Categories
Environment

Bakken Oil Pipeline Pledge

BakkenPledge_v2_600px(EDITOR’S NOTE: Ed Fallon has long been a friend of Blog for Iowa. Here is his latest on the Bakken Oil Pipeline).

Over the past two years landowners, farmers, tribes and environmentalists have done everything possible to stop the pipeline.

We have pursued legal and legislative channels at great cost of time and money.

We have held forums, rallies, protests, flotillas, press conferences and more.

We have written letters and opinion pieces for our newspapers, spoken with radio stations and TV reporters, and written countless letters to government agencies.

We have learned more about pipelines, climate change, watersheds and eminent domain than we ever imagined we’d need to know. With the knowledge we’ve acquired, we’ve educated others — and public opinion has moved our direction. The most recent Iowa Poll shows less than half of Iowans support the pipeline while three fourths oppose the use of eminent domain to build it.

We await court rulings on a lawsuit filed by ten Iowa landowners and another just filed by Tribal leaders in the Dakotas, and remain cautiously optimistic that the court will decide in our favor. But barring an injunction, those cases may take time.

Meanwhile our land, water, property rights and climate are being trampled.

From the perspective of climate change, it is unconscionable that our government enables this pipeline to go forward. President Obama claims to understand the seriousness of climate change, having said, “No challenge–no challenge–poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” Yet he hasn’t lifted a finger to stop this pipeline.

From the perspective of eminent domain, Republican Governor Terry Branstad campaigned against the abuse of eminent domain, yet now has no problem with its use for a powerful, wealthy pipeline company.

From the perspective of our environment, Democratic officials like State Senator Mike Gronstal and Congressman Dave Loebsack either openly support the pipeline or refuse to stand with their constituents against it, despite grave concerns about the potential impact on our land and water.
As with many great struggles before us, when those elected to represent and protect our interests fail to do so, it is incumbent upon the people to challenge an unresponsive government through nonviolent civil disobedience.

In this struggle against the Bakken pipeline, there are two key examples of the failure of law and government to respect and protect our rights.

First is the Army Corps of Engineers’ abdication of its responsibility to assure the safety of our waters. In issuing a permit to Dakota Access, the Corps failed to assess the full range of the pipeline’s probable impacts.

Second, the decision by the Iowa Utilities Board to issue eminent domain to a private company providing no service to Iowans is an assault on the sanctity of our right to own and enjoy property. If government can allow your land to be confiscated for an oil pipeline, where will the assault on liberty strike next?

Yes, it is time to defy an unjust law, time to defend liberty, time to fight the expansion of the fossil-fuel infrastructure and the accompanying destruction of our environment.

In the tradition of other great American struggles for freedom . . .
From the Boston Tea Party to the labor movement struggle to secure rights and freedoms we still enjoy and take for granted;

From the fight for women’s suffrage to the civil rights struggle of the 1960s;

From the Farm Crisis when farmers stood with their neighbors to block foreclosure auctions to the struggles happening now all across the country in opposition to fracking, pipelines and oil drilling;
. . . It is time to step forward and risk arrest.

Over a month ago, a Pledge of Resistance was circulated. The Pledge was initiated by Bold Iowa and supported by Iowa CCI, CREDO Action and 100 Grannies for a Livable Future. To date, over 1,000 people have signed the Pledge, which reads:

“{W}e are the conservatives, standing up for a safe and secure future for our families. It is those we protest, those who profit from poisoning our water, who violate our property rights, and who are radically altering the chemical composition of our atmosphere — and the prospects for survival of humanity — that are the radicals.”

If you are moved, please sign the Pledge and stand with us in a final attempt to stop this pipeline that our planet can’t sustain and most Iowans don’t want.

Ed Fallon
Des Moines

Categories
Home Life

Couple Hours to Myself

Gardener's Breakfast of tomato, salt, pepper and feta cheese.
Gardener’s Breakfast of tomato, salt, pepper and feta cheese.

Hope regular readers are well tolerating my posts from Blog for Iowa. They are different from what I normally write here, but then none of us is one-dimensional — I hope.

I got off work at the orchard a couple hours early. It’s the beginning of the season and we had plenty of staff to cover customers. The apples coming in are mostly tart and useful for baking, apple sauce and apple butter. We had ten varieties available today.

Had a great conversation with a gent who bought a large bag of Dolgo crabs for crab apple jelly. His recipe was basically this one.

“Don’t squeeze the jelly bag,” he cautioned. “The jelly will go cloudy.”

I wished him good luck as he headed for the sales barn exit.

We get a treat for each shift we work. I ate a Zestar apple. Before leaving I bought a 10-pound box of blue berries and on the way home secured a dozen ears of sweet corn at a roadside stand. Tonight’s dinner will be sweet corn on the cob and fresh tomatoes with blueberry yogurt for dessert.

Seconds Bell PeppersPlans for the unexpected mid day gap are to mow the lawn, gather the grass clippings, process bell peppers and Roma tomatoes, fix dinner and freeze some of the blueberries. The freezer is already packed, so I hope the peppers and blue berries will fit. I have no idea if everything will get finished.

A storm blew down a pear tree branch. After inspecting the damage I picked the unripe fruit then cut the branch cleanly from the trunk. Once they ripen we’ll have more than enough for fresh and maybe some for pureed pear sauce. The tree is still loaded.

Crate of pears.
Crate of pears.

Working three jobs is challenging mentally, physically and every way in between. It’s hard to keep up and a couple of unexpected hours to myself was a welcome surprise.

Categories
Sustainability

Hiroshima Day 2016

Hiroshima, Japan after U.S. Nuclear Attack. Photo Credit: The Telegraph
Hiroshima, Japan after U.S. Nuclear Attack. Photo Credit: The Telegraph

The Washington, D.C. rumor mill is saying President Barack Obama may “do something” about nuclear weapons before the end of his term.

Among ideas being discussed are early retirement of some of the non-deployed weapons in the arsenal; declaration of a no first use policy; or taking weapons off hair-trigger alert.

The arms control community is pushing for no first use policy, but whatever — any Obama action to reduce the threat of a nuclear weapons exchange near the end of his presidency would be welcome, and largely symbolic.

Saturday, Aug. 6, marks seventy-one years since the United States dropped the first of two nuclear weapons on Japan.

When the Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy” over an unsuspecting Hiroshima, it killed between 60,000 and 80,000 people immediately with a total death toll estimated at 135,000. The bombing of Nagasaki occurred three days later. Men, women and children were killed indiscriminately.

President Harry Truman made the decision to use the bomb. In the end, he had no questions or regrets. Truman believed in the larger picture of World War II, a conflict in which tens of millions of people lost their lives, dropping the bomb would save lives. More than seven decades later we continue to debate whether bombing Hiroshima was necessary or played any significant role in ending the war.

After signing the New START Treaty with Russia, which entered into force in February 2011, the U.S. Congress embarked on a nuclear weapons modernization process expected to spend as much as $1 trillion over the next 30 years. That’s a lot of money for a weapons system we hope never to use.

What’s an Iowan to do? My friend and colleague Peter Wilk speaks for many of us.

Calling for “No First Use” of Nuclear Weapons
Submitted to the Brunswick (Maine) Times Record

This August 6th and 9th we are once again reminded of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed an estimated 200,000 women, men and children. This past May, President Obama was the first President to visit the site and to commemorate the bombing victims.

While in Hiroshima, President Obama declared, “Among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.” Thousands of members and supporters of Physicians for Social Responsibility completely agree.

Although most of us would rather not think about it, the U.S. and Russia continue to have thousands of nuclear warheads deployed on hundreds of missiles, bombers and submarines. We and the Russians keep over 1,000 of them on so-called “launch on warning” status. These warheads can be launched within minutes and reach their targets around the world within thirty minutes, putting millions of innocent civilians at risk in each of our countries.

The recent military uprising in Turkey reminds us just how unstable our current situation is, with 50 of our nuclear weapons stored in a U.S. airbase there. This airbase was surrounded and cut-off during the most unstable period of that coup attempt.

Perhaps most frightening is that the U.S. maintains a policy of threatening to be the first to use nuclear weapons in a future conflict. Combining this policy with our “launch on warning” stance sets the stage for a potential nuclear war initiated out of fear, anger, miscalculation or accident.

These horrific weapons threaten our own national security rather than enhance it. They are unusable in any meaningful sense of the word, given the global disruption to the world’s climate, food supply and economy that would result. At the same time, they have no value in countering terrorists or cyber-attacks.

Fortunately there are also some positive developments upon which to build. 127 countries have taken the Humanitarian Pledge calling for elimination of nuclear weapons. As a result, the United Nations established an Open-Ended Working Group that has begun meeting to discuss the most promising next steps toward a treaty to ban nuclear weapons around the world.

Meanwhile, the potential humanitarian impact of any use of nuclear weapons is so overwhelming that we in the U.S. must pull ourselves back from the brink by taking an easy step of our own. Since these weapons are in reality unusable, the U.S. should minimize their role in our military planning. President Obama can and should declare that the U.S. is adopting a “no first use” policy – pledging to never again be the first nation to launch nuclear weapons against another.

The U.S led the world into the nuclear age. Now it’s time to lead the world beyond it – to move to safer national security strategies that do not put all that we care about at risk, under the false premise that threatening to use nuclear weapons against others can protect us.

President Obama – your legacy and our lives are at stake. Please complete your presidency by taking a meaningful step to reduce nuclear risks by initiating a “no first use” policy.

On this 71st anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima, let us all pledge “never again” and commit ourselves to do what we can to help make progress toward a world free of nuclear weapons.

Peter Wilk, MD
Physicians for Social Responsibility — Maine

It’s time to prevent what we cannot cure, and abolish nuclear weapons.

Categories
Living in Society

Plasma Sales and Iowa Politics

Farm Greeting
Farm Greeting

(EDITOR’S NOTE: This post was written for On Our Own: Sustainability in a Turbulent World in 2013 and has been corrected and updated). The Cumulus radio station in Cedar Rapids was advertising how a person could earn up to $340 per month selling their plasma. It’s enough to make it worth a look to see if plasma sales could fit into our budgetary bottom line. Sounds kind of grim, but people do it all the time.

Plasma is the pale, yellow liquid portion of blood that helps our bodies control bleeding and infection. When one donates plasma, blood is removed and the plasma separated and saved before being returned to our body. We generate more plasma within a couple of days so twice a week donations are usually possible.

Donating takes about an hour and plasma collection centers make it easy with a straight forward, step-by-step process. They explain how payment is loaded on a debit card. It is literally using one’s body as an ATM.

Several self-employed and low-wage earners in my circle use plasma sales to supplement monthly income. Got a toothache? Better schedule some sessions at the plasma center to get cash to pay the dentist. One suspects residents of our nearby college town use the cash for cigarettes, salty snacks, sugary drinks and alcohol, but in any case, plasma sales can be a reliable and steady source of income if one meets the requirements for donating.

Plasma money could be put to good use. For example, it could be used for political donations. That way, when a political telemarketer called, knowing my annual budget, I could say, “Yes. I’ll donate $100, which will take me four plasma sessions.” Politics would literally be based on blood money then.

We could go a step further and say that all financial contributions to politicians had to originate in plasma sales. There would be a natural limit to how much a person could donate, and a restriction could be placed on corporations that said something like, corporations can make political contributions, but such contributions must be paid via the plasma of shareholders, imposing a reasonable and well-defined limit to corporate money spent on political campaigns. I bet corporations would exercise their “free speech” differently under such a rule.

If my modest proposal about political contributions seems a bit edgy, I am pretty sure it would work. Having skin in the game would take on a whole new meaning.

Most Americans are asleep at the wheel of politics, and would not contribute, so there is little danger of a glut of plasma on the market.

If times get tough, I’ll re-visit adding a plasma sales income line to our household operating budget. For now, I’m just glad I don’t have to do it.

~ Written for Blog for Iowa

Categories
Living in Society

Voter Suppression In Iowa

BermanRepublicans have taken the effort to suppress voting rights nationwide, including in Iowa.

Iowa Republicans have done their part, if not as egregiously as in other states.

They would do more to suppress voting rights if they controlled our bicameral legislature and the governorship.

One of the first things Iowa Governor Terry Branstad did in 2011 when he assumed office was to reverse Governor Tom Vilsack’s executive order to automatically restore voting rights to convicted felons who had served their time.

Branstad established an application process for such felons, making it more difficult to regain their voting rights.

“Restoring voting rights to Iowans who have committed felonies is something that I take very seriously as governor,” Branstad said July 11 during his weekly news conference. “To automatically restore the right to vote without requiring the completion of the responsibilities associated with the criminal conviction would severely damage the balance of rights and responsibilities that we all have as citizens.”

“Iowa is one of only three states – alongside Kentucky and Florida – to impose permanent disenfranchisement for all people with felony convictions, unless the government approves individual rights restoration,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice. “On June 30, 2016, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the state’s disenfranchisement law in a 4-3 split decision in a case called Griffin v. Pate.”

After Griffin v. Pate, State Representative Mary Wolfe (D-Clinton) said the Iowa legislature was presented with an opportunity regarding voting rights.

“In my opinion, the majority ruling seems to invite the General Assembly to amend current Iowa Code to redefine ‘infamous crime’ for purposes of disenfranchisement as something other than all felonies,” Iowa state Rep. Mary Wolfe, D-Clinton said to the Des Moines Register. “I certainly think the average Iowan would not agree that all felonies, every category of felonies, reaches the level of infamous crimes.”

Would such legislation advance in Iowa’s divided legislature? Republicans can be expected to block it in today’s political environment.

Blog for Iowa author Dave Bradley wrote last weekend, “There is no shortage of Republicans in positions of authority who will do nearly anything for their party to win elections, no matter what.”

Iowa native Ari Berman, author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, points to North Carolina as an example of what Republicans have done to suppress voting rights.

Three weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder, the North Carolina legislature toughened its voter ID bill, already the most restrictive in the country, according to Berman.

Quoting North Carolina State Senator Josh Stern, Berman laid out what the bill added:

  • Shortened early voting by one week.
  • Eliminated same day voting and provisional voting if at wrong precinct.
  • Prevented counties from offering voting after 1 p.m. on the last Saturday before the election.
  • Prevented counties from extending poll hours by one hour on election day due to extraordinary circumstances like lengthy lines.
  • Eliminated state supported voter registration drives and preregistration for 16/17 year old citizens.
  • Repealed voter owned judicial elections and straight party voting.
  • Increased the number of people who can challenge voting inside a precinct.
  • More frequent purging of voter rolls.

On Friday, July 29, a federal court ruled North Carolina’s voting restrictions were “intentionally discriminatory.”

Would Iowa pass such a bill? It’s hard to say.

We can expect the conflict over voting rights to continue in the federal courts as Republican-controlled states attempt to reduce the number of people eligible to vote.

Progressive Iowa Democrats should work to retain our slim Senate majority as a firewall against further Republican voter suppression efforts.

To help retain a Democratic Senate majority, send a check to the Senate Majority Fund (Committee ID #9098), 5661 Fleur Drive, Des Moines, Iowa 50321.

~ Written for Blog for Iowa

Categories
Living in Society

Encountering Chuck Grassley

Senator Grassley in Williamsburg, Iowa in 2010.
Senator Grassley in Williamsburg, Iowa in 2010.

The conventions dispersed and the road home was ahead as Blog for Iowa writers engaged with Senator Chuck Grassley last Friday.

Both Trish Nelson, in a chance meeting in Mount Pleasant, and Dave Bradley, at a town hall event in Columbus Junction, each encountered Grassley in eastern Iowa.

Both stories are worth hearing and indicate where our senior senator is regarding his life in the Republican party.

“News is sketchy while on RAGBRAI,” Nelson wrote in an email.

She was driving support for a team of veteran RAGBRAI riders and responding to Dave Bradley’s report from the Columbus Junction event.

“Speaking of RAGBRAI and Chuck, guess who I ran into checking out of our Super 8 this morning in Mt. Pleasant?” she wrote. “I even had a few minutes of face time with him.”

“I was like a deer in headlights at first but I managed to stay polite and we had a light, friendly conversation,” she continued. “I asked him what he thought about Hillary’s speech — he said he thought it was good and he fell asleep during it. He said she would just be more Obama.”

“I asked him his thoughts on Donald Trump and he said, ‘he needs to act more presidential,’ as if he was lamenting that he wouldn’t get elected because of that one small thing. I told him Trump can’t act presidential because he is so impulsive and that people are genuinely frightened that he could actually become president.”

Grassley asserted something positive about Trump, which Nelson countered.

“Chuck kind of backtracked and said, Trump ‘only’ has a 25% chance of actually being elected. He said the Republicans have too much ground to make up in the electoral college for him to win. It was weird, as as if he was trying to reassure me by acknowledging that Trump is probably going to lose anyway.”

I can’t believe I didn’t ask him about his obstruction of Obama’s SCOTUS appointment and the judiciary, and for awhile I was kicking myself, but at least I got to address concerns about Trump.”

Later in the day at a Columbus Junction town hall, Don Paulson of the Muscatine County Democrats asked Grassley the question about Merrick Garland.

“Grassley said 30 years ago some senators set a policy of no appointments in a president’s last year,” Dave Bradley reported. “What horseshit.”

Bradley assumed this was a variation on Grassley’s Biden talking point and nothing new.

During her campaign for state representative, Sara Sedlacek lost Louisa County, where Columbus Junction is located, by a significant margin.

“It was probably a 90% Republican crowd,” Bradley wrote. “All white except one. State Representative Tom Sands was there to give Grassley a big smack on the cheeks. Another guy praised Grassley for ‘standing up to Obama — you’re the only one that does.'”

This describes every Republican event I have attended — a venue for Republicans to vent. Dave ticked off these notes:

  • Several said leave the VA (or at least Iowa City) alone.
  • One woman had a prepared speech about puppy mills.
  • Another guy praised Republicans for defunding Obamacare and said they should pass the same bill every day.
  • Couple of other all praise to Grassley statements.
  • One college student did have some challenging questions on gun sales but of course Grassley had very well prepped responses rolled out in his folksy manner.
  • An anti-Grassley guy from Iowa City asked him about term limits — Grassley said he favored them, but you can also always vote me out.
  • Couple of questions on Social Security — Grassley claimed it has 17 more years (2033) but no one is willing to talk about it with everything on the table.
  • One guy claimed Obamacare took $900 million from Medicare — Grassley agreed and said it just disappeared from Medicare.
  • Damn it was painful not to just stand up and call him a f*cking liar.

“Unlike Muscatine much earlier this year (Grassley) is much better prepared and has his talking points down really well,” Bradley said. “Trying to get him to stumble will take an exceptional effort if someone is trying to. He even took pains to refute his not visiting all 99 counties — with a big sign on a stand proclaiming that he visits all 99 counties every year.”

Grassley doesn’t always hold public meetings on his 99-county tour according to a July 20 Des Moines Register editorial.

“Since 2011, he has held only three public, town hall meetings in Iowa’s 10 most populated counties, and there were no meetings of that type in eight of those 10 counties,” they said.

If you want to discuss an issue with Senator Chuck Grassley maybe you’ll randomly bump into him, or maybe you can speak for a couple of minutes at his public meetings. What is problematic about this type of accessibility is the unbridled forum — for Republicans particularly — to say just about anything.

In my experience at similar events, Grassley moderated the wackiest of the wacky. By enabling people to express themselves as he does Chuck Grassley encourages extremism and political spin. He helped create the party of Donald Trump even if he doesn’t think much of the mogul’s chances in November.

It is important to contact our elected officials, especially our federal representatives. However, when Senator Chuck Grassley talks about “representative government,” take it with a grain of salt. What you see isn’t always what you get.

~ Written for Blog for Iowa

Categories
Living in Society Writing

August Recess

View from the Barn
View from the Barn

SOLON, Iowa — While Trish Nelson takes a well-deserved break, I will attempt to fill her shoes at Blog for Iowa.

Delegates from the national party conventions dispersed last week and there is a lot to write about. Party and twitterverse aside, the telltale sign the election campaign shifted to a new phase was when a political friend called last Tuesday for help finding lodging for our Iowa Democratic Party organizer.

As politics takes a summer vacation in August for most Iowans, I want to cover as much ground as I can, and less of what everyone else is posting. Following is part of my storyboard.

I’ll cover each of the four Iowa congressional candidates at least once. This is mostly to learn what I don’t know. My Congressman Dave Loebsack was confident about his chances in the second district when I saw him in July. Monica Vernon is a hard worker and fighter, and the prospects look good for her winning against first term congressman Rod Blum. Jim Mowrer and Kim Weaver are running in the western half of the state, and those races will be informative. These four races are the most important, yet under-covered in the state.

Because of it’s high visibility, I’ll rely on the coverage of others for the U.S. Senate race. As primary winner Patty Judge attempts to upset incumbent Chuck Grassley it is unclear she has the organization to win or that he is truly vulnerable. A campaign operative told me convincing Iowa Democrats Grassley is vulnerable is a key challenge. My reaction when she spoke near my home July 17 was she needs to point out the faults of her opponent less and talk more about Democratic values. Let third parties do the work of calling out Grassley on his many flaws.

Here is an entire month of posting about the presidential contest in four sentences. “Republicans nominated Donald Trump and Mike Pence for president and vice president respectively at their national convention. If they think they are going to win this election solely by demonizing Hillary Clinton they are on crack. I disagree with them on virtually everything so that’s enough said about the mogul and his sidekick. The focus should be winning down-ticket races.”

There will be discussion of the 2020 presidential caucuses during the 2016 campaign and I land in the camp of eliminating Iowa’s first in the nation status. With due respect to Dave Redlawsk, author of Why Iowa: How Caucuses and Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nominating Process, the quadrennial presidential caucus should be the first casualty in blowing up the Iowa Democratic Party. I have long believed first in the nation helps Republicans more than Democrats and plan to lay out my case over the next few weeks. Shorter version: Democrats should stop helping Republicans organize in Iowa.

Iowa native Ari Berman posts constantly about the importance of voting rights after Chief Justice John Roberts gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. What are the challenges to voting rights in Iowa? There has been a lot of posting about the Iowa Supreme Court decision about voting rights for convicted felons. There is more to elucidate.

What else?

At the county fair our group had a corn kernel vote on security issues. Air and water quality were most important to fair-goers’ sense of security by a distance. Forestry management is part of that discussion. People forget the state was once prairie with oak-hickory forests that stood and regenerated for millennia. What is surprising is how slight is the modern role of urban sprawl compared to pressure on forests. I hear almost no one discussing forestry management and its impact on air and water quality yet see farmers tear out riparian buffers on a regular basis to plant a few more rows of corn and beans. This issue needs a voice.

Our government insanely wants to spend more than a trillion dollars re-furbishing our nuclear arsenal. What we should be doing is eliminating it. I’ll share some of the work of my colleagues in International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War during coming weeks.

Nuclear power is on the wane nationally and some attention should be paid to the Palo, Iowa plant. Their permit was extended to 2024, and already there are rumblings at the plant that the “good jobs” there will be going away. It is in Iowa’s best interests to shutter Duane Arnold Energy Center and I’ll explain why.

Lastly, we need an alternative to our industrial food production system. There is a nascent local foods movement, but its rise has not been fast enough. There are substantial questions about local foods sustainability in its present form. Issues like land ownership, creating markets, reducing the use of pesticides, and scalability are all unresolved. If the local foods movement does not work toward solutions, one questions whether it will exist as a distinct entity going forward.

These and other topics will be my summer. I hope readers will follow along as I do my best to make it worth while to return to Blog for Iowa often.

~ Written for Blog for Iowa

Categories
Work Life

At the Apple Farm

Sign at Wilson's Orchard
Sign at Wilson’s Orchard

Between working opening day at the orchard and the kickoff of a friend’s political campaign I had two hours.

Day six of a hundred straight work days was about as good as it gets: a reunion with friends from last season, a chance to catch up and engage again in this apple life.

It’s not that the garden went neglected. I picked kale for the library workers and tomatoes, cucumbers and jalapeno peppers for the kitchen. There’s plenty of work to do around the house. Instead of doing it I crashed on the couch and slept deeply for an hour after my shift.

Refreshed enough to go at it again, I will — not later, but now.

Categories
Writing

August 2016

Freshly Dug Potatoes
Freshly Dug Potatoes

While Europeans vacation in Italy and the South of France, I’ll be writing some 12,000 words on Blog for Iowa. August is neither recess nor vacation for low-wage American workers.

I’ll have a chance to earn a little more money to pay corporations for things we need like fuel, communications, health care and insurance, loans, and electricity. There’s also taxes wanting cash.

It’s been a struggle to earn enough money to pay monthly bills, so if I write as well, my life can correctly be characterized as “struggling writer.”

Not sure I like the moniker.

Yesterday a fellow said I needed a haircut.
“I don’t have the money,” I said.
“Haircuts only cost $15,” he said.
“If you give me the $15, I’ll get a haircut.”
“It’s really about the money?”
“Yes it’s about the money.”

I work in low-wage jobs to understand what people experience. It’s an attempt to be grounded in society and inform my writing. With a comfortable platform, that includes a line of credit and no mortgage, good health, and two working cars, my family has it easier than most.

The main challenge of low-wage jobs has been physical. Assembling kits, selling produce, demonstrating products, lifting bags of bulk commodities, chainsawing trees, and farm work all required standing and use of upper body strength. I’m stronger than I was, but my aging joints are taking a toll.

Writing jobs have been good when I could get them. There was little money in freelancing while the newspapers sought to do more with less. I filled a specific need for editors, and once the need went away, so did the offer of stories.

In August I’ll post my articles on Blog for Iowa, then here a day later. This site is home for my writing, so most everything I write longer than 140 characters finds its way here.

A new writing adventure begins and I’m so looking forward to it.

I hope readers will follow along.

Categories
Work Life

100 Days of Work

Locally Grown Sweet Corn
Locally Grown Sweet Corn

Today begins 100 straight days of work.

Monday through Friday I’ll be at the home, farm and auto supply store, Saturday and Sunday at the orchard, and in between there is writing, gardening, cooking, home maintenance, yard work and living.

It’s not a life of fun. It is doing what’s needed to sustain a life in Iowa.

I bought two new pair of blue jeans to accommodate the new schedule and get by with once a week laundry. Other than that, the logistics were already in place and I’m ready to go.

Next week I begin editing Blog for Iowa — at least one post a day. The 23 August posts have been roughly framed, although what happens in society will drive what gets posted when. I’m looking forward to posting 500-600 words daily.

Preseason Saturday at Wilson's Orchard
Preseason Saturday at Wilson’s Orchard

On Saturday at the orchard cars were lined up for preseason raspberries, blueberries and Lodi apples. With 50+ people in line, I didn’t go inside. If this crowd was any indication it’s going to be a very busy season.

I will work in the sales barn although the chief apple officer and his operations manager weren’t sure what I’ll be doing opening weekend. The octogenarian friend who got me the job four years ago has given up driving the tractor-trailer that provides tours. I enjoy working at the orchard because it is a nexus of contact with people I’ve known most of my life.

Missing is a plan to get enough rest in the coming days. While not a high priority, it needs consideration. I better get on that too.