“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” –Marcus Aurellius
I remember the day well. It was late May of 2009.
For the past five years, I had made a living—not an extravagant one, but enough to get by—writing on the blogs MyDD (from 2004-2007) and Open Left (from 2007-2009). I also had side hustles consulting for advocacy groups and candidates, and running a small political action committee called BlogPac.
However, even though I was getting married in about six weeks, the money had basically dried up. Democrats had swept the 2008 election and, as always happens, folks were tuning out of the news now that their side was in power. Spring was in full swing and digital publications were struggling for readers as the weather improved. Perhaps most importantly, smartphones and social media were in the midst of their meteoric rise, a disruption that fundamentally changed the Internet and ultimately pushed older online formats, like blogging, to the wayside.
With my income slowing to a trickle, I didn’t know how I was going to pay my bills going forward, much less afford a honeymoon. So, at one point in late May I just crumpled up on the floor, crushed that my dream of making a living as a writer was over, and trying to imagine what other type of job I could get.
Eventually, I picked myself up off the floor—literally—and decided to not give up. The next week, I began experimenting with building an email list by asking my readers to sign online petitions relevant to the articles I was writing. Once people had signed up, I sent them action alerts and fundraising requests via email, as well as links to my articles on Open Left, which often covered the same topics as my action alerts. By September, Open Left was both an email list and a blog, with content on each that complimented the other, and a bigger readership than ever before. With this more dynamic platform, I was able to play a role in the (ultimately failed) campaign to include a public option in the Affordable Care Act. The next year, after seeing what I was able to do at Open Left while many other progressive blogs were struggling or folding, I was invited to start an activism department and email list at Daily Kos. I ended up working there for nearly 14 years.
Weird as it may seem, and as crushing as it was to me in May 2009, often I have thought to myself, thank goodness the bottom fell out of progressive blogging in early 2009. Otherwise, I’d probably have spent the last 15+ years cranking out articles at Open Left in a one-bedroom in West Philly instead of building a dynamic media and activism engine. For me, the impediment to action ended up advancing action, just as Marcus Aurelius wrote 1,850 years ago.
If you will forgive me for having indulged in this anecdote, you should know that the reason I am retelling it is because it came to mind when I was reading a rather touching story from Douglas Burns in the Iowa Mercury Substack. In the story, which was written in March of this year, Burns talks about his personal anguish at how financial difficulties forced him to sell the local, 93 year-old, family-owned Iowa newspaper he had worked on for his entire adult life, the Carroll Times Herald:
Forty years earlier, I was in my teenage years when I saw stories about family farmers killing themselves. I understand now. I’ve spent 30 years of my life on this. We were the best newspaper in the state (named by the Iowa Newspaper Association in 2013). What for? Maybe I’ll catch coronavirus.
We had to sell what we’d built to avoid foreclosure on mom’s house, my house, forfeit our role as builder in the community in which we’d been in a century-long ensemble cast of builders.
On Dec. 1, 2022, three generations and 93 years of family ownership of the Carroll Times Herald ended. It was like being at your own funeral and parole simultaneously—the death of what bound our family, defined us, but a release from a prison of unsolvable problems in a challenged industry during a cultural tornado watch for democracy.
Later in the article, Burns writes about how he had started covering Josh Turek, who is now the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Iowa.
Intrigued by Turek’s story, the fact that he won in a challenging, red, western Iowa Statehouse district as a Democrat, and impressed by his defiance of his own disability, I wanted to learn more about Turek as he seemed to me to potentially hold the formula, or at least have it in reach, for what Democrats have sought for 12 years in Iowa—a statewide candidate with electability—a winner. A connective and compelling biographical narrative matters.
So I started covering Turek when I could, interviewing him at length, working to confirm if my instincts, built over 30 years of political coverage in this state, were reliable.
For those of you who don’t know, the story Burns is referring to is that Josh Turek was born with spina bifida, and endured 21 surgeries before the age of 12. Despite that, he went on to become a two-time paralympic champion in wheelchair basketball for Team USA. In 2022, in a bad year for Democrats nationally, Turek won a seat in the Iowa state House as a Democrat in a district that has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1968. He won re-election in 2024.
One day, when Burns was doing a sit-down interview with Turek, he ended up pouring his own heart out to Turek over the loss of his newspaper:
One Saturday afternoon, before a community event for Latinos in Council Bluffs, where I also would secure stories for La Prensa Iowa Spanish Newspaper on entrepreneurs in that southwest Iowa city, I was interviewing Turek on a range of topics. The economy and job loss emerged. So I let my own sorrows get the best of me and engaged in all-American self pity. I relayed our story of business and personal loss, of economic struggle with the newspaper.
The part of the story I really liked was how Turek responded:
Turek, sitting in a wheelchair, having endured 21 surgeries related to spina bifida by age 12, let me exhaustively roll through the pain, the experience of our family, our loss. He looked me in the eyes, never interrupted me. I could tell he understood, that through his own lived experiences, he could tap into my turmoil.
Then, in the interview, Turek, the first visibly and permanently disabled state legislator in Iowa, said this to me:
“I think probably 85 percent or 90 percent of the people who are in my sort of condition, or with similar disabilities, this situation breaks them and they don’t go on to live meaningful, successful lives,” Turek said. “But the ones who do come through are stronger and those make the most interesting, hard-core people. Some of those that get broken become harder in the broken places. It’s totally true. The struggle builds the character. If you can get through that and it doesn’t completely break you, it makes you stronger, a much more interesting individual.”
Turek shot me a knowing smile. He got that I got it. That’s the moment I had my confirmation about Turek.
This guy finds a way. I should be able to as well. And, yeah, he’s right, these struggles, if you can clear them, make you more interesting. He certainly is.
(Note: I don’t want to abuse fair use rules too much here, so I urge you to go to Douglas Burns’ Substack, read the entire article, and sign up for more.)
Man, I just love that response from Turek. This is someone from a truly unconventional background—at least for an athlete and a politician—who has a phenomenal attitude. I just want to do whatever I can to help him reach the U.S. Senate.
Turek is also someone who I feel very good about supporting, because I know that my resources, and those of my audience, are not going to waste. Whether Josh Turek can win as a Democrat in red areas is not a theoretical proposition—he has actually done it, twice in fact, and in bad years for Democrats at that. If any Democrat can win this election for U.S. Senate in a red state like Iowa—an election which is absolutely crucial to determining which party controls the U.S. Senate next year—it’s Josh Turek.
In case you are wondering, polling in Iowa currently shows Turek’s race essentially tied.
Note: Bowers Kerbel Media is the reader supported, two-person, pro-democracy and pro-Democratic organization that runs Wolves and Sheep and the Bowers News Media news and activism email list. The amount you give to each entity on the page can be adjusted by clicking “customize amounts.” You can find out more about Josh Turek on his campaign website.
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