Vote for Joe

I just today wrote a newspaper article about this man who grew up not more than 15 miles south of here in the small town of Alger, Ohio. According to a Pittsburgh newspaper at the time he was playing, Raymond Brown could have played in the Major Leagues, if he had been allowed to. He wasn’t. What’s more, when he finished playing, he moved back to Dayton, Ohio, where he worked at a “biscuit company” for seven years before he died. His tombstone initially said nothing about baseball. However, after he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Dayton Daily News did a series of stories on him. Subsequently, an ad hoc citizens group did fundraising to get him a “fitting tombstone” with information about his baseball playing.

I just did a newspaper story about an Eagle Scout who, for his “Community Service Project,” raised $1,500 and, along with some other Troop members, put in six really nice statues of saints on the grounds around a local Catholic church. Each statue is accompanied with a small plaque capsulizing, in three short sentences, the particular saints ethos, if you will. For example: “St. Isadore is the patron saint of farmers and farm workers. He communed with God while walking behind his plow. An ordinary life can lead to holiness.” Or in my vernacular, St. Isadore was kinda/sorta a rural “average Joe” saint. And, frankly, this otherwise “average” Eagle Scout kid has a leg up on this ordinary sainthood thing as well.

I was doing some foreign relations research with this book last night. I was reading, specifically, about a 26-year bloody civil war in Sri Lanka. But I wasn’t looking at it in an isolated sense, but rather as it being emblematic of a template that has been playing out over and over, in various ways, worldwide, because of the modern phenomenon of “globalization.” The British colonized Sri Lanka in the early 1900s, primarily because they found the upland areas suitable for lucrative growing of coffee, tea and rubber plants. In turn, this greed fueled the importing of large numbers of Tamil workers from southern India. These people were turned into “indentured servants (read: slaves).” And they quickly became about 10% of the population in Sri Lanka. Time passed. In 1948, Colonial Sri Lanka ended. But the Tamil were now discriminated against by the majority Sinhalese government. This included several mass killings/genocide of the Tamil. The Tamil, in turn, formed a rebel group to fight the government. As mentioned at the outset, the civil war lasted 26 years, and as of 2009 there is a tenuous peace. Now here’s the kicker, and how it relates to, say, the U.S. We don’t go in and forcibly colonize these smaller, poorer countries, and plant a flag. No, we ‘plant’ corporations. We then pay sweatshop wages (read: slave labor). And the corporations work behind the scenes to pay governments for favorable tax rates, access to natural resources, and so on. We just don’t call it colonization. We call it doing business in a global market economy. This, in turn, continues to perpetuate poverty loops in these countries, continued class tensions, and a constellation of other sociological problems.

NASA is preparing for the Artemis Missions back, for one, to the moon. A “Star Date” news show today reported that, as part of these missions, millions of dollars were being spent to develop space equipment to look for water on the moon. The best they can determine, so far, is that the only water is frozen in deep craters on both poles and not easily accessible. Meanwhile, one billion people on this planet are without clean drinking water, and many die each year from water born disease. Trump is backing the Artemis thing. I wouldn’t. I’d take the money, and technological know how, and try to get efficient, clean drinking water systems to as many in the Third World as possible. See, these people are getting sick now. They are dying now. For more on what I’d do to help in the Third World, see our foreign policy…

I just interviewed a local park system “naturalist” who has a Masters Degree in Environmental Science from Iowa University. She said with those in the last two generations becoming increasingly unplugged, so to speak, from nature, many have developed what is now being referred to as: “Nature Deficit Disorder.” She said how this manifests in youth, among others, is with higher rates of obesity, Attention Deficit Disorder, depression… In fact, she continued, that in 2006 author Richard Louv’s book, Last Child in the Woods, has sparked a, colloquially speaking, Back to the Woods Movement, if you will, with parents, teachers, church leaders… intentionally starting to help youth re-engage with nature in a much more prolific way. What’s more, besides the good it does for the kids’ psyches, and such, the kids, in turn, often “…fall in love with nature.” And once you love something, well, you’re more apt to want to save it. Our administration’s stance on the environment is right in line with all this, and holds out a tremendous amount of models we’ve researched across the country to affect a tremendous shift toward the spirit of the paradigm I talk about here.