LA Times story on CA family moving to Iowa

[essentialsaltes]

Dream relocation or Lovecraftian descent into madness?


 At 5 years old, [Sara O'Neil] told her mom [in Iowa] that she’d live by the ocean someday.

As an adult, she made her dream a reality. Sara joined the Navy, married, had four kids and, for more than two decades, built a life in Southern California.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and with it the realization that the Golden State’s liberal politics didn’t align with hers.

Wanting to feel grounded during a tumultuous time, Sara and Johnny started going back to church. They picked Calvary Imperial Beach chapel, part of the sprawling Costa Mesa megachurch that was meeting in person — in defiance of state restrictions on large gatherings.

Sara, then a nurse at Sharp Mary Birch Hospital for Women & Newborns, managed to get a medical exemption [for the COVID vaccination] because she said she’d experienced an anaphylactic shock with a previous vaccine. After three interviews, Johnny, a Navy vet turned firefighter, won a religious exemption.

Still, COVID-era California weighed on them. Sara worried that she might be living in the end times the Bible prophesied.

And as Sara and Johnny soon learned, their new church had an outpost in Iowa, stocked with people like them.

So Sara and her husband, Johnny, a Southland native with a sunny disposition to match, packed up and joined the droves of Californians leaving the state, some for political reasons.

The church attracts 30 to 40 attendees on any given Sunday, and members say about half are from the Golden State. In the Ames church, the newcomers found a community of like-minded folks. Together they worried about vaccines, prayed outside Planned Parenthood offices and said blessings at antiabortion clinics.

Johnny, she said, will more than likely vote for Trump, whose track record he trusts. Sara’s views are complicated. She blames Trump for the first pandemic lockdowns, and for funding vaccine research. Although Trump “was obnoxious to listen to,” Sara excuses his racist comments, such as characterizing Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” 

The couple, who both served in the military after Sept. 11, 2001 — Sara in the Persian Gulf — now doubt that Al Qaeda carried out the attacks, a view that is unsupported by evidence.

“I think 9/11 was a CIA mission, and I think they blew up that building,” Johnny said. “There’s too much evidence. I’ve seen too many videos.”

the oldest two kids reminisced with their parents about one of the things they miss most about California: the state’s diversity.

At his Iowa high school, Johnathan still can’t believe how his friends at school casually use a derogatory slur as a nickname for the one Black student on the football team.

“Casual racism, I will say, that’s a real thing,” he said. “I didn’t think it was a real thing until I moved out here.”

[The Family] insisted that they’re still all in, despite their gripes about Iowa’s lack of diversity and limited understanding of Mexican food.