Perhaps you may not want to interview someone who is candid and vocal regarding so many citizens that are being treated like disposable people. Their needs pushed aside for more affluent projects that appear more attractive to the business community and the city. Using the flood as a tool in which projects that were on the drawing board long before the water invaded our lives can be pushed through as flood-related rebuilding. Time Check is a part of this community that was born and grew from the work and friendships of immigrants from so many countries. They all lived in harmony for decades before doing such things was ‘politically correct.’ This blue collar community was valuable to the moral and religious growth of Cedar Rapids.
—E-MAIL FROM LINDA SEGER1
Not long after I began to investigate the flood, I heard the term “economic cleansing.” Up to that point, I had viewed the city’s recovery plan as benign, simply an attempt by good people to cope with a bad break. I still believe that, but I also believe that something else was at play in Cedar Rapids—something that, although not sinister, was not entirely on the level. Floods create opportunities just as they create misery. Real estate speculators were buying flooded houses from desperate homeowners for as little as $5,000. Rents went up. There was money to be made off this flood.
It also appeared to me that within weeks of the flood, the city’s public relations campaign was in full swing. One of the first people I spoke with was involved in that campaign, and he tried to warn me off the book project. “We don’t need any more bad publicity.” It was both implied and stated publicly that “Cedar Rapids was back.”
A year later, anyone driving around the city; touring the desolate neighborhoods of Time Check, Czech Village, and Little Bohemia; or noticing just how dead downtown was on the weekends would come to an opposite conclusion. Yet there was pressure for those still involved in the recovery to sing from the same cheery hymnal. Even the usually accommodating Christian Fong was feeling the pressure to continue the mantra of “We will be a stronger Cedar Rapids. We were hit hard, but we’re coming back. This flood gave us a great opportunity.”
The first time you say it, you genuinely mean it. The next time you say it, you remember that it was a good line the first time you used it. By the third time, you’re using it because it’s on your message sheet and someone else picked up on it. You can say it so much that you almost felt brainwashed, and the community has this collective memory that’s being shaped by what’s being said over and over and over again.
When your memory doesn’t match reality, a schizophrenic situation develops. And when the collective memory of a community, formed by a persistently repeated message that sometimes is politically motivated, doesn’t match reality, you end up with a schizophrenic city. It’s a bigger problem than individuals, because you’re dealing with a community that doesn’t know who it is. There’s no self-awareness. The community loses the ability to identify problems and understand what’s going on.2
The Time Check neighborhood along the river in northwest Cedar Rapids was a nightmare to the city’s public relations efforts. It was the requisite stop for politicians, who promised immediate aid or handed the city a check or wanted to use the neighborhood as a photo opportunity. But it also stood in sharp contrast to the idea that Cedar Rapids was back.
There are several ideas as to the origins of the name Time Check. One is that the trains passing through would check their time at that location. It’s probably more likely that the railroad workers who lived there were not always paid on time, so merchants would extend credit by accepting the workers’ time cards as a kind of scrip.3
Time Check is where FEMA’s Director Craig Fugate came in September 2009. It was a typical visit. He took a walk through the neighborhood with Congressman Dave Loebsack, Iowa’s Governor Chet Culver, Mayor Kay Hal-loran, some city council members, local media, and one Associated Press reporter. He spent fifteen minutes in the neighborhood, stopping once to talk to three men sitting on the porch of an abandoned home. The men were very candid, but Director Fugate didn’t really stay long enough to get a true view of the loss. He did talk a lot about the heavy rains in Alabama that day.
Christian said of these visits, “The cynicism level rises higher and higher when another politician arrives and says, ‘It’s great to see Cedar Rapids back thanks to the money I sent to you since you reelected me.’ It’s all so carefully packaged, but it doesn’t match the reality when I walk around the neighborhoods.”
The Time Check neighborhood is loosely defined by the main thoroughfare of Ellis Boulevard, which runs east to west, and then everything north to the river. The houses are modest wood-frame structures, not particularly modern or energy efficient. After the flood, when the water receded, it was hard in some cases to determine ownership. Four months after the flood, Christian had told me that about 25 percent of owners citywide could not be located.
“Most people would say these are people who were already slipping through the safety net. They lived in Grandma’s house. No one knows who owns the house, but it has been in the family for years. They’re making $10,000 a year, but it’s OK because they didn’t have a mortgage on that house.
“There’s probably 200 or 300 of those people left. They will never apply for state aid. Ruggedly independent, they wouldn’t be caught dead using food stamps. They are living in tents now. The government will never find them because they don’t want to be found by the government. Maybe they’re undocumented workers; maybe there’s a warrant out. Maybe it’s just a personal decision that they don’t want to accept government aid because of a family history. Only the not-for-profit or faith communities can reach those people.”4
Even a year after the flood, street after street contained boarded-up houses that stood empty. Some people had begun to move back in. If they had the money, they rebuilt. Faith-based volunteer groups were also helping out. The pressure was intense to sell, either to a private party or wait for a buyout from the city. Some took a check from FEMA to use as a down payment elsewhere. Some took their FEMA checks and headed for a casino, bought a truck, took a trip overseas, or paid off bills. They hoped FEMA would never follow up as to how they actually spent the housing money.
Time Check is where my grandfather worked for thirty years at the city bus garage. He painted the city’s Bicentennial bus in 1976. During the many summers I stayed in Cedar Rapids, I would ride down with my grandmother just before noon to place Grandpa’s lunch box in his green Chevy pickup. As a reward, he would always leave a candy bar on the front seat.
Perhaps I had Grandpa in mind when I toured the abandoned neighborhood for about the sixth time and finally grasped what had been lost.
I realized that those flood victims had lost not only their homes but also their sense of neighborhood and community. I had asked Dr. Tansey if losing that additional safety net had added to the mental anguish of residents.
“Absolutely. People who experience loss or trauma but have a sense of a community often weather it much better. I think that’s in large part because the helplessness and horror are tempered when you feel that there are others there to lend a helping hand.”5
Hang around long enough in Time Check and you will hear the name Frank King, president of the Northwest Neighbors group. (Jon Galvin is vice president.) Frank and I had been e-mailing for a couple of months before I met him in person on the front porch of his former home on E Avenue NW, just down the street from the bus garage where Grandpa worked. He wore a cap from Menard’s, shorts, and a fuchsia Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation shirt with the slogan “2009 Sugar & Spice, A Cure Would Sure be Nice.” The shirt displayed the faces of two children; one was his granddaughter Payton.
He and his wife, Jane, now lived in another part of the city on 27th Avenue SW. The Time Check house was being used by members of the volunteer organization Christian Reform World Relief Committee, who would live in it for the next two years rent free in exchange for finishing the repairs Frank had started. It took them nine days and a crew of eight to complete the work on Frank’s house, and they planned on rehabbing homes for more than 200 other families in the neighborhood. The organization rotated in couples every three weeks from across the country. On the day I was there, women were setting the table for a fried-chicken dinner. (Frank’s house is technically outside Time Check, but his street and most of the blocks due south of Ellis Boulevard feel like the same neighborhood.)
Frank is sixty years old, retired from Montgomery Ward, and has emphysema (another reason he moved away from the flooded neighborhood). The anxiety of the flood made him resume smoking, something he is not proud of. He grew up six blocks from the E Avenue house. The four-bedroom, three-bath, original Craftsman house was ordered through a Sears catalog and was delivered to a local lumberyard in 1921. Horse-drawn wagons were used to deliver it to the homesite. The house sits on a big lot with fifty trees and a strawberry patch, and Frank has owned it since 2000. The floodwaters inundated the basement and rose to six inches on the main floor. Frank spent more than $100,000 to repair it, doing the work himself and losing thirty-five pounds in the process.
He originally said I should talk to him because the “perspective of an actual flood-affected person is so much different than one who looks at this as an opportunity for a rebirth of the city. It is somewhat like having a close family member die and while the body is still in the house, the neighbors start to celebrate. The ‘corpse’ is the houses where it has yet to be decided whether the owners can rebuild or need to move on.”6
Frank is the proverbial squeaky wheel in the city, the one who asks the hard and uncomfortable questions at public meetings. A friend of his described him as “a line in the sand.” This role hardly seemed preordained. When he was in high school, Frank made a deal with his speech teacher. He was so afraid to speak in front of the class that he talked her into letting him give his speeches in front of her alone after school.
He is not universally liked, but he doesn’t care. His message is clear: The city wants to gentrify the Time Check neighborhood—in fact, had the plan in place before the flood—and he will not allow it. The neighborhood is everything to him, and he is protective of its working-class families. Frank can look out from his front porch and tell you who lives in every house up and down his street, including their age, profession, and how many children they have. Many of the residents are elderly and have lived in Time Check their entire life.
To help them out after the flood, Frank has organized shovel and rake brigades. The brigade goes out into the neighborhood, mowing lawns and raking up all the nails and glass left from the flood. At the height of their efforts, they were able to fill 700 bags of trash in two and a half hours. Frank believes that mowing lawns, raking debris, and keeping down weeds in the hundreds of abandoned yards has a positive psychological effect on residents, what he calls “messages of hope.”
Another one of Frank’s many complaints about the way the city is going about flood recovery is that it is more concerned with getting downtown back up and running than helping the residents of neighborhoods like Time Check. “Millions of dollars” were pumped into downtown businesses without the kind of strings that FEMA attaches to its money, and the businesses still sit in a floodplain, Frank told me. “I know that businesses create jobs, jobs create income, and income creates the ability to have a home. I understand the concept. But I also know that there’s very few people that live in this area that are going down to buy [an expensive] latte.”7
Frank believes that the reason the city has not acted more quickly in helping homeowners in Time Check is that it’s trying to pressure them into selling or going into foreclosure so that gentrification can begin. “The longer they make people wait, the more go into foreclosure, the more they give up hope . . . These are wonderful people [in Time Check], but these are not the civic leaders; these are not doctors and lawyers. These are the working-class people.
“I’m not against revitalizing. I just think that you still have to think, What about the people? Just because you’ve got a new generation coming doesn’t mean you throw away the old one. Do we line them up and shoot them all?”
Frank was the first to mention the term “economic cleansing” to me. What set him off was a letter to the editor published around two weeks after the flood in the Cedar Rapids Gazette from Marion resident Robert Caldwell:
The Flood of 2008, bad and as destructive as it is, presents Cedar Rapids with an unsurpassed opportunity to rid itself of a business district haphazardly built in past years, and of a residential area that looks like a slum, is often crime ridden and a place of despair, into a “thing of beauty and a joy forever,” certainly for some present and future residents and a cause for pride for all Iowans.
It can and must be done.8
Three weeks later, Frank responded:
I am responding to a June 30 letter in which the writer refers to the area hardest hit by the flood as a crime-ridden slum and claims we are better off without it. I would have written sooner but as president of the Northwest Neighbors Association and a flood victim myself, I have been busy.
I have attended almost daily meetings to decide what to do with the 64 percent of Harrison Elementary School children who lost their homes or the entire student body of Taylor who will not have their school for a year.
I have also been concerned with the many elderly, including a 91-year-old ‘thug,’ who has lived in Time Check neighborhood almost her entire life.
At least the writer will feel safer as he drives from his unaffected Marion home into Cedar Rapids. This man may be educated but he is obviously a dispassionate, inconsiderate person who should take Highway 13 to Highway 30 to Interstate 380 to avoid having to see the slums he is glad to see go.9
In a Time magazine article, Cedar Rapids’ Councilman Brian Fagan took on Frank’s charges. “We’re not trying to push anyone out. We totally understand the frustration of all those people in those neighborhoods who are waiting. We have tried to move and advance as quickly as we can. Going through the natural disaster, then the economic crisis, then a bitterly cold and hard winter, certainly put strains on those ties that bind us together as a community. But we’ve got the plans in place and the commitment and engagement from the community.”10
Frank had a point: The city had a preliminary riverfront development plan before the flood, one based on another city that had been flooded, Grand Forks, North Dakota, where Mayor Halloran’s son Stewart lived. Grand Forks suffered its devastating historic flood in 1997 and had hired the firm JLG Architects to remake its riverfront.
A series of articles from April and May 2008 in the Cedar Rapids Gazette by reporter Rick Smith clearly show that the city was already making plans to redevelop its riverfront.
On April 19, 2008, in a story headlined “The downtown RiverWalk is real; City Hall committee readies to pick from five design consultants,” Smith reported:
Steve Hershner, who is team leader of the RiverWalk task force, reports that his group in recent weeks received entries from 18 firms presenting their qualifications to help the city come up with a new definition of the Cedar River through downtown with trails, riverfront park, and other enhancements.
The first phase of the work, expected to cost $150,000, Hershner said, will, among other things, identify the best place for a RiverWalk, a small outdoor amphitheater, trail connections, a trail bridge across the Cedar River at the base of May’s Island, and open space.
According to the city’s proposal, the consultant also is expected to present a plan, to be built in phases, that can coordinate with a river feasibility study to be prepared by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps’ study will involve both sides of the river from the Time Check Neighborhood to the city-owned Sinclair site.”11
On May 14, 2008, Smith reported:
The City Council this evening is expected to pick between two accomplished design firms for the job of creating a master plan for one of the council’s top priorities—riverfront redevelopment.
In front of the council last week, one of the design firms, Sasaki Associates Inc., Watertown, Mass., took a risk and showed off some concepts for how the riverfront could change.
They talked about turning First Avenue West along the river into a “great boulevard” with trees on each side and in the middle and how multistory buildings would go up on the west side of the boulevard and face the river. They also had a pretty image of an open-air riverfront amphitheater, on the west side of the river, just upriver from the Police Department.
It was the third idea and image that had some on the council remembering former District 4 council member Chuck Swore without even mentioning him by name. That idea, which Gina Ford from Sasaki even called kind of out there, involved moving the dam above the downtown to below the downtown. Such a move would raise the level of the Cedar River through the downtown and create a still pool of water there. People then could use the river right in the downtown for boating and even skating in winter, was the thought. Raising the river, too, would make people actually see the river. Now, it is mostly out of sight as it runs through downtown, Ford and her colleague, Mark Dawson said.12
The design firm Sasaki Associates was hired from Water-town, Massachusetts, to put the study into a feasible structure. What emerged was the “Cedar Rapids River Corridor Redevelopment Plan.” The firm wants to “rebuild a greater, more sustainable Cedar Rapids around three main themes: a flood management strategy to provide greater protection and a new riverfront greenway for the community; transportation improvements to increase connectivity and connect the neighborhoods; and a focus on sustainable neighborhood-based initiatives and investment. Sasaki will be putting these ideas to work in an ongoing riverfront feasibility study with the Corps of Engineers and in an intensive neighborhood planning process.”13
One sketch from the Sasaki Web site shows a shaded street bustling with retail shops including the “SOHO Café.” It is hard to see the resemblance to Cedar Rapids. Sasaki was paid $5 million.
The mayor told me, “Have you seen the JLG Plan? We started that before the flood because I was teasing Brian Fagan [city council member] that our plan was to redevelop the riverfront in downtown Cedar Rapids first and foremost and then move out from there. The city and the county joined together to call 2008 ‘The Year of the River.’ And then the river bit back. Not quite the way we intended, but nevertheless.
“We were awfully glad that we had made arrangements to have our design firm be the same one that did the Beijing Olympics, because they knew what they were doing.”
As far as the future of Time Check, she said:
Here’s what I have in my head or my heart, one or the other. Time Check was a working-class neighborhood. Time Check [residents] were the folks like your grandfather who worked all day and then if they had time and money enough would stop for a beer on the way home. Mowed their lawns, took care of their kids, and that part of time looks awfully empty right now.
But I was mucking out houses over in Time Check and I discovered something that I had not known. Most of those houses were a hundred years old, some more than. As I was mucking these houses out, I noticed very little insulation in the perimeter walls. Whoever was renting or buying those houses must have been paying horrendous utility bills. So as we replace those houses, whether in the same area or a different area, we are going to see that they’re built to necessary and modern building codes.
Coal must have been awfully cheap in those days. There was no incentive to put a lot of insulation in a wall. My parents’ house that I grew up in had a coal furnace that we stoked every morning. We didn’t even have a stove to use. We shoved it in. I hate to see how much insulation it didn’t have, but I bet it was better than the ones I was mucking out. That’s a very poor way to make a dividing line between rich peoples’ houses and poor peoples’ houses, because then the poor people really get screwed.14
Yet despite the plan by the high-profile company, the houses still stood in Time Check and people were slowly moving back in or simply not selling their ruined structures. The neighborhood was being reclaimed. SOHO Café was nowhere in sight.
Linda and Gary Seger decided to move back into their Eighth Street NW home after restoring the two-story structure. Gary is a metal fabricator and, until the flood, Linda was retired from a career in the medical field. After the flood she took a part-time job as a food service worker for the Cedar Rapids school system. She said the part-time job gave her some income and still allowed her time to work on flood recovery.
When I met them in August of 2009, there were three lights visible on their street at night from other homes. They considered that progress. Another family was about to move in kitty-corner to them in time for their children to begin school. Other residents were also beginning to come back.
Linda made us coffee and sat down at the dining room table. Gary, wearing jeans and an Omaha Zoo T-shirt, stood in the kitchen and let Linda do most of the talking, but he did add details. When I asked them to tell me the story of the flood, Gary deadpanned, “There was a lot of water.” Without missing a beat, Linda added, “See, he’s ready for Twitter.”15
The Segers were among many people in Cedar Rapids who didn’t quite take the threat of a historic flood seriously. Their house sat in the 100-year floodplain, so they expected minor flooding now and then. (The remodeling of their house now places them in the 500-year floodplain.) The evacuation notice warned of only a twenty-four-foot crest, and the Segers imagined that, at the most, their basement would flood. In 1993 the Cedar crested at 19.27 feet and the Segers only had minimal water in the basement. No one expected thirty feet.
In the days leading up to the crest on June 13, Gary sat on his front porch with a neighbor, somewhat amused at the frantic activity in the neighborhood. City dump trucks were hauling dirt to a nearby park on the river to build a dike. People were beginning to remove items from their houses and he thought, The water will never get that high. I’ve lived here thirty years, and at the most all we’ll get is some water in the basement. Gary thought the pre-flood panic was comical.
“We’re standing out there watching, and I kept telling them, ‘Boy, these people are in left field. There’s no way the water’s going to come this far.’ Well, here they come pulling gas meters and stuff out. Then we got evacuation notes on our doors.” That’s when Gary and Linda decided that they should start to take the flood seriously.
With the help of four daughters, their husbands, and the Segers’ adult grandchildren, they moved a lot of what was in the basement upstairs and sat it on the dining room table. A few things were moved upstairs to the second story, but they left the computer, televisions, radios and other electronics, and family genealogy research Linda was working on downstairs.
They lost it all, including pictures, everything their six kids had ever made, and all their school papers. Linda said she had kept it all because she could never throw anything away, including items her fifteen grandchildren had made or given them.
They spent days worrying behind an Iowa National Guard checkpoint, fearing the worst but hoping for one of those miracles. They already knew that all that was visible of second-story houses like theirs were the upstairs windows and the roofs. As mentioned earlier, a daughter managed to get to the house in a boat to retrieve a cat that had hidden when they evacuated. The daughter entered the house through a window accessed from the porch roof. She peered over from the railing upstairs and heard what sounded like a waterfall. Furniture was crashing against the walls downstairs and she panicked, thinking the house might collapse. She finally found the fourteen-year-old cat and boated back to the barricade. After months of treatment, the cat died of a bacterial infection, Linda said.
“He evidently tried to get downstairs because he was used to going [to get his food and water]. He must’ve drunk the water.”
Gary was the first to see the condition of their house. He turned to Linda and warned, “Don’t go in; it’s a shithole.” Linda said, “My husband [a Vietnam veteran] doesn’t lose it very often, but he burst into tears standing on the porch.” That’s when Linda said their roles reversed; she became the strong one.
After the flood, they lived in a FEMA trailer from July 2008 until April 2009 while they rebuilt their house. “You really know what it’s like to be humbled when you are getting your meals on the side of the Red Cross truck. And you are so grateful to see that truck and hear that horn coming, that you know two times that day you’re going to get a hot meal. And you first think, Oh, I don’t need that. We’re not that bad off. And then you turn around and look at your house that’s in shambles, and you’re like, We’re homeless.”
The Segers used $23,000 from FEMA to rebuild. It took ten months. The pipes in the FEMA trailer froze three times that winter. “We had a choice. Relocate or rebuild. Some people took advantage: They took the money and did a lot of other things with it. But you always have the possibility to be audited. I have every receipt of every single thing we spent, and more.”
Linda was intrigued by Mayor Halloran’s idea to remake Cedar Rapids in the image of Grand Forks, so she decided to look a little closer. She pored over topography maps and soon realized that the Cedar and Red Rivers were “total opposites.
[The Red River] is a river that flows upstream, it is a low basin river, it floods every year due to—melting. It’s not a high-bank river. We, on the other hand, flow south. We were a deep-channel river, until we sort of really ruined our own river. And we don’t have these spring melts that they do up there [in North Dakota]. So there was really no comparison other than Sasaki worked on both deals. Sasaki was hired at a pretty good salary. Since then they have made almost $5 million in their consulting, designs, and workshops. So they’re getting a very lucrative paycheck out of this.
Well, as the terror of the flood subsided, people started asking questions. Then all of the old rumors about the gentrification came up, and economic cleansing, and many of us began to see that this was a pattern, because they jumped in immediately. And prematurely, when people were not even back in their homes and they couldn’t even give us a decision on what to do with our homes. The city got greedy and starting preventing more and more people from getting building permits to go back and rebuild.
These workshops were springing up and these open houses in which designs were displayed. And they really didn’t want the flood people to come and look at them, because I went to the first one they had and everybody was dressed as if they were at a cocktail party. And then people from the flooded area—we show up in our jeans and in our T-shirts—we’d been working all day in our houses—and we find out that there’s all these easels with all these drawings, and you start talking to the people from Sasaki. And they weren’t even aware that there was housing on the other side of Ellis Boulevard. They just knew how to beautify neighborhoods. Urban renewal and landscaping and things like that.
The night of the cocktail party Linda became a community activist. She decided then and there that she would not be the typical stoic Midwesterner who takes what fate brings her. She particularly resented the patronizing treatment she and her neighbors were receiving from the city. “It was an attitude like the parent who says, ‘I really know what’s better for you than you do, so you do what I tell you.’”
She began speaking out to the press—local and national—and attending meetings. She started pushing back against the city that, she said, began to refer to her and her Time Check neighbors as “those people.” She hasn’t stopped since.
On the one-year anniversary, the day the city cleaned up the streets around her neighborhood so that the tour buses could cruise through and gawkers could take photos, Linda was with her family for a cookout. But it wasn’t a happy day for her. She was depressed.
“The news media called me and I said, ‘I won’t feel like there should be a celebration until every person that has lost their home has a place to live.’ I understand that some individuals who were not affected, it’s not the same for them because they’re just looking at it, and it’s a year we didn’t have a flood. I said, ‘I don’t deny them an opportunity to celebrate it in however way they want,’ but it bothered me that we had tour buses going through here.”
After our interview I received the following e-mail from Linda:
August 21, 2009
Dear Stephen:
You asked that I expand on my role as an activist/advocate. I do not recall exactly when I really became aware of my desire to become outspoken and active in the flood recovery work. It just evolved from the muck and devastation I was experiencing on a daily basis. You may or not believe this, but I feel it was Divine inspiration.
As the weeks unfolded following the flood, I seemed guided in the path to directly face those who were in a position to make decisions. When I would speak out, people would listen. I became more articulate and empowered. Sometimes as I would speak to government officials, I felt as if I was watching from another vantage point and this woman who was speaking was not me. I never experienced being nervous (something in prior times that was “normal.”) No matter how important the individual I was conversing with, there were no butterflies. I did not speak from notes. My words came easily and extemporaneously. My energy level increased despite hours of work rehabbing my home and carrying out all the duties needed to climb the red tape mountain for assistance.
As the months passed, I never requested news media coverage, but I was constantly sought by them. Calls came from all over the United States and several news outlets. I began attending City Council meetings and talking to residents all around the flood area. I was asked to address State Legislature representatives and the Governor. I spoke at forums and made video releases explaining the plight of the flood people and their struggles. Faith-based organizations asked me to give testimony to congregations and volunteer groups. This all came without any hesitation on my part. My family was surprised at my high profile as an advocate. They found that they could Google me and there was information.
People came to my home once I moved back in asking my advice and help. News reporters call when they need a flood “icon” to give an opinion. Political people urge me to disclose my preference on candidates. This is just unreal. I am a 65-year-old grandmother of 15 (so far). I am just an average person. What makes a difference is that I want things to be better for my neighbors and citizens who lost so much in the flood.
If God has given me this gift at this age, I am not questioning His wisdom. I am His servant, and I will work to help my brothers and sisters in whatever way I can. I will not stand by and see people suffer when I can speak out for them. I will always be honest and forthright in my comments and questions. I do feel that many of my fellow citizens are being treated unfairly and with prejudice. That is probably not what you expected, but it is what I feel in my heart. We are our brothers and sisters keepers, and I cannot only think of myself and my needs. I will continue to do this until God decides he no longer needs my energy.
Linda Seger16