Vote for Joe

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…

Just this week I interviewed a woman who came to the U.S. from Jalisco, Mexico in 1999. At the time, she was a 23-year-old single mother of two young children, and her husband had left them. As with many place in Mexico, Jalisco had a lot of poverty and this woman was struggling to provide for her kids. Her sister had immigrated to the U.S. several years prior, and had started a Mexican restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. The young mother joined her sister, worked hard in the restaurant, learned the business, and eventually opened her own restaurant in a small town in Northwest, Ohio. It’s a great restaurant. Her business employs a number of local people. And she is active in her church and the community. In other words, she’s been a real gift to our country. Note: As I write this, Trump is saying our country is “full.” My take is, it isn’t. And, in fact, we could use a lot more people like this woman. For our position paper on Hispanic Immigration, see…

I was reading part of this book tonight for research. It noted that in the early 1980s, only 18,000 acres of old growth redwood forests in California were left — down from a high of 200,000 acres. (And the guess is it’s even a lot less now.) Besides a considerable amount of logging, the book noted that in the logging areas, thousands of footsteps (from the loggers, and such) have trampled vegetation and compacted the earth so that new trees can’t seed… On a west coast research trip, in Brookings, Oregon, we interviewed a “forestry technician” who opined that we leave the old growth forests (redwoods or otherwise) alone, log others, and what’s more, start providing governmental subsidies for more tree farms. He said, currently, forestry technicians like himself are busy trying to reverse some of the latter environmental damage, while yet others are continually monitoring endangered species in the old-growth forests where the logging is going on. He added that common sense would say that if you leave the old-growth forests alone, it would free up a lot of this manpower and, well, keep the old growth forests healthy and intact. For our position paper on the Environment, including a section that addresses this kind of ‘arbor issue,’ see…

“Leave the driving to us…” I was readin part of the book A Century of Graphic Design this morning. In a section titled: Design for Transportation, it noted how one transportation company wanted to portray their mode of transportation as a “seamless and efficient system.” My wife Liz, as a public relations consultant back in New Zealand, worked on a campaign to inspire more people to ride the bus to work, and so on. The ad campaigns revolved around saving money, being more environmentally friendly, foregoing the hassles of parking… It only worked, in part. People, many people, are addicted to their automobiles. That simple. In fact, how many would seriously consider, even for a minute, taking, say, a Greyhound bus on vacation? Not many. New Green Deal, or not, we need a major paradigm shift when it comes to transportation in this country. And our administration would have some cutting edge ideas…