I should have written on the card: “I need a ride to the White House.” Too late, I’m now a couple hundred miles from Mt. Eaton, Ohio. Mt. Eaton is Amish country. And we have spent a lot of time studying the Amish culture as we’ve traveled. Far from nostalgically “antiquated,” The Amish/Mennonites may have a much saner take on society — and how God wants us to live within the context of society…. I covered a village council meeting tonight that focused on an upcoming village festival; a pit bull biting a one-year-old; fire hydrant replacement at a nearby university; and the other activities of the local Public Works crew. This is democracy at a grassroots level. Our campaign talks about shifting much more power to local government where they are intimately familiar with their needs, their issues.
Several years ago, when our Sarah was a sophomore at Franciscan University, she went with a group of students on a missions trip to Nicaragua. She was so impacted by the trip that in subsequent spring breaks, instead of partying in Florida, and such, she went to Haiti, twice on mission trips as well. And she helped lead the last trip. Sarah was forever changed by this. And wouldn’t it be great to have a “First Daughter” in D.C. who had a real heart for the poor in the Third World, and who worked ardently to get them as much help as possible? Just sayin.’ God never said: “Make Nineveh Great Again!” The repenting that happened there was probably far from the latter paradigm. It probably aligned itself with, not “Nineveh First,” but rather “Others First.” See, for instance, our foreign policy stance to get a feel for what that might look like in the year 2021.
Coming back from seeing my new grandchild (our first) this week, I traveled through “Amish country” on Rte. 250 in eastern Ohio. What you see here is an “Amish farm truck.” Internal combustion engine vehicles (trucks, tractors, combines…) pollute. The Amish believe in being good environmental stewards of God’s creation. That simple. A word that pretty much sums up the Amish lifestyle, “simple.” We have interwoven some of the ethos of the Amish into our agricultural platform.
Catching up on May and June (cont.)… McGuffey, Ohio, home of the Scioto Marsh, is having their 125 year Anniversary Festival this summer. I wrote a newspaper article on it. During the Depression, families moved from all over Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia… to eke out a living in the onion fields of the marsh. They lived in shacks on the periphery of the marsh and the whole family would pitch in. Life was hard, but folks shared, families were close, and people appreciated what they had. It would be a good lesson for us today. I just read that the average American household, for instance, wastes $1,500 of food each year… I also wrote a story about a local man who restored a ’70s stock car. It’s in beautiful shape, made for a good story… but, frankly, traveling around an oval at speeds over 200 mph is, in a very real sense for these drivers: playing Russian Roulette. What’s more, you have to wonder if God looks at it that way… I also interviewed an art professor from a local college. He teaches a course called “Visual Literacy.” He said most people are remarkably visual, yet they often don’t see. That is, a barrage of pop-culture imagery comes at people constantly through television, social media, and so on. And advertisers, show producers, and such, use subliminal, and not so subliminal, messaging to influence people to keep watching the show, keep buying the stuff, and so on. As there is a lot of noise pollution in society at this point, there is also a lot of “visual pollution.” We would do well to unplug as much as possible… In covering a local village council meeting, the mayor, in the aftermath of a village fireworks display, said the event went off magnificently. One of the councilmembers didn’t agree. She proposed “silent fireworks” next year, “…like they do in a town in California,” she said. No action was taken on this that night, and it would be safe to say that this council woman was in the minority. LOL.
Catching up on May and June (still cont.) I recently stopped in Rawson, Ohio (pop. 564 — although I’m not sure if that includes the cat), where I put up a campaign card in the post office there. I should have written on the card: “Please return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” But anyway… These campaign cards, strategically placed, are our answer to the million dollar campaign advertising of ‘the other guys.’ Call me a: cock-eyed optimist… For a Memorial Day newspaper article, I interviewed a Vietnam Veteran in Bluffton. He was on the front lines, saw a lot of the ravages of war (“…shot off limbs, bullets to the head, shrapnel laced bodies…”), and he was totally mystified when he got back to the States and was treated with a fair amount of disrespect, and even anger by some of the American populace. While the geo-politics around the Vietnam War were, indeed, mixed, these veterans, nonetheless, needed to be treated as heroes, period. “No greater love does a man have than to lay down his life for his friends.” –John 15:13…
Catching up on May and June (cont.) The Bluffton Police Chief has spent the last year going through the archives looking for names and stories about the officers who have served on the Police Department, dating back to the late 1800s. His belief is that they should, indeed, be honored. And he has set up a rather elaborate historical display in the Department’s lobby. Defund the police? Hardly. We should be paying them more for what they do, in tandem with coming up with other creative community policing strategies. Our position paper on crime includes a number of these strategies, based on extensive cross country research to see what was working… Light one candle and knit one (or a hundred) quilts. I did a story for the local newspaper on First Mennonite Church’s “Quilt Project” here. More than 100 church volunteers combined to make this happen. Some donate money, others cut fabric, others sew. These beautiful quilts are then sent to families in the slums of Calcutta, refugee camps in the Ukraine, and any other outreach destinations America’s Mennonite Central Committee has around the globe… In nearby Ada, Ohio, I interviewed a man who is revamping that village’s tech system. His projection into ‘work in America post pandemic’ is that there will be a significant paradigm shift, with many more people working from home. This, in turn, will free up a significant amount of office space that could, conceivably, be converted into residences. This would spell less urban sprawl. More people living in population centers, so less driving. And on, and on… All common sense.
Catching up on May and June… I was the quintessential ‘track parent’ this spring, going to meets all over Northwest Ohio, then, eventually, all the way to Columbus for the State Finals. Our Jonathan made it to State in the open 400-Meter and the 400-Meter-Relay (he ran anchor). And while Jonathan finished 13th in the open-400, his relay team “made it to the podium” in 7th place in the State. It was all pretty exciting for the family, and a tribute to all of Jonathan’s hard work… In May, I interviewed a local man who restored a replica of a Tiny Lund stock car. Lund raced in the 1970s, won the Daytona 500, and eventually died in a fiery crash at the Talladega Speedway in 1975 — leaving a wife and young son behind. Besides the article, I wrote a subsequent column equating high speed auto racing to a form of Russian Roulette. Seems to me it’s a lot more healthy, and life giving, to race around the tracks Jonathan was racing around… In May, I also wrote a column on the current housing bubble. I said it portends that, as just one aspect of this, more and more people in American want to build new homes. I wrote: So then you have urban sprawl eating up more and more of precious farmland. You have more and more trees being cut down in a time when we need as many carbon sinks as possible. You have more and more places that need energy to heat and cool. And none of this, at this point, is, frankly: ‘cool.’ What’s more, it’s antithetical to common sense… For an in-depth look at our stance on the environment,see…
CNN: At least 233 people were killed and 618 people were injured by gun violence in more than 500 shootings across the county during the 4th of July weekend — a 26% drop since last year’s holiday weekend.
Welcome to the new normal. This is nothing short of some war zone figures! Our stance on gun violence would go a long way in reversing this. As we went a ‘long way’ to find the answers.
I just interviewed a local woman for a newspaper article that focused on her passion for genealogy. In the past 50 years, she’s has put together some 14 rather thick volumes of archival material on both her, and her husband’s, sides of the family. Why? She said there are family members who have been “special” in her life, and she wanted to know more about them. In turn, she surmised people in her family had “special” people as well. So as a gift to them, she set out to discover these peoples’ heritages as well. We would do well as a society to slow a bit and collectively explore our roots and value those “special” people, Our Social Security platform, as just one angle on this, focuses on valuing some of these “special” people in a variety of quite tangible ways. Note: The photo is a section of a quilt that was done by a Methodist Church “Ladies Society,” circa 1941. This woman includes several photos of the quilt in her ancestry material, because several of the names are family members. There are 325 names on the quilt.
Popular Christian performer Brandon Lake performed on a Sunday night in Bluffton recently. He was up for a Grammy in 2020 and his worship song, “This is a Move,” was the top Gospel praise song of 2019. What was most impressive this night was not only Mr. Lake’s performance, but the amount of young people who were singing along, swaying, reaching their hands to heaven, and praying… Pretty amazing, actually, in a culture that’s trying to pull them farther and farther from God.
