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Talk about lousy optics — and I am not referring to out-of-style eyeglasses. Public perception is the topic for today.

There were a couple of recent news nuggets that illustrate in different ways an uncomfortable fact of life in Iowa — that too many state and local government officials are *not* comfortable with the public looking over their shoulders as they perform their official duties.

One case overflowing with irony involves the Des Moines County Board of Supervisors. The other involves State Treasurer Roby Smith.

Thirty-three years ago on a snowy Friday in November, the nightmare of mass school shootings shocked Iowa like it has never been shocked before.

It was 3:40 p.m. A former University of Iowa graduate student with a brilliant scientific mind, and a .38-caliber revolver, walked into a conference room in Van Allen Hall, the home of the university’s renowned Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Gang Lu, a native of China, pulled the revolver from his coat and in quick succession fatally shot two professors, Christoph Goertz and Robert Smith, and another Chinese grad student, Linhua Shan, who were seated at the large conference table. A handful of others in the room were spared.

Lu then walked down a flight of stairs to the office of the department chairman, Dwight Nicholson, where he fired a bullet into Nicholson’s head, killing him.

Lu left the building and walked a couple of blocks west to Jessup Hall, the main U of I administration building. He went to the office of the associate vice president for academic affairs and mortally wounded T. Anne Cleary. On his way out, he paused to shoot a student clerical worker, Miya Rodolfo-Sioson, leaving her paralyzed.

With police officers closing in, Lu went upstairs to an empty classroom. There, he killed himself with a single bullet.

The gunfire was over — but the questions began.

I have fielded a bunch of emails, text messages and phone calls in the days since the school shooting in Winder, Georgia.

Each one is from Perry, Iowa. Each one had the same question for me and the Iowa Freedom of Information Council. Each one came from a parent, teacher or other concerned person asking, why isn’t the public allowed to read the official findings by state agents about the shooting at Perry High School and Middle School last January 4?

We are in the home stretch of another presidential campaign, and it is important for voters to be alert for the unintended consequences of candidates’ promises.

Office-seekers and their supporters like to portray issues in terms of absolutes — as in, my position is the very best way to address this issue; my opponent’s way is all wrong.

Most of the time, issues are not all black, nor all white. Most of the time, issues involve many shades of gray, meaning there are no simple solutions.

Take illegal immigration, for example.

During the 40 years I was a newspaper editor/manager, I strived to ensure the staff incorporated context into their articles. Sometimes, in a journalistic shorthand, that was described “the Iowa angle.”

If there was a mass murder in Iowa, I would dip into my stash of clippings and find the list of the worst mass killings in Iowa history. That allowed us to give context to the magnitude of the tragedy.

The same with tornadoes and floods. How does the number of deaths compare with the worst of these nightmares we have experienced in the past?

During the Vietnam war, and later during the Gulf wars, we turned to bound desk calendars where we pasted clippings to track the running tally of deaths of Iowa soldiers.

So, over this past weekend a friend and I pawed through statistics to provide important Iowa context when Belgium’s mixed relay triathlon team pulled out of the Olympic competition in Paris.

Belgium’s decision was made after one of its athletes became ill and was hospitalized, reportedly for an E. coli infection, after she swam in the River Seine earlier in the competition. The same day as the announcement about Claire Michel, Olympic organizers canceled a training session for the swimming leg of the triathlon because the Seine’s water pollution levels were too high.

The quality of the Seine’s water has been a persistent worry leading up to this year’s Olympic Games. The pollution levels forced organizers to consider delaying, or even canceling, some outdoor swimming events.

This is where the Iowa angle comes into the picture — and it provides some interesting context for the news out of Paris.

Some memories stick with you — like that August day around 1960 when my parents loaded my two brothers and me into our Dodge Coronet and headed to the Iowa State Fair for the first time. Our excitement rivaled that of Abel Frakes’ family in the famous “State Fair” movies.

The Frakeses celebrated during their time in Des Moines — with Abel winning the grand champion ribbon with Blue Boy, his prized pig, and Melissa’s mincemeat winning, too. But the Evanses’ excitement was cut short when torrential rains sent us scrambling for our car much earlier than planned.

For some Iowans, new rules for this year’s State Fair may remind us of a time in Iowa’s recent past that was far from joyful — when COVID turned our state and our institutions upside down.