Forgiveness amid the confusion of a fatality at Walmart

An elderly man from Alta died after a vehicle hit him while he was walking in the Walmart parking lot. The driver was Latino. No charges had been filed; the incident was under investigation.

Which caused a young local woman to declare into a cellphone what most Iowans were thinking when they voted for Donald Trump, Steve King and Kim Reynolds: Why can’t those people just go back where they came from?

Well, for one thing because a lot of them hold down jobs at the livestock company owned by the young woman’s family.

The manure hit the fan on social media. People jumped down her throat for repeating what she hears around Northwest Iowa every single day. It impacted business. Her family had to explain it to the help, who really have no choice but to stay put and lie low. It doesn’t need much explaining to Latinos that Anglos resent them — even though you wouldn’t have sausage for your meat truck without them.

She is barely out of high school. Her brain isn’t fully formed. Cut her some slack. That was essentially the message from Latinas on Facebook who urged reconciliation and forgiveness.

Let those who are not hypocrites cast the first stone.

False narratives are planted deep, but so is redemption in this black soil.

The accident was tragic. She felt a need to blurt something out, since all our feelings are worthy of Snapchat. Prudence dictates that you just don’t trade in that sort of talk in Storm Lake, which is majority Latino. For sure, not if you want to sell some chorizo from your mobile meat store.

The allure of social media and its ready access — just post it — is too much for simple country folk who do not think things through (like being cognizant of who is tending the sows). The blowback was such that her Facebook site and business site were wiped clean.

In the good old days meat vendors stuck to ribs and kept their opinions in the bar. Just because social media is there does not mean you are compelled to display how narrow your perspective is. No law demands that you respond to a post that does not agree with you.

The young woman wears a cross, which is essentially about forgiveness. You would like to think she knows not what she is saying. These days you can’t leave it at that. A storm must ensue.

Donald Trump won Iowa by wide margins by bashing immigrants. Steve King made a career of it. Things have been deteriorating in rural Iowa, and if you are the governor you blame somebody who doesn’t belong here because they don’t look like you.

The young woman is parroting them.

The fact is, Tyson can’t operate without immigrant help. Our entire food system is built on the backs of immigrant labor. Her own family depends on them.

She has been led to believe that they are the source of her pain. She feeds on social media. It is refracted back to her in every dusty stop of her truck. Life was better when we were all White. Who are those people steeped in dung with the hogs? Must they be there?

So many people feel just like she does.

She went to school in Storm Lake, so she should know the score. Still, people believe that Mexicans or Salvadorans are the problem, and not people with blonde hair. The blonde’s people came the proper way, no doubt, while immigrating to what was the territory of the Ioway and Dakota people. Our forebears took them out to make room for us, and apparently us alone. The journey is justified by faith. Progress is a gestation crate in a nursery tended by someone of a lower strata who can be returned to sender when not needed.

She is each of us blurting and bleating into a record of our ignorance, so don’t be too rough on her. She could be made into a red-cap hero but that is not the posture the family has taken. They are trying to show some humility that meets the embrace of the Latinas.

She didn’t kill anyone. She dealt a blow to the family enterprise by getting suckered in by the phony immigration debate. The people who pull the strings need Storm Lake to be split and confused so they can go on, unnoticed. High food prices? Must be the stoop labor. Can’t make rent? Too many illegals. Diesel at $5? Send back the Haitians. Can’t afford health care? Must be the Latina nursing aides driving up costs.

She will get through the storm. Have mercy on her and the driver with a man’s death on his mind and no resolution yet. Forgiveness is the way, the Latinas remind us. Thank God they are here.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. His latest book, Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World, is available from Ice Cube Press. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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