Vote for Joe

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…

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.

I was reading this book tonight, specifically a chapter about international trade imbalances. It notes, on a rudimentary level, that “international transaction” is an exchange of goods and services between countries. These are categorized as: imports and exports. Pretty simple. Now, in recent years, we in America have been concerned about trade imbalances that work to our detriment, financially. Yet something that’s way more (eternally) important, is the nature of these international transactions in the light of the Gospel message. An example: China is currently committing nothing short of genocide with the Uighurs. Killing, torture, forced sterilization, “re-education” brainwashing… Yet we continue to have China as a “Favored Nation” trading partner. This means our international transactions with China, both import and export, are helping keep China buoyant. And by extension, helping keep the glaring human rights abuses going. So, simply put: We are, currently, complicit in genocide. Does anyone in America seriously think because we look the other way and don’t connect the dots on all this, that this ‘spiritual trade imbalance’ is going to be lost on God when we’re standing at Judgement. Hardly. It’s time to look at international trade through a keen social justice lens. And we believe our foreign policy position does just that.

My first small town stop of Campaign 2024 was Cygnet, Ohio (pop. 554). When I looked up the population later for this post, I also saw I spelled the name of the village wrong on the campaign card I posted at the post office.. There’s a good start for the campaign! Dan Quayle spelling ‘potatoe’ wrong all over again. LOL.

I just wrote a newspaper column titled: …growing “green concrete.” During a stop in Oklahoma City a number of years ago, I met with a man who had turned his quarter-acre lawn in that city into a “permaculture,” with numerous vegetable plants, berry bushes, fruit trees… Robert Waldrop said that all growing green grass was good for is “raising sheep” (unless, of course, you have younger kids who need to play in at least part of the yard). On the front end, Americans waste some $40 billion a year keeping their yards green (toxic fertilizers, weed killers…). Money that could be spent on developing country sustainable agriculture projects. What’s more, if we grew a lot more of our own food at our own homes, this, too, would be substantial savings — that could also go toward all sorts of ending world hunger projects. There, indeed, would be enough food to feed the world, if we in the First World realigned our lifestyles to do just that. Note: At the end of time, we’ll ask: “But Lord, when did we see you hungry?”