Vote for Joe

I interviewed Greg Gerschutz recently.  He joined the Peace Corps in the early ’70s and was sent to a rural village in the Philippines called Eastern Infanta (pop. 2,000).  He worked with an extension agency there to help small farmers increase their high protein vegetable crop yields.  He told me he was “…young, innocent and wanted to feed the world.”  And for the impoverished people in the “world” of Eastern Infanta, he did.  Our administration would push for incentives similar to what you get to join the armed services, for people joining the Peace Corp. — in order to help “make war” on poverty worldwide…  We also traveled across the state to Franciscan University last week, where the students major in God, and minor in the other stuff.  Seriously!  You can’t take a math class at Franciscan without learning about God’s Natural Order for the universe, and how it ties in.  As you can’t walk across campus without seeing a sea of spiritual t-shirts with such sayings as:  “Holiness is not a spectator’s sport.”  And true to the ethos of that, students here do spring breaks to Nicaragua and the Bronx to do outreach work.  They join floors in dormitories they call “households.”  And students in each household, each year, support each other practicing various “virtues.”  In pursuing the sanctity of all human life, which Pope Francis recently told the U.S. Congress was important, students take their Saturdays to protest, and pray, in front of an abortion clinic in Pittsburgh.  Holiness, indeed, is not a “spectator’s sport” at Franciscan.  And wouldn’t it be refreshing if a whole lot more colleges saw it that way.

Buckeye Back Roads Tour cont…  Stopped at the Spring Street Coffee House in St. Marys, Ohio.  Owner Roger Beckett said he was a “moderate” when it came to politics.  That is, he said he was basically a realist who believed in well-considered, “incremental fixes over time.”  And one thing he said he wanted to see ‘fixed’ is: Congress.  He said a good number of countries have a parliament with a certain percentage of seats for various political parties (often reflective of percentages of the populace who are involved with these various parties).  Mr. Beckett said he’d like to see the same here.  For instance, there would be seats for Green Party politicians, Constitution Party politicians, Libertarian Party politicians…  He said as opposed to a sort of “winner take all” mentality, this would be a fairer, more balanced, approach in the U.S.  I thanked him for the idea, put up a campaign card on the coffee house bulletin board (our answer to the SuperPac multi-million dollar TV ad strategies), and headed on…  Or rather, back.  I’d left some campaign material in Wapakoneta, so I headed the 12 miles back on Rte. 33, past, among other landmarks, Rte. 33 Brews & Blues Tavern.  And it was Wapakoneta’s Joe Alexander who had the ‘blues,’ (sorry).  He told me he was a retired Goodyear factory worker who had just found out some of his pension had been summarily cut.  He said at the same time he found this out, a news service reported on the new list of the: “400 Richest Americans.”  Mr. Alexander said the most astonishing part of the latter for him was that the accumulated wealth of these 400 people represented:  1/8th of the entire U.S. economy.  Mr. Alexander added that with figures like this, it’s not hard to see why the middle class ranks are becoming smaller, and smaller…  Note:  To continue along these lines… the Economist Magazine recently reported that the top 20% of the country (socio-economically) owned 84% of the wealth; while the bottom 20% owned 0.1% of the wealth.  In our touring, we have looked at this abject poverty in, say, the rural  Black Belt Region of the South, in the inner cities of Chicago, LA, Cleveland…  It is in these places that little kids are daily trying to dodge hunger, drugs and bullets.  Shifting this around would be one of our administration’s top priorities.

I stopped at Ada, Ohio, (pop. 6,052), home of the Wilson Football Factory.  They make the “official” NFL footballs here…  While in downtown Ada, I met a woman whose husband had had a fatal heart attack during the middle of a sky-diving jump in Xenia, Ohio.  For the “burial,” the whole family (wife and four kids) did a collective sky-diving jump: while sprinkling his ashes…  From Ada, I headed south on Route 235 to Alger, Ohio (pop. 870).   In the downtown area there is a memorial to area Veterans.  A plaque in the shadow of an eagle and American flag, reads:  “All gave some.  Some gave all.”  In Alger, I also put up a campaign card at the local market and talked to Mike Dye.  He said a couple years ago an excerpt from a You Tube video he put up made it to: CNN.  The crux of the video was that government stimulus checks sent out to all American taxpayers several years ago should have been “time limited.”  That is, said Dye, the stipulation should have been that the money be spent in one year.  (You’d have to send in receipts, or something, as proof.)  Dye thinks this would have been “common sense.”  …And it’s ‘spiritual common sense’ that’s on display at the Willow Branch Cemetery on the outskirts of Waynesfield, Ohio (pop. so small it’s not even listed in the back of the Atlas).  Part of a gravestone at the cemetery there reads:  “When it’s time to leave the earth, the only thing you take with you — is what you gave away.”  …It was then on to  Uniopolis, Ohio (home of 2000 State Wrestling Champ Brent Miller), where you can get your eye brows waxed at B’z Hive Salon for five bucks.  The only other things “downtown” here is a small carry out store and a U.S. Post Office, where I put up a campaign card on the bulletin board.  What’s more, there was a full-color Mitt Romney campaign brochure in the top of the waste basket there.  See, all the millions of dollars on campaigning by these other guys and, that’s right, whose up on the bulletin board in Uniopolis?  And we continue to do this all without paid political consultants!  Note:  A study released yesterday projects that obesity in American will grow from about a third of the population today, to 44% by 2030.  Meanwhile, 24,000 people starve to death every day in the Third World (U.N. figure) and millions and millions more are chronically malnourished.  This is such a  tremendous social justice travesty, and our foreign policy paper addresses the topic at length.

Some more vignettes from our recent Buckeye Back Roads Tour:  In Beaverdam, Ohio (Well, if you don’t carry Beaverdam, you’re not going to carry the country.), I put up a campaign flier at the local market.  Then at Benroth Body Shop, just a few miles west of here on Route 30, I talked with owner Todd Benroth.  He said he believes if Americans go in to protect a country, “…we should get paid.”  …And it’s the Albino people in Tanzania who could currently use some protecting.  In Gallion, Ohio, Fr. Robert Hauss (who does mission work in Africa) said the Albinos are absolutely “hated” in Tanzania, and continually subject to rape, dismemberment and murder.  Fr. Hauss said when he talks about this on, say, radio shows in the U.S., the interviewers will often be aghast.  Fr. Hauss, however, said he often follows this up by saying the same thing goes on here on an even much wider scale — with the killing of unborn babies.  I once saw a bumper sticker in Mansfield, Ohio, that read:  “Call me an extremist, but I think dismembering babies in their mothers’ wombs is wrong.”  During a talk at the University of Notre Dame several years ago, I said, basically, that we are a society gone mad…  In Bucyrus, Ohio, I, in a rather impromptu fashion (I’m like that), sat in on a weekly Bible study.  These guys, too, were talking about how “dark” our culture is getting with abortion, redefining marriage, the breakdown of the family in general, sex and violence in the media, sex and violence on the streets…  It’s sure not ‘Mayberry’ anymore.  Note:  The New York Times today noted that the current Mideast protests are “…swept up in the colliding cross currents or regional politics.”  That is in the wake of the Arab Spring, people there are freer to protest in general.  Also, the “War on Terror,” while supposedly only targeting fundamental extremism, sometimes appears to be a war on Muslims in general (from the general populaces’ perspective there).  As a result, the controversial film mocking the Muslim religion is sparking a push back.  During the Democratic National Convention, Jimmy Carter said many things playing out on an international stage can seldom be summed up in a TV political ad sound byte.  But rather they embody, more often than not, a complex set of circumstances that need considered analysis and measured action.

Yet more Buckeye Back Road stumping…  In Van Wert, Ohio, we stopped at old Bailey’s Restaurant downtown to put up a campaign flier.  While having coffee there, I looked up to see a man who appeared to be in his early sixties, short and slight of build.  He walked out of the kitchen in a white shirt, white pants, a yellow bow tie…  It was as if he’d been transported through a 1950s time warp.  During Campaign 2008, I told The Review newspaper in Alliance, Ohio, that we’d like to see the country go back, in part, to the 1950s in regard to: a slower pace of life, neighbors helping neighbors more, the streets being a lot safer for kids…  In Gomer, Ohio (I resisted the distinct urge to say: “Shazaam!”), I put up a campaign flier at Uncle Al’s Pizza and Market, then spotted some kids heading off on their bicycles to play baseball at a sandlot field up the street.  A world away in our major cities this day, some eight youth would be killed by gunfire — as they are every day in America now.  Note:  We have an extensive position paper on crime based on years of cross country research.  At one point, we interviewed a Detroit police officer who said his department was using a Community Oriented Policing Model that included each officer being a mentor to six inner city youth for three year periods at a time.  They, say, shoot hoops with the youth each week, help them with homework, take them to Detroit Tigers or Lions games…  He said instead of the youth seeing them as “an enemy” encased in the metal and glass of the squad cars, some now saw them as, well, friends.