Vote for Joe

My wife Liz was two months pregnant with our fourth child when she had a miscarriage in La Crosse, Wisconsin Saturday night. As providence would have it, we were staying at the home of Martha and Kevin Helin at the time. (Martha is a nurse on the maternity ward of a hospital in La Crosse, and couldn’t have been more helpful.) The baby’s name is Mary Rose. Shortly after, a woman in Lacrosse said she had two miscarriages and at a Catholic Monestary there they have glass, engraved rectangles in a wall, with the names of babies who didn’t make it. She said she quite frequently goes there to run her hand across the names (as they do at the Vietnam Memorial) to remember these children. Our Sarah is designing a small, cardboard grave marker for Mary Rose.

We traveled west to Carpentersville, Illinois. A man-on-the street here told me he’d just gotten a speeding ticket — in the mail. He said he’d recently been on the interstate and a computerzed surveillance camera and attached radar gun, took his picture and clocked his speed. “Yeah, I was probably speeding,” he said. “But doesn’t, like, someone have to catch you anymore?” Note: This man said with the ticket he got a letter that included an explanation that the average American is filmed by a surveillance camera (grocery store, gas station, bank, interstate…) up to 75 times a day. I asked the man if he’d read George Orwell’s book: “1984” — about “Big Brother” watching.

While in South Bend, Indiana, I interviewed Jonah Smith in regard to an expanded position paper we’re doing on the environment. Smith, who majored in Ecology at Rutgers University, said farm run off in the Mississippi River Watershed Region is being transported down to the Gulf of Mexico at an alarming rate, creating a gigantic aquatic ‘dead zone’ in this body of water. Smith said a key to staving off more of this particular environmental devastation is a dramatic shift to much more: organic farming… Smith also said modern agri-business should be looked at as a monopoly of sorts, and, ideally, there should be a move to break these up, while supporting more small farm initiatives. Note: For Father’s Day yesterday, our family went to a Babe Ruth League game just over the border in Niles, Michigan earlier in the afternoon. This is a summer league for guys 16 to 19 years old. We set up our lawn chairs along the right base line and simply had a wonderful time… There was a cemetery just beside the field. And afterward we found a grave stone with the name “Joe” to pray and talk about my father who died several years ago. (He’s actually buried in Cleveland, but I told the children: “Granddad will still hear us.”)

While in northern Indiana, we learned of an excellent social justice program. In Kimmel, Indiana, a group of farmers (and others) are involved with a “Common Ground Growing Project.” They are farming a common plot of land, with the proceeds going to the Foods Resource Bank, which is a Christian based initiative to get money to 25 Third World countries for seeds, farm tools, irrigation equipment, animals… all in an effort to help farmers in these other countries become more sustainable. I told the Advance News newspaper in Napanee, Indiana that our platform calls for dramatically stepped up programs like these to help in the Third World. Note: While in Napanee, we went to a supermarket that had a significant amount of parking for Amish buggies. The kids and I walked about looking at the horses, talking to some of the Amish. And I couldn’t help but think what a sane response many more of these buggies (and bicycles…) would be to global warming — and all the domino effects that are happening to nature as a result, including tremendous damage to wildlife habitat… Coincidentally enough (read: providentially enough), as we walked about the buggies, we happened on a man wearing a t-shirt that said: “Extinct is forever.”

Just before leaving Ohio, the family and I helped an organic farmer in Bluffton hoe a field of beans. Hard, sweaty work. But clean, good work. More than a few times while out in the field, I’d look up to see a pick-up truck going by with a chemical sprayer on the back. I’m sure we looked much the anomaly out there with our old-fashion hoes. Nevertheless, the farmer said in a small radius around his place, another farming couple had both lost their lives to cancer recently, as had his brother who farms just the next field over. He said the chemicals leech into the groundwater and get into the wells. And, he explained, some of the chemicals sprayed, never make it to the plants or the ground — but rather become air born. “It’s kind of like breathing in second hand smoke,” he lamented. Note: These chemicals are not just hazardous to the farmers. David Orr, who is head of the Environmental Science Department at Oberlin College, has written that the chemicals (pesticides, herbacides…) in our food supply, are creating “chemical cocktails” in the systems of the general populace these days, which is leading to all sorts of disease, including cancer.