We stopped by the Catholic Worker House in Cleveland after the kids second soccer match at the Micheal Zone Recreation Center here. I excitedly shared about their last minute victory in a “shoot out.” One of the volunteers, Joe Mueller (who is an anarchist), looked up and said that organized sports, for the most part, prepare youth to become “good capitalists and ready for war.” (That is, his point is organized sports, the way they are now, are ultra-competitive — like in the work place — and contain many components of war, including such terminology as: “shoot out, pitched battle, throw a bomb…”) Several minutes later, I asked Joe what he had planned for the next day. He said he was going to a friend’s place: “…to watch the Ohio State / Michigan game.” After a pause, I looked at him, oh, a little askance. He smiled and said: “It’s a total personal failing on my part… but I went to school at Michigan.” (Yet another demonstration of the existential depth of a Michigan fan.) There goes a few Wolverine votes come 2008, huh… Note: On a more serious side, Joe Mueller just came back from a trip to Iraq as a delegate on a Christian Peacemaker Team. He saw, first hand, some of the suffering on the ground there among the general populace, and was quite moved. Mueller is a peace activist, and prior to going to Iraq, he risked arrest with an act of civil disobedience at the Cleveland Air Show. He and another activist strung yellow “crime scene” tape around an F-18 fighter jet. His point was these high-tech planes could well be considered ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ — especially to all those (soldiers and civilians) on the receiving end of their missiles.
11/17/05
Interviewed Ofosu Amponsah as part of my position paper research on the economy. Mr. Amponsah, who is from Ghana, West Africa, teaches economics at the Bryant-Stratton College in the Cleveland area. He said to establish true “competitive markets” based on sustainability (for everyone), we need to revert back to an older orientation where there were, say, five to 10 people in a local company that produced, primarily, for local people. And he said there needs to be a resurgence of small Mom & Pop stores, etc., as well. Mr. Amponsah said the neighborhoods in Cleveland are deteriorating because so many of these shops, and small companies, were now vacant. And what’s more, with people moving from neighborhood to neighborhood desperately searching for work (and/or moving because the neighborhood their family had lived in for generations was decaying), there is no “socio-cohesion” anymore, said Mr. Amponsah. He said to help correct this and breath life back into some of these neighborhoods, a package of significant tax breaks, and other incentives, need to go to small businesses, in tandem with help from local ‘business incubators,’ and so on. Note: Mr. Amponsah said the type of globalization the U.S. is spearheading, is creating “wage slavery” in the sweat shops of the Third World. Meanwhile, us American consumers go on buying the cheapest priced items possible, without a social justice thought.
11/16/05
Talked at length with a man at the Catholic Worker Storefront, a evening drop in center for the disadvantaged in the area. He said several years ago, he was homeless in another municipality to the west of here, and was picked up by the police. He was then transferred to the Toledo Psychatric Hospital, which started a string of psychiatric hospital, and jail, visits over the next three years. While he didn’t say what his diagnosis was, as we were talking he demonstrated features of someone with bi-polar disorder in a manic phase… There seems a significant number of people who come to the “Storefront” who have mental disorders, and are either living on the streets, or living in tenuous, month-to- month situations on low rent apartments, and so on. As a mental health counselor, I worked for a time as a liaison between a drug and alcohol outpatient treatment program in Lorain, Ohio and the Cleveland Psychiatric Institute. I saw, first hand, the desperation of people living (actually often just surviving, or worse) in the hell of mental illness, sometimes coupled with addiction as well. These people need comprehensive help on all levels: quality mental health counseling and proper medication, if needed; job training and/or education; a team of people (from a church, civic group…) to help them with such life skills as budgeting, nutrition, home ownership. Short of all this, many will be left to: “just survive.”
11/15/05
Went to an excellent presentation on the book Moral Politics. The presentation was given by Cleveland’s Dick Weber, who is a social worker. Mr. Weber said the basic theme of the book is that there is a “conceptual link between politics and morality in our country.” What’s more, this dynamic is often shaped, to one degree or another, by a person’s upbringing. He said the book explains two basic family models that the author believes are on different ends of the continuum. Those are: “athoritarian male model vs nurturing mother model.” And how these get extrapolated into the nation, is people growing up in the authoritarian male dominated family lean toward a more structured society based on “conservative priorities” like: moral strength (enforced, for instance, by militarism); moral purity (social movements like feminism and environmentalism are often considered outside the lines of this, so to speak); moral order (male dominated society)… Meanwhile, the assertion is those who have grown up with the nurturing mother model, lean more toward such “liberal priorities” as: moral nurturance (a tendency toward more empathy and less structure); nurturance of social ties (making sacrifices — philisophically and otherwise — to keep community together); moral growth (open mindedness to alternatives to a solely male dominated society)… In the discussion afterward, my wife Liz said these explanations were quite helpful in seeing some of the underlying psycho-social dynamics in our nation. However, she was concerned that describing these models in — in polar ends of the continuum — may be: ‘polarizing.’ What’s more, she said seldom is this as black and white as the author seems to present. That is, in raising our eight-year-old boy, healthy parenting calls for a combination. That is, because he doesn’t have (as most eight-year-olds don’t) strong internal control, he needs a regular degree of authoritarian, parental guidance. Likewise, for healthy support in the developmental stages, he also needs regular, empathetic nurturance. Liz’s point is most families display some of each, to one degree or another. And extrapolated out into society, many peoples’ politics are a mix — from issue to issue. (The conundrum is being limited, basically, to a two party system that is often perceived as: “either/or” on many issues.) Liz’s last point that night was that we need to look for “common ground” in all this and to keep dialogue going — so the best of each orientation emerges and is blended into the best society we can have — all for the common good.
11/14/05
Our children, Sarah, 10 and Joseph, 8, participated in their first soccer league game at the Michael Zone Recreation Center up the street this evening. The league has four teams and is a good mix of Black, Hispanic and White youth. (Not exactly what you’d call an homogenous bubble. Read: suburbs.) The game was a rough one, and our kids took their knocks. But in the end, they both played their best. Note: In our family, we try to de-emphasize ultra-competitiveness. That is, we’re trying to teach the kids that the essence of sports should be about team camaraderie, good clean physical excertion, fun… After the game (which our kids team won), Sarah came up to me and said: “We really killed them Dad!” … Apparently Liz and I might have, oh, a little more parenting to do in this area.
11/13/05
Met with Stephanie Taylor who is on a board for “Affordable Housing” on the near west side of Cleveland. Ms. Taylor said the area is going through a steady process of: “gentrification.” That is, developers are coming into the neighborhoods and rennovating. The problem here is, as the places are rennovated… the rents go up, etc. The lower-income people who have lived in the neighborhoods here for generations, then are basically forced to move, said Ms. Taylor. Note: As a result of some of the lobbying for affordable housing, recently four historic apartment buildings in this neighborhood have been rennovated — and offered as low income residences. An article in the Plain Press here explained the $8.6 million West Side Homes Project was a four-year collaborative effort between local development corporttions, housing groups, the city of Cleveland, the public housing agency, social service agencies and charities. Thirteen of the housing units target families with incomes less than $2,000 a year and rents in these units are $50 per month. Twenty five units are reserved for families with incomes form 30 to 50% of the area median income ($13,520 to $16,240). Rents on these units range from $204 to $304 per month. And so on…
11/12/05
Have spent much of the week starting to work on updates for the position papers on our website. We currently have some 15 years of research to draw from… A main focus during this particular week was putting together an over-arching philosophy on the Economy. (See: Economy category at: “what joe stands for.”)
11/11/05
Veterens Day. The front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer carried a story about a Marine Veteran who said he grew up watching war glorified on such shows as: Combat. After he got into the Service, he did tours of Vietnam and Iraq and said he saw the real reality of war… I’d recently interviewed Cleveland’s John Smith (not his real name), a Veteran who has also seen the reality of war. He was a medic who developed Post Traumatic Stress and has undergone an extensive amount of counseling through VA Hospital programs… Several years ago, I interviewed another former Army medic. He lived in the state of Washington. He was at “Hamburger Hill” in Vietnam, the second bloodiest battle in that war’s history. For three days, he said he was on the hill, amidst a constant firefight, attending to soldiers. When the battle ended, he said he (almost robotically, read: in a state of emotional disassociation) walked down the hill, found a tarp and curled up under it in a fetal position. He was airlifted out, and eventually was sent back to the States. Out of the Service, he got a small house boat on a slough of the Columbia River — and rarely left it. (A dimension of his PTSD was agoraphobia.) When he did infrequently leave, he’d take a small skiff and go down the slough to a railroad bridge that reminded him of one he knew in Vietnam. There, he’d camp for weeks at a time — away from everyone. Note: As a formal mental health counselor, I know about the various symptoms of PTSD. And I know how real (another ‘reality’ of war), and debilitating, they can be. It is my belief these Veterans should have every counseling avenue imaginable available to help them heal. And even at this, I don’t think people ever really heal entirely from war.
11/9/05
Met with an activists from the country of Columbia, who is on a speaking tour in America. Jenry Nermi is the Director of the Christian Center for Justice and Non-Violent Action in Columbia. She said Columbia has been in the midst of an “armed conflict” for the past 50 years, the struggle between the government and the para-military that is aligned with it, vs guerilla groups aligned with the poor. Ms. Nermi said America’s “Plan Columbia” to eradicate coca crops has actually hurt, more than helped. She said aerial fumigation of coca crops is done so high up, that the spray also often affects all surrounding crops — tremendously damaging small subsitence farms, and so on. What’s more, the spray is Glyphosate, a Monstano product that she said is causing rashes, eye problems, respiratory problems (no studies have been done to see if there are cancer links, and so on, yet). Ms. Nermi said what is really needed in Columbia is “agrarian reform.” That is, she said there are currently few rural roads to get these farmers’ produce to local markets, so growing the coca is often the only option the farmer sees for feeding his family. If these farmers had these roads, and perhaps some humanitarian help to, eventually, move toward more sustainability, the coca growing there would, most likely, drop in kind. Note: The American “War on Drugs” needs to be fought more, I believe, in the American home. For a number of years, I was a licensed chemical dependency counselor working with addictive family systems. One of the things I observed, time and again, is if a youth grows up in a “dysfunctional home” and is shorted emotionally by parents who are alcoholic, or drug addicted, or gambling addicts, or the parents are addicted to work, addicted to TV, and so on… the youth, consequently, grows up with emotional holes inside. Holes they, in turn, begin filling with alcohol, drugs (like cocaine), and so on. In other words, we need to deal with the root of the drug problem: which is healing more of the families in America.
11/8/05
Went to a Bible Study at St. Coleman’s Church in the heart of the near westside of Cleveland. The topic of “sin” came up. An all but ‘lost concept’ on many Americans these days, sin was described in a multitude of ways among this particular group. One that was particularly interesting, I thought: One person said sin is maintaining our gluttonous lifestyles in America — while, for instance, global warming seems to be increasing exponentially. (Several years ago, I interviewed Bluffton College Environmental Science Professor Bob Antibus. He said if the whole world consumed — energy, material goods — as the average American consumed, we’d need three earths!) “Bless me Father for I have sinned… I could have bicycled to the store, but I drove… I could have recycled, but didn’t…” Wouldn’t that be refreshing, and enlightened? Note: We are readying for yet another tour and need donations. If you can help, please send your donations to — “Schriner Election Committee,” 2100 W. 38th St., Cleveland, Ohio 44113. (We’re effective at what we do, but like other campaigns, we need donations to keep going. Thanks.)