We are more than the sum of our natural disasters

This time of year we Midwesterners brace ourselves, though not necessarily for the reasons one might think. Where we live, in the larger watershed of the roiling Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, May and June inevitably means direct-line impacts from the sundry and serious calamities our insurance agents name under the broad umbrella 'Acts of God”: tornadoes, floods, straight-line winds, hail sized pea to baseball.

Many national reporters treat us and our perennial catastrophes similarly, offering fly-by-night sympathies while their digital irises open wide to record our ruined or washed-out lives, our compromised dams and levies, our cars and tractors up to their engines in muddy floodwaters. We are an almost Biblical people in their eyes, fated to endure drought and deluge and to bear up under it all, somehow, with a faith and moxie we possessed long before their pressing bylines.

More often than not we do bear up, for the record, and the members of the national media assigned to report our cosmically bad luck fly back to New York City and Washington, D.C. with their bags packed and their news packages wrapped, and we are left to pick up the pieces amongst ourselves, which is mostly the way we solve our problems anyhow. Sometimes, though, and contrary to popular image, we break down as soon as the cameras stop rolling. We don't always look out at the canvas of the devastation God wrought and say in that stoical tone the media perennially reserves for us, 'Well, it could have been worse.” Sometimes it's worse than we could ever have imagined. Sometimes, given space and trust, we're even willing to say as much.

The severity and drama of our severe weather hits us doubly each spring and early summer. Not only does it leave many of our already hard-pressed communities hurting, but it detracts from all the other good and worthy things otherwise coming to bloom in this, the forgotten middle of the country: 'Brain Gain” in some of our rural counties threatened for three generations by rural-to-urban migration, a record number of new farms (though far too many of them hobby), the blessing of our uniquely grassroots retail politics.

Already this season tornadoes have devastated portions of Iowa, Kansas and Oklahoma; flooding has ravaged parts of Iowa, Arkansas, the Dakotas, Missouri and Texas. More calamities, as yet unseen, seem sure to knock on our door. Still, it's worth recalling when the national media zoom in on what's left of our lives scattered on the lawn like so many pick-up sticks, that we are more than the sum of our natural disasters, more than the projection of our collective and genuine grief over the airwaves at the magnitude of events beyond our control.

What we are is region whose drama, history, and unpredictability trump even our more celebrated losses, what we are is a stick-with-it people who deserve more than breezy and passing coverage.

' Zachary Michael Jack is a seventh-generation rural Midwesterner. He lives on a farm in Jones County. Comments: loveofiowa@live.com