Canadian RAGBRAI-er Feared Getting Shot in U.S.; "No Politics!"

Captions: I ran into these two women from Huntington, Alabama and had to take their photos. The horrors of chain gangs in Alabama can't be overemphasized, but I was reassured by their assurance that they'd both voted for U.S. Senator Doug Jones, not "Judge" Roy Moore, an alleged pedophile, who ran on the Republican side. They were "hurt" that I'd think they hadn't voted for Doug Jones, who successfully prosecuted two of the Ku Klux Klansmen who blew up four little black girls while they were attending church. "We're not all racists in Alabama!" they cried.

Early on RAGBRAI 2018 I rode with a Canadian woman from Toronto who kept saying every time I talked about politics, "Let's not talk about politics! I don't want to get shot!" Telling me not to talk about politics is like telling an owl not to hoot, but I tried to reassure her. I told her that I'd only seen one individual who might shoot her. He was a grim, older white man in Steve King country who was driving an old pickup truck with bumper stickers that said "TRUMP," "Never Hillary," and "Steve King for Congress."

She did not seem reassured. She lost me on a small steep hill into town and seemed relieved to lose her nemesis, the Democrat whose overt political stance was clearly going to get her shot by some wacko. She is a chef for a private club in Toronto. She supports her beekeeping habit and beekeeping studies at Cornell University, my alma mater, by cooking for a living.

She really tripped my trigger when she told me that my botched right hip replacement would have been fixed in Canada without doctors lining up to defend each other as they do in the U.S. The Iowa City surgeon (retired -- forcibly, I hope) who botched my hip replacement shall remain nameless. I hear that in the U.S. you can't sue doctors because they support each other, but they can sue you if you name them as having been incompetent.

"Canadians are way to the left [politically] of you," she said loftily.

How could I disagree? She wasn't referring to me personally, she was referring to the U.S. as a country. Donald Trump is our president and undermines the rule of law and our democratic values on a daily basis. Yet he has cultlike support from his base no matter what he does.

The one thing that gave me hope was the thoughtful statement from a young Republican woman, Kate N., who is connected to the American Soybean Association, who is so frustrated with Trump's tariffs and the harm that is doing to soybean farmers in Iowa and the rest of the Midwest, that she's considering becoming a Democrat.

It turned out that the turning point for her was Trump's servile support of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin instead of his own national intelligence officers in Helsinki.

"I was so embarrassed," she said.

I told her, "You're halfway to being a Democrat already!"

There's hope that not everyone in Steve King country is looking at Trump and Steve King with rose-colored glasses. Crawford County Republicans had a hard time giving away free bottles of water to RAGBRAI-ers. I only saw one taker. I gave the Crawford County Republicans a piece of my mind. One woman responded cheerfully, "But at least we have life!"

I should have responded, "If only you cared about babies and children once they're born," but as a social worker, I met pro-lifers who talk the talk and walk the walk. They take in and nurture unwanted, abused and neglected children as foster parents. Some are sincere and loving. The number who hand the kids a Bible and then starve and beat them to death are in the minority. Still, it's a very dangerous minority and children die in their custody, children like Natalie Finn and Sabrina Ray. The Department of Human Services is controlled by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds who supports unsupervised home schooling. Home schooling is a dangerous opportunity for abusive and neglectful parents when there's no serious scrutiny. Little Avery McCoy of Riverside fell through the cracks when her parents failed to take her to required doctor appointments for malnutrition and neither DHS nor the police followed up in a timely way to keep her from dying.