rapids, and has been helping families in need for 26 years.

Stay tuned — I’ll publish more details as those plans develop.

6/24 column: Payday loan alternative needed here

Payday lenders promise a quick fix for a cash emergency.

But those short-term, high-interest loans are the rope that hangs many already-strapped households with unmanageable debt.

In 2007, Iowans took out more than 900,000 in payday loans. Almost half the borrowers took out these “emergency” loans at least a dozen times.

Industry advocates say the loans’ popularity is proof they serve an important need. But the Consumer Federation of America has compiled research that shows payday loan users often are worse off than similarly situated people who don’t take out that kind of loan — more likely to suffer financial hardship, to lose a conventional bank account, to also become delinquent on credit cards or file for bankruptcy.

Iowa legislators have taken several stabs at tightening the rules, as many states have, by limiting the number of loans borrowers can hold or the fees lenders can charge.

But while regulating the suppliers is important, we also have to take seriously the demand.

Enter Bankers Trust and Citizens for Community Improvement in Des Moines. They worked together this spring to offer 40 small-dollar loans to low- and midincome borrowers with bad credit.

CCI community organizer Chris Neubert told me it was flooded with more than 600 calls for information after announcing the program.

CCI offered credit counseling and worked with more than 100 applicants to develop a budget — a document Bankers Trust underwriters took into consideration when checking applications.

Most borrowers had credit scores under 580 and many used the money to get out of the payday loan cycle, Neubert said.

“We were seeing people with four, five, six payday loans for $500,” he said.

The bank loaned a total of $50,000 at 12 percent interest for terms of one to three years — compared with payday lenders’ two-week loans at an annual interest rate of 300 percent or greater.

CCI is looking for more partners to offer more loans in Des Moines. But there is clearly a demand here in the Corridor, too.

There are 18 licensed delayed-deposit lenders in Cedar Rapids, 10 in Iowa City/Coralville and three in Marion, according to the Iowa Division of Banking.

I wonder if anyone is willing to take the ball and start a similar program here.

It seems like a great opportunity not only to help people get through their latest financial emergency but also help them gain some traction on the road to financial security.

6/20 column: Country takes good with bad

Not to put down other towns, whose Fourth of July fireworks are really very nice. Whose cookouts and parades are lovely ways to celebrate our national birthday.

But compared with most, the 17-day-long Cedar Rapids Freedom Festival is a massive celebration. A diverse, sprawling hulk of a patriotic good time.

It’s a festival that asks: Who says we should have to choose between jazz and big band, between John Philip Sousa and Three Dog Night? Between baseball and cricket — and kickball and tug of war and bowling?

It is also a celebration of our heartfelt devotion for our country. That’s something we share, even though we sometimes disagree about the details — to put it nicely.

And it’s pretty cool that this granddaddy of all festivals spans Independence Day parts one and two. July 4 — when leaders stood up and said it was a self-evident truth that all men are created equal — and June 19, or Juneteenth — the day nine decades later that word of the Emancipation Proclamation finally reached the country’s last African-American slaves.

Because our collective freedom story isn’t captured in one holiday or the other, but in both together.

Even then, it’s not the entire story, of course. In the 233 years since declaring independence, this country has taken steps forward and back, bumping along as we conduct this grand experiment.

Still, I take heart when I think about our general trend toward acceptance, openness and freedom. There is a lot to celebrate this year and every year.

But that doesn’t man those missteps aren’t part of our freedom story, too.

U.S. senators unanimously passed a resolution this week, apologizing for this country’s shameful history of slavery and government-enforced racial segregation.

Some people will dismiss an apology that comes 140 years after the fact. Some will wonder, who exactly is apologizing, and to whom? Others will question what good it does when we still struggle with the seemingly simple idea that all people are created equal.

But collectively acknowledging one of our greatest backward steps is important precisely because we are a work in progress.

A truth may be self-evident, but that doesn’t mean it’s self-enforcing. Being clear-eyed about our history helps us move forward.

And being patriotic isn’t about choosing whether to be proud of our successes or honest about the times that we have failed. It’s both.

And it’s about working together to make the future even better.

6/17 column: In honor of Social Security

IOWA CITY — In some ways, the scene Sunday at a Lower City Park shelter was like any typical retirement party.

Picnic tables were loaded with cake and potluck dishes. People talked and joked in small clusters. Swing music played in the background.

But the photos tacked to the shelter walls weren’t of the man of honor, local activist and gadfly Gary Sanders. They were of Frances Perkins — President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, the first woman to serve in a presidential Cabinet, prime mover for massive sections of the social safety net — such as Social Security and unemployment insurance.

And there was Sanders, in his trademark pink short-sleeved button down and teal shorts, on his head a worn Hamburg Inn baseball cap and those owlish tortoiseshell glasses.

“We know so much about all the celebrities,” he told me. “And we know nothing about somebody like her, who literally changed everyone’s life in this country for the better.”

See it’s not a retirement party exactly. It’s a Social Security party, thrown by Iowa City’s hometown instigator.

Inside the shelter, local politicians, activists, labor folks, city staff and journalists mingled with Gary’s friends.

“You don’t really meet Gary,” a woman said when I asked how she knows the Iowa City icon. “You just learn of Gary.”

A man dressed as Uncle Sam asked if I wanted my stimulus package. “Sure,” I answered, so he reached into a burlap sack and pulled out a penny.

The Social Security Act turns 75 next year. And while we all know it’s got problems, it’s still one of the country’s most-supported public programs.

Sanders expects to collect his first Social Security benefits today, thus the party.

True to form, it was a goofy event with a serious message (Sanders has been known to preside over political candidates’ forums wielding a large baloney, as an example).

We take these beloved public programs for granted, but they didn’t come easy, Sanders reminds me.

He said he sees some contemporary parallels.

But he shrugs me off when I try to get him to talk about another obvious parallel — a certain local man who isn’t afraid to get in people’s faces when he believes in something. A man who is not afraid to be a little silly to better drive his point home.

“When you see something that’s wrong, you have two choices,” he said.

“You either complain about it or you do something about it. That’s it.”

6/13 column: Hate speech matters

James von Brunn’s apparent murder of Stephen Tyrone Johns, a guard at U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on the National Mall, was this country’s third act of domestic terrorism in less than two weeks.

The murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, the murder of one soldier and injury of a second at a Little Rock, Ark., recruiting office and this most recent incident — all were symbolic attacks designed to frighten and intimidate us to further a political end.

That those ends were wildly different is irrelevant. It’s the tactics that make the terrorist, not the ideology.

For decades, white supremacists and other extremists have used the Internet to spread hateful propaganda and promote violent resistance against their imaginary enemies. It takes just a little Googling to find von Brunn’s paranoid and racist tracts online.

But you don’t have to peek into dark digital corners to find the hate. In a June 3 column, Ann Coulter wrote that Tiller’s death made the score “49 million to five,” comparing estimated numbers of abortions performed to abortion doctors murdered since the passage of Roe v. Wade.

“I wouldn’t kill an abortionist myself,” she wrote, “but I wouldn’t want to impose my moral values on others.”

Sarcastic, sure. But harmless? It seems to me that kind of venom doesn’t just derail public debate, it lends credibility to extremists.

Few pro-life Americans would advocate murdering a doctor any more than they’d advocate the murder of military recruiters or security guards. But it’s a sticky question in a free society — what do you do with people who insist on preaching hate?

As much as we’d sometimes like to, stifling hateful speech is not usually the right response. But neither is ignoring it.

As former Aryan Nation recruiter turned civil rights activist Floyd Cochran says, silence and apathy are hate groups’ greatest allies. “Organized white supremacy groups are counting on you to do nothing,” he says.

The same can be said for others — professional and amateur — who preach hate, no matter who their target is.

Most won’t ever turn violent, of course. They’re all talk.

But for too long, we’ve allowed them to take up more than their fair share of the conversation.

It’s time for the rest of us to speak up.

6/10 column: Fading memories of flood

A year later, it seems impossible we ever might forget the relentless water. The fear and uncertainty. The smell.

Last summer’s flooding is still fresh in our minds during this anniversary week as we continue along a sometimes agonizingly slow road to recovery and renewal.

But time has a way of dulling even those memories etched during powerful and singular events. As years pass, we’re left with bits and pieces — letters, newspaper accounts, our increasingly fuzzy recollections.

So a number of local folks have been collecting and cataloging flood stories and images to make sure they aren’t lost.

In Iowa City, the University of Iowa Library system worked with students and faculty, and StoryCorps, a non-profit group devoted to recording and preserving oral histories of everyday people, to record flood-affected people’s experiences.

Those interviews, online at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/flood, make you realize just how fickle our brains can be. Only a few short months after the event, memories started to fade.

In one Oct. 7, recording, Judy and Kenneth Miller talk about the flooding of their Cedar Rapids home:

“You told me to walk down by the river, by the levee, when I walked the dogs that night,” Judy says. “I did and it looked pretty bad. It was evacuated all the way to Fifth Street, four blocks from our house.”

“Well, didn’t you have to go get your car out of the parking lot that already had flooded, before you came home?” Kenneth asks.

“Yeah, I forgot about that.”

In another, David McGraw, stage manager for the UI theater department, talks about vacating that building.

“Weren’t we there?” AmyRuth McGraw asks him on the tape.

“Right. You were there to kind of drop off something.”

“I think Paul and I came down to — I forget — we were all there, though.”

Our flood stories still are unfolding. Our recovery is far from over. But as we mark our progress on this anniversary, we also can preserve our memories.

The Carl and Mary Koehler History Center in Cedar Rapids has collected hundreds of flood photographs. To donate your photos, contact Beth Miller, (319) 362-1501 or beth@historycenter.org

At The Gazette, we’re collecting your flood stories and our own at www.iowafloodstories.com/blogs/ You can submit your story online or contact Jamie Kelly at (319) 399-5956.