Vote for Joe

I headed out this morning, face mask on, to Columbus Grove, Ohio, to do some impromptu campaigning. Not having the millions for advertising (go figure), I often use bulletin boards to get my name/message out to multiple people. (I can’t tell you how many of these I’ve put up all across the country over the past 20 years of campaigning.) What’s more, not only do I personally sign them, but I try to come up with some “localized” comment for the card as well. By the way, it’s the: “Columbus Grove Bull Dogs.” What’s more, I actually try to strategically locate the campaign card near other postings that might, say, play off it. For instance, on this one I’m trying to get across, subliminally, that I’ve “Entered to Win!” Okay, so, like, not everyone is going to get that. But it entertains me. LOL, sort of.

While doing research on agriculture, I read an article in National Geographic on farming and fertilizer the other night. And a major problem in America these days, and around the world for that matter, is artificial fertilizer with nitrogen that’s contaminating ground water, suffocating wildlife in lakes and rivers, and is even now creating big, aquatic “dead zones” in bodies of water like the Gulf of Mexico. (Yet another front in which we’re gradually destroying the environment.) As president, I would push for banning these artificial fertilizers and ramp up, exponentially, organic growing — across the board. Organic farmers Ron and Maria Rosmann, in Harlan, Iowa, spread no nitrogen on their fields and instead add nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live in nodules on the roots of legume crops like soybeans. “You organic guys can’t feed the world,” Ron says he hears. But he always replies: “That’s not true.”

For a newspaper article, I just interviewed a woman at our local Farmers Market who makes homemade jellies and breads. She lives on a nearby farm and said she abhors letting anything go to waste. So much so, she utilizes practically everything on the farm for her products . For instance, she makes “red onion jelly,” which she said goes good on sandwiches. She makes “corn cob jelly,” which she said evolved during the Depression era. She even makes “Queen Anne Lace Flowering Weed Jelly.” If Americans, as a whole, had this kind of thrift mentality with practically everything, just think how much more savings this would generate for our brothers and sisters in the Third World who are food insecure, clean drinking water insecure, habitat insecure… There is so much potential relievable suffering in this world, if only us in the First World would shift our paradigm and sacrifice more. Our foreign relations policy spins around this.

I covered a George Floyd Protest Rally this week in our village. Some 300 people came together for a peaceful, and poignant, protest. There were prayers, songs, testimonies about racism… But the one thing that was missing was the acknowledgement that in small town (and suburban) America, many people have grown indifferent to the plight of those living in desperation (Black, whites, Hispanics, Asians…) in our inner cities — where a lot of this police violence, and violence in general, is happening. Racism among some police? Sure. But virtually all these police are functioning, day in and day out, in veritable war zones. So, of course, some police are going to develop things like varying degrees of PTSD, and so on — which will, at times, hinder their judgement. The onus, really, is on us. That is, those of us who myopically reach for more and more of the “American Dream,” (more money, more safety, more, well, everything), while forgetting about the people trapped often in a veritable Hell. Note: Our family intentionally moved to a hardscrabble area of Cleveland, Ohio (and the time the poorest city in the country) to do outreach work with the poor, along side a group of Catholic Workers. We saw this desperation, this pervasive climate of violence — and its across the board — first hand.

For Memorial Day this year, I interviewed two men. One was a local man who was a Marine and fought in Iraq right at the beginning of the war. A Christian, he was willing to lay down his life to free the Iraqi people from the iron fist and well-documented murderous, torturous ways of Saddam Hussein. He was two blocks from the iconic Iraqi War scene where, with much fanfare, Hussein’s statue in Baghdad was toppled. The other man is a local Mennonite and a Christian Peacemaker. He went to Columbia at the height of that bloody civil war to help displaced people stand up for their land rights, and so on. What’s more, he and others, were human shields for children, from this displaced group, as they walked to school each day. This man said the motto of the Christian Peacemaker is that: “We should be willing to die for our cause as much as a military person is willing to die for their cause.” You’d think Jesus would agree when He said: “No greater love has a man…” Our foreign policy revolves around this kind of ethos.