....when you say that the changing racial demographic of our country is “cultural suicide,” I know what you mean. You mean me. You mean my brother and sister. You mean my father, who immigrated from India in the 1970s with eight dollars in his pocket and a perfectly pressed suit that was no match for the Midwestern winter wind.

My siblings and I may not look like the racially pure version of Iowans — or Americans — you desire, but we had a fairly typical Iowa childhood. We played tennis and conducted the marching band and designed elaborate costumes for Odyssey of the Mind. We showed hogs at the county fair and spent long summer days selling lemonade during RAGBRAI. The education we got in small-town Iowa (in school systems which, as a state legislator and a U.S. representative, you’ve systematically de-funded) got us full-ride scholarships to Iowa colleges. We’re now a professor and a lawyer and an art curator. We’re doing just fine.

My hometown, however, is not doing fine. And, despite your belief in the horrors of “demographic transformation,” I’m pretty sure my siblings and I aren’t the cause of its slow decline. I’ve watched over the years as small businesses on Main Street turned into vacant storefronts. Members of my high school class (myself included) left western Iowa because the jobs we could get there just didn’t compete with the ones we ended up getting elsewhere. In fact, your sense that allowing other races to mix into an historically white area will lead to “cultural suicide” couldn’t be more off base.

Cultural suicide occurred when the unions were broken at the packing plants in our hometowns, turning respectable $21-an-hour jobs into back-breaking $11-an-hour labor that couldn’t support a family. Cultural suicide occurs every time you vote to defund public education, stripping Iowa public school teachers of the resources they need to educate the next generation of Iowans even as you accept $10,600 in campaign contributions from the College Loan Corp. — a company that profits from increased student debt. Cultural suicide occurs when you decide to display a Confederate flag on your desk, conveniently forgetting that you represent a state that fought for the Union.

I get it. It’s easier to point fingers at the brown people who take those 3 a.m. shifts at the packing plant and are now raising their families on minimum wage than it is to accept personal responsibility for the ways that your particular brand of strip-mining the Iowan economy is devastating the lives of Iowans.

More.... http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/iowa-view/2016/10/02/king-heres-real-cultural-suicide-iowa-faces/91304942/

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