The path to success

Age of the Geek Column: All eyes in Iowa have been on Maddie Poppe this week as the small town girl from Clarksville takes the national stage as finalist on "American Idol."
(Note: this column was written on Monday before the results of the contest)
Win or lose, Poppe has a bright future ahead of her. Her story is one we all aspire to in one form or another. She's living the dream of transcending her small town roots and making it big.
The same aspirations have been repeated at graduation ceremonies across the state over the last couple weeks. Countless speakers in high school gyms will encourage the next wave of newly minted adults to follow their dreams and find the path to success.
And, in many cases, that path will lead them away from Iowa.
This is a problem.
It's not that there's anything wrong with leaving Iowa in search of greener pastures, I've done it myself, but continuing to lose our best and brightest is going to put Iowa in a demographics crisis we can't afford, if it hasn't already.
The combo of the great Midwest brain drain, an aging population, and lagging population growth can be felt in every corner of the state. Countless towns have become "bedroom communities" of rundown houses not worth the cost of maintaining and fewer and fewer amenities to attract desperately needed new blood.
Many of these towns are probably already beyond the point of no return, fated for un-incorporation and a population sign that says, "Will the last one out please turn off the lights."
School districts continue to consolidate in order to gather enough students to keep their doors open. The rising cost of transportation for districts with hundreds of square miles to cover is going to be an ever increasing problem, particularly if the state keeps cutting budgets.
Meanwhile, Iowa's unemployment rate is stuck at a paltry 2.8 percent. "Common sense" might lead one to believe that's 2.8 percent higher than it should be, but in reality the opposite is true. With so small a pool of available workers, businesses can't fill the positions they need to fill, much less expand.
More conventional wisdom would say that if there's such a demand for workers, businesses would raise their wages to convince people to move here.
Obviously that's not happening. There's only so much you can pay a person before it becomes more cost effective to just move the business, leaving rural areas in the discouraging position of literally being unable to pay people enough to live there.
And that's the crux of the issue.
As a young person that's left Iowa and come back, I've been frequently asked why I did it and what it would take to get other people to do the same.
I tell them that, outside of the obvious things like family and low cost of living, I love my job, I love my internet, and I love the weather.
That works for me, but it clearly isn't enough for everybody and I don't know what it would take to make somebody want to stay in rural Iowa, or move here from somewhere else, if they didn't have to.
But I do know what isn't going to work.
The Republican Party of Iowa recently went on the offensive against visits from "out of touch" California liberals, proudly proclaiming "Iowa, not California… and proud of it!"
You want to talk about out-of-touch?
California is constantly on the verge of drought, semi-regularly catches fire, and most of the population is at risk of having the ground underneath them open up and swallow them at any given point in time.
In spite of that, California is the world's fifth largest economy and arguably the most sought after place to live on the planet.
Maybe the state suffering from a critical loss of population shouldn't be so quick to throw the term "out-of-touch" around.
I understand the impulse to bristle against Iowa's reputation as a "flyover" state. Even I cringe when Iowa gets mentioned on a late night talk show because the punchline always hinges on the presumption that the Midwest is a place you wouldn't visit if you didn't have to.
But stereotypes don't become stereotypes without a kernel of truth. Getting defensive and embracing all the things that keep those "coastal elites" away isn't going to do anything to change that reputation.
Passing legislation that seems tailor made to disgust young, college educated demographics isn't going to make them want to pursue careers in the state.
Electing representatives that only make news when they are embarrassing us on a national stage isn't going to make businesses want to set-up shop here.
Demonizing immigrants, the people that actually go out of their way to live here and have acted as a buffer between Iowa and total economic catastrophe, is as counter-productive to the state's long term interests as you can possibly get.
Iowa needs people. We need people to work. We need people to buy things. We need people to offer services and people that can afford those services.
Anything we can do to make Iowa an appealing place to live, we should be doing. Even if it means doing something different.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and seriously did miss Iowa weather.