Almostgotit.com

AP image by Sue Ogrocki. From a story on NPR online.

This image of the University of Iowa campus was taken last Sunday from about the same place that my own photos were taken a few days earlier.

I remain a little obsessed with Iowa City.

This is exactly why everyone needs to travel.  Reading about a place and the people who live there is never the same.  I wouldn’t have believed it myself until my own first trip abroad: we are intensely experiential beings. 

My current empathy with Iowa is not virtuous, just human.  The midwest floods have become more than newsprint to me only because I’ve just been in the midst of them. In a similar way, my whole attitude about being “American” changed during the six adult years I lived outside of this country, with other places becoming flesh-and-blood to me while America itself receded to mere newsprint. 

I don’t feel like I’ve fully re-materialized in Tennessee yet.  This won’t last.  I expect in a few days I’ll feel local-normal again.  I’ll probably stop caring so much about the flood victims, too, which is too bad.  But I’ve learned that our capacity to empathize with things too far away from our own experience is much smaller than most of us would like to admit.