Looking Out Over the Wide, Flat Earth

By Liam Collins

Before landing in the Hawkeye State, the physical differences were very real. I’ve never been to Iowa. I’ve never even been to the Midwest. I was born-and-raised in a town nestled between the mountains, New York City and the Long Island Sound. I thought North Carolina was flat and wide. But staring out from a plane nearly 35,000 feet above the earth to a land I never knew could be so flush was surreal. Politics aside, it grounded the experience that this group is about to have.

Sure, the opportunity to interact with presidential candidates and citizens that take their role of selecting the next president so seriously is invaluable, and I think I can speak for this entire group when I say it’s the main reason why we’re all here. But these flat plains make me realize that understanding the role of the Iowa Caucuses in presidential politics is not the only thing we should be getting out of this trip. The gravitas of these wide open grounds reminds me that I’m going to a part of the country to interact with people in an element I’ll never be able to understand, but can only begin to grasp by dropping in on Iowa territory. 

Over the next two weeks, I plan on, of course, talking to candidates for president, asking the hard questions and trying to get a grasp on where the Iowa Caucuses may go and how they work. But I’m not just here to study the politics, I’m also here to study the people. Dr. Landesberg and Dr. Dalhouse have both been drilling into our brains that we should be talking to Iowans. I, of course, have always planned on doing that. But the gravity of why we need to be doing that hit me in the pit of my stomach when studying the subtle beauty of the flat earth that is often lumped in to why people have no interest in visiting middle America to begin with. Someone lives here. And I can’t wait to meet them.