Vote for Joe

In the last month, among a number of newspaper stories, I did an article about “Alice.” She’s 103 years old. Tremendously spry, and lucid, she was living on her own in a house, until she fell and broke her hip. (Now she’s temporarily in an assisted living facility.) She got around fine before then, with the help of “Meals on Wheels” and some caring neighbors. What’s more, she had (is having) quite a life. When asked where she grew up, she winked and replied: “I never did.” Like with Native American cultures, and such, we should be valuing our elderly, much more than we do. Our Social Security position paper revolves around that.

A library “Adult Book Study” in Ada is currently reading this book. I sat in on the group last night for a story for the local newspaper. The crux of the book is that there is a relatively new, elderly “houseless” population that has sprung up in the past 10 years, or so. These aren’t seniors out there doing RV retirement leisure travel. These are seniors who lost jobs in their professions during the Great Recession of 2008, lost their homes, and lost most hope of being hired back into their professions at another place at their age. So they travel in old campers, and such, doing tough seasonal jobs in warehouses, in farm fields during harvest, and so on. Meanwhile they park their small campers, vans, and so on, on side streets, in Wal-Mart parking lots, etc., just trying to get by. The ages of these nomads range from 60 to 80. Our administration would address this, in spades, by increasing, exponentially, the “social security” safety net for elders in general. See the following… https://www.voteforjoe.com/social-security-c2wv

I just wrote a local newspaper article about a special group of students who just graduated with their Masters in Law from Ohio Northern University. They are all from the country of Kosovo. What’s more, one man told me that when he was four-years-old, he was in a refugee camp during the Kosovo War. He said the only thing on his mind then was: “staying alive.” Now he’s got a lot more on his mind, like, for instance, going back to his country to help increase the “rule of law,” as Kosovo continues to stabilize after the war. He also told me he has tremendous empathy for the plight of refugees worldwide these days. Our campaign does too…

During a village council meeting I was covering last night, the village administrator said he’d been contacted by this church about them holding an open-air morning service in the downtown park. Back and forth discussion ensued among the council members about the interface of “church and state” in regard to allowing this. Then the mayor, who took on sort of a wizard (in the Wizard of Oz) sage-like role, said the U.S. Constitution provides for “peaceable assembly” on public land. He surmised the worship service would, indeed, be ‘peaceable,’ and the park is ‘public land,’ so, huh… I once gave a talk at Greensboro College in North Carolina. I said that while I was for “separation of church and state” the way the founders intended, that didn’t mean, for instance, that you can’t have a politician who, say, pushes for legislation that matches his/her moral compass. In fact, I’d imagine in a sane society that you’d want that.

For Earth Day, I wrote a newspaper article about Bluffton University’s Sustainability Club. The students got a campus restaurant to ban non-biodegradable plastic straws, they are lobbying for food composting at the cafeteria, they are proposing an “Energy Savings Challenge” between dormitories… I ended the article by posing: Can one small university in Northwest Ohio save the entire planet? A proverb: A lone butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can set in motion a chain of events that can, ultimately, cause hurricane force winds in another part of the planet. For more on our platform on the environment, see…