Vote for Joe

Black History Month: At Berry College in Rome, Georgia, this week, I interviewed Professor Brian Carroll who is the author of the just released When to Stop the Cheering (The Black Press, the Black Community and the Integration of Professional Baseball). The book tracks the Negro Baseball League from 1879 to the 1960s, when it dissolved. Professor Carroll said that blacks, for the most part, lived in a “mirrored society.” Their formal institutions, their newspapers, their baseball… all mirrored their white counterparts. This stemmed from the 1896 Supreme Court “Separate but Equal” Decision. This segregated our nation along racial lines, again. “And that separation was cemented by physical demarcation,” said Professor Carroll. That is, city planning of housing and roads allowed for separation between poor black sections and more affluent white sections. Professor Carroll pointed to the poor, black southside of Chicago as a prime example of this. And this demarcation continues through today in many metropolitan areas… On a research trip to look at inner city poverty, we went into a gang war zone on the still primarily black southside of Chicago. There at a homeless shelter, I interviewed a woman who had been living in her car through part of the winter — with her three sons. The week before we arrived, two teens were gunned down on a street corner because the criteria to get into one particular gang here is: to kill someone… Later during Campaign 2000, I told the Pittsburgh (KS) Morning Sun that blacks and whites in many metropolitan areas are still, not only segregated, but the blacks continue to be “slaves” to inner city poverty loops. Note: Professor Carroll is quite a wordsmith. And his book should be a fascinating read.

    In Rome, Georgia, we attended a study group about the writings of G.K. Chesterton Saturday evening.   Facilitator Tom Farmer presented a number of famous Chesterton quotes.   The one that particularly struck me was: “Fallacies do not cease  to be  fallacies  because they  become fashions.” (…from the book Orthodoxy.)   Things that have become ‘fashionable’ these days in America include, for instance, both parents working in pursuit of moving further (and often unnecessarily so) along the “American Dream” continuum.   The trade off, and a tragic one at that, is  many children  are now  raised in Day Care, or in front of televisions, or computers…  One Christian man in the group said he and his wife had made a calculated decision  that  the wife, not only stay home with their children, but that she home school the children as well.   As a suffix, he ruefully smiled:   “When someone asks me what my wife ‘does,’ I tell them: ‘She’s at home with our children preparing them for an eternity in Heaven.   What does your wife  do?”  Note:   The next day we went to Mass at St. Mary’s Church in Rome.    A visiting priest  said it’s ok to “enjoy nice things,” but we must also be mindful of the poor.   My wife Liz challenged him afterward, questioning whether it’s spiritually sound to affirm current American  consumer patterns (again, the “fashion” of the day), while so much of the world lives in dire abject poverty.    The priest’s  response, and a gracious one at that, was:   “Well, I guess I’ve still got another Mass today to get that right.”

We are in motion on our 20th tour leg for Campaign 2008…   A few hours out of Cleveland, we stopped in Jeffersonville, Ohio, where I said to a man wearing a Brown’s hat that when we got to D.C. one of the first things we were going to do is have the Capital Dome painted orange and brown (Brown’s colors), “then have a big face mask put around it.”   Not necessarily concerned about ‘partisan football,’ he said he was more concerned about: partisan politics.   And what he’d really like to see in D.C. is a lot more cooperation ‘across the isles.’     Note:   Driving into Nashville on Rte. 65, we found ourselves in a sea of vehicles rushing along, merging, exiting… An apt metaphor for our current society (materialism, technology…) speeding along these days at the same almost unchecked pace.   To subscribe to the Catholic Worker philosophy is to slow down considerably, cut back considerably, and pay attention to the rhythms of the family, the rhythms of our neighbors, the rhythms of the earth.     And in that, the American family would heal, communities would solidify and global warming would reverse.   It’s simple on paper…

We have just finished our position paper on the Iraq War.

All eyes have been on Denver because of the harsh weather this winter.   “Cold hardly describes the temperatures these days (in Denver),” writes Robbie Goldman.   We met with Goldman several years ago during a campaign swing through Denver.   He is involved with the urban ministry Dry Bones, which works with homeless street kids.   Kids living in sewers to stay warm, kids living in old, abandoned box cars to stay out of police sight, kids living in cold, back alleyways…   Goldman gave us a tour of those haunts and introduced us to street kids throughout the city.   It was summer.   It’s not now.   Those kids need help.   Dry Bones needs help to help them.   For an excellent look at a group working in the trenches for God, go to the Dry Bones website and watch their video.