Vote for Joe

History Museum football helmet, circa the 1950s. …photo by Joe

Catching up on the summer of 2025 (part 4)…. I wrote a newspaper article this summer about a local man who played football for Cincinnati University in the 1950s. He played without a facemask, broke his nose eight times during his collegiate career, and who knows how many concussions he got. About the same time I was writing this, on July 28, Shane Tamura shot and killed four people in a building that housed the NFL headquarters. He, too, was killed. But Tamura left a note asking that his brain be studied for CTE, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. He had played football in high school in California. Now, if this was a one-off situation, it would be easy to dismiss. But CTE keeps coming up again and again now, including in a significant study done on a group of deceased NFL players. While I grew up playing football *(see), and love the sport, it’s becoming time to seriously assess if we want to keep sending our children down an athletic path that could seriously hurt them for life. Note: I was also recently reading parts of a book titled The Big Scrum (How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football). The book noted that there was an increasing number of deaths and maiming in football in the late 1800’s, and a cohort of college presidents, and such, were calling for the abolishing of football. At the time, Roosevelt wrote an article for Harper’s Weekly, defending football against “…the noisy crusade of the (football) prohibitionists.” The sport, he wrote, was integral to a “…vigorous and manly nation, where there is a certain slight element of risk.” Yet, and here was the caveat: He also wrote: “The brutality must be done away with, and the danger minimized. The rules for football ought probably to be altered…” Note 2: We would do well, as a collective society, to lobby for a series of changes that make our current brand of football much less violent. Problem is, we, also as a collective, have become absolutely addicted to watching the football violence. Note 3: We would also do well, for many of our kids’ sakes, to start to like the game of soccer more. Most of the rest of the world does.

Rural El Salvador missions trip

Catching up on the summer of 2025 (part 2)… I wrote a newspaper article about a local couple, both trained paramedics, who go to rural El Salvador every year to help with various medical missions. They are motivated by their Christian faith. “This might well be the only chance many of these people have to receive any type of formal medical care during the year,” said Rachel, who is pictured here. The poverty is staggering in these areas, yet America is currently spending $140 billion on deportations. Think what that money would do in Mexican, and Latin American, rural areas. Our position paper on Hispanic Immigration is a much saner, and much more spiritually sound, approach to this issue. See… One of the village council meetings I reported on, included the village administrator talking about her participation in a new, and local, Housing Coalition effort. The coalition will be undertaking an initial housing study, to tabulate figures on such dynamics as to, for instance, what local home buyers are looking for in the way of, say, duplexes, versus single family units, versus tiny homes… And to the latter, one of our platform proposals is suggesting local zoning commissions change zoning codes to allow for tiny home structures to be built on more properties — as part of a multi-dimensional approach to significantly impacting homelessness. That is, besides providing a physical, permanent tiny home structure, things like church care teams could form around a person, as they are getting on their feet, and getting established. The care team could plug the formerly homeless person in with social services, with a church, with job training, with education, with counseling… As opposed to just sweeping people off the streets and into over-crowded shelters, what we propose would be a much more thorough, systemic, and exceedingly more spiritual approach. For a look at how we would approach poverty in general, see…

Migrant children organize for a soccer game in Ohio

As I type this, the deportation riots rage in LA. Meanwhile, this photo is of migrant farm worker children who are going to a bi-lingual school while their parents work in the fields here. (I just wrote a newspaper article about this Migrant Education Program.) In the winter, the kids will be in California with their parents during harvest season there, then down south to Texas, Georgia, etc. Poverty and insecurity follow them everywhere. Cart blanche just deporting as many “illegals” as possible, people who, for the most part, have come here to escape poverty, to escape violence… is absolutely nuts on a spiritual level! Many who hold this highly protectionist sentiment, whether political officials, or those who voted for them, won’t have to worry about being deported from Heaven. They’ll never get in — the wall will be that high for them at the border of Heaven. For more on our Farm Worker position paper, see…

elawtalk.com photo

I was recently talking with a local law enforcement officer who is in the early stages of trying to develop an initiative to get statewide mental health coverage for all first responders. He said that currently, some municipality insurance plans cover mental health services, and some don’t. This officer said he sees it as essential that every first responder has access to these vital services. He noted, as just one example, that statistics show that every three days in America, a first responder will take his life. Concurrently, statistics also show some 22 military veterans take their lives every day in America. Our administration would concur that stepped up mental health coverage, for both first responders, and for military veterans, should be a ‘front and center’ priority. Note: Our family spent five years doing outreach work in a hardscrabble area of Cleveland. And those police officers, for instance, are regularly confronted with life and death situations. And it only stands to reason, as with war veterans, that incidence of PTSD would be high among these officers. For more on our position paper around crime/law enforcement, see… And for more on our time in Cleveland, see…

Trump just hosted the president of South Africa. During a press conference, the president said that his country is replete with poverty (…a 40% unemployment rate currently), and as a result, riddled with gang violence, and such. *It was noted that some 75 people are killed in that country every day now. That’s more fatalities than some war zones. The Catholic Catechism explains that First World countries have a grave responsibility to help Third World countries which are struggling. This is Exhibit A, with an exponent… American lifestyles, as a whole, revolve around nice, well-appointed houses or apartments. We eat three square meals a day, with snacks, and with, often, never giving a second thought about eating out regularly — as many of these Third World people are tremendously food insecure. We purchase the latest in automobiles, with all the options. And I could go on, and on… with all this. In modern day apparitions from the Blessed Virgin Mary, she, regularly, talks about “unbridled materialism” plaguing the First World. We (many of us), in turn, default to looking at Elon Musk, Jeff Bazos, Warren Buffett… as being plagued with “unbridled materialism,” without looking at ourselves in the mirror. And that is especially germane in comparison to our lifestyles versus the abject poverty lifestyles of many of those in, say, South Africa. *See: Luke 16:19-31. Hint: Many of us are the “rich man,” and many in South Africa are “Lazarus the Beggar.” Our Foreign Policy spins around carrying out the essence of what the Catechism calls for. See… *Note: The reason for the photo of the baby in the womb with this? With abortion, the killing around the world is absolutely off the charts. Concurrently, and as a result of abortion, it seems God is incrementally taking His protective hand off the world, as we devolve into war in Gaza, Ukraine, the Sudan, Haiti (gang war), South Africa (gang war), and on, and on… Stay tuned for full-blown World War III.