Vote for Joe

While the other candidates are holding town hall meetings, and the like, in Iowa and New Hampshire, I’ve decided on Northwest Ohio.  (Call it a hunch)  Last night I found myself in an impromptu round table discussion at McDonald’s with some 20 Methodist Church members from Leipsic, Ohio.  One of the women was an ER nurse and said a lot of extraneous healthcare costs come from people on Medicaid, for instance, coming to the emergency room, often unnecessarily, for the slightest of physical ailments.  She said she believes this, in part, is because it is free to them.  Coupled with this, Atlanta Georgia’s ER doctor Jonathan Davis told us on a stop there that some 33% of ER visits, if not more, are unnecessary as well (Medicaid, or not).  This, in part, is because we’ve become a society addicted to feeling good all the time.  And we run for help at the least discomfort.  And in tandem, we’ve become such a litigious society, doctors are afraid of advising someone not to come in.  Note:  Our administration wouldn’t be opposed to Medicaid, but we would mobilize a public awareness program to help people to learn more about healthcare issues that need a doctor, or not.

I talked with Bluffton University professor Don Hooley.   Back from a sabbatical to India, he said it wasn’t uncommon to see a family of four there living in one 15 ft. by 15 ft. room, complete with a small kitchen, small bathroom, and electricity.  What’s more, he said people in these situations consider themselves: “doing well.”  On the other end of the spectrum, and on the other side of the world, we live like kings by comparison, including people in, say, the lower-middle-class here.  But this shouldn’t be about “counting our blessings.”  This should be about going to things like house sharing, and the like, and taking the savings to help our brothers and sisters living in Third World slum dwellings without the kitchen, the bathroom, or electricity.  We have become so gluttonous about our “space” in this country.  Note:  On a campaign stop in Stamford, Connecticut, a couple years back, we met with an attorney who taught at a university in India for a time and was tremendously impacted by the poverty he saw in some of the slums there.  So impacted, in fact, he came back and googled the “international average salary,” which was a little more than $9,000 at the time.  He decided to live on this, and started by moving his family into a small trailer.  He takes the rest of his income and gives it to humanitarian aid agencies working in India.

And you think the Super Committee had problems…  I talked last week with Tom Eckelberry who is the president of the Harrod, Ohio (pop. 400), Village Council.  Harrod is one of a handful of towns that don’t assess a tax on resident incomes.  However, that’s about to change. At a public hearing about this, some 30 rather upset residents showed up to air their concerns.  (Read: They didn’t want to be taxed more.)  Amidst the vocal protest hub bub, Eckelberry offered a creative “compromise solution.”  There’d be a new tax (1%).  However, after city expenses were met each year — there’d be a rebate to residents out of what wasn’t used.  The residents thought this was a fair compromise.  Amazing…  This small town village council president was able to come up with an extremely common sense approach that worked.  Yet these high profile politicians in D.C., with all these supposed smarts, ended up: stymied.  Incidentally, it’s the Tom Eckelberrys of the country who we want to take to D.C. with us.

Catching up on the last week…  I met up with a homeless guy who we had taken in a few years back.  He’s a modern day “hobo,” if you will.  He has a bi-polar disorder and how it manifests is: he doesn’t do well in one place for long.  He has traveled the country (hitchhiking, on buses…) the past 20 years.  Coincidentally, I have extensively traveled the country the past 22 years doing research and campaigning.  While my wife Liz wouldn’t call it a bi-polar disorder, she has referred to it (on her bad days) as being: “nuts.”  Okay so we’re not ahead in the polls, yet…   Some of this campaigning has taken our 16-year-old daughter, Sarah, and I on a recent swing through northwest Ohio.  (Sarah just got her temporary driving permit, and I have to believe this was a more pressure packed trip than all the other presidential candidates experienced last week — Herman Cain notwithstanding — combined.)   One of our stops was at tiny Van Buren, Ohio, where I put up a campaign flier on the town bulletin board under “Community Events.”  Well if I win, people in Van Buren would consider me being there a “community event,” right?  In Upper Sandusky, Ohio (pop. 6,364), I did a little impromptu stumping at the Beca House Coffee Shop downtown.  As we were leaving this quintessential, midwestern small town later, against a backdrop of kids walking home from school, colorful fall leaves… Sarah and I noticed an even more colorful (and graphic) “Girls Gone Wild” tour bus parked in front of a tavern downtown, apparently there to put on a semi-erotic show that night.  I couldn’t help but think:  “Girls Gone Wild / Society Gone Nuts.”  …I rounded out the week by attending a seminar on “Prmitive Native Skills” with our eight-year-old son Jonathan at Bluffton University.  Wilderness Instructor Clint Myers fascinated some 70 students with demonstrations of how Native Americans lived (hunting, fishing, making clothes…) before the White man got here.  When Myers got to the demonstration about starting fires (without matches), he held up a gray rock and asked the class what kind of rock it was.  70 college students stared blankly, until our Jonathan’s hand tentatively went up in the back.  “It’s a flint rock,” he said.  (For homeschooling Jonathan has been reading a lot of wilderness literature lately.)  All 70 heads turned in unison, and apparently in awe.  Or at least they were impressed, as was I — who didn’t know what it was either.  Myers then started a small fire with the rock, until one of the more technologically advanced students said if it got any bigger “…the sprinkler system would probably come on.”  And that was that.  Note:  Wilderness instructor Clint Myers said the average American uses 120 gallons of water a day (drinking, cooking, cleaning, flushing toilets, watering lawns…)  Meanwhile in the developing countries, many people use a pail of water a day, if that.  And often times it’s not clean water.  On a stop in Stephens Point, Wisconsin, we interviewed University of Wisconsin Environmental Professor George Kraft.  He said we are running into water problems worldwide, in part, because the developing countries are over-using water.  Thus, our administration would ask Americans to cut back on their water use significantly and fund many more water projects in the Third World.  “Common sense for the common good,” worldwide.

Two days ago the AP carried a story saying the UN inter-governmental panel of scientists not only continue with their assertion that global warming is real, but it’s apparently accelerating rapidly.  However, the panel does note there is still time (but not much) to curb it.  With this in mind, I attended the Northwest Ohio Urban Forestry Seminar at Bluffton University yesterday.  You see, trees absorb carbon dioxide.  So if we start planting a bunch of trees all over (in tandem with sacrificing, going to much more green energy, etc.), we’ll have a leg up on this global warming thing.  Nebraska City, Nebraska (home of “Arbor Day”), did.  On a campaign stop there several years ago, we learned this town of 7,000 people was planting 10,000 trees.  While we were in Rawlins, Wyoming, for another campaign stop, a U.S. Forestry person there told me that while we get so up in arms about the rapidly depleting Brazilian rain forests — we clear cut almost all (96%) of America!  And it’s time we start looking in our own backyard, and, well, planting some more trees in it…  After the seminar, I took our kids to basketball practice at the Harrod, Ohio (pop. 467), Multi-Purpose Center.  And as luck would have it, the Harrod Village Council was meeting last night just up the hall from the gym.  I stopped in.  While most of the nation was riveted on the mounting tension between Israel and Iran yesterday, the Harrod Village Council people discussed the best way to get some “duck weed” off a local farm pond.  And then there was the issue of a tractor tire in a ditch by the fertilizer plant.  The village administrator said:  “If the water plugs up in a big storm, there could be real trouble out there.”  (And you think this nuclear threat in Iran is a nuisance…)    Note:  Levity aside…  My wife Liz was just showing me yesterday that iconic Norman Rockwell painting of a man in a worn leather coat and flannel shirt standing to address what seems like a small village council meeting in America somewhere.  The picture has “grassroots democracy” written all over it.  And these guys at the Village Council meeting in Harrod last night, dressed in jeans, work boots, flannel shirts…, were living this small town democracy thing out with all the gravity it should be lived out with — as were those in the audience.  For instance, three women from the Harrod Historical Society were there to lobby that the town park lights not be turned off as a cost cutting measure.  Those lights shine down on, not only grass and park benches, but a 1905 Shay Steam Engine (which was designed here) and a Veterans Display that features a full-size Army green tank, a full-size Army green helicopter, and the words on a plaque nearby that say, in essence, that people gave their lives so that the democratic process that was being played out in this small village council room up the street last night — could go on.  Note 2:  As the highly-charged, geopolitical international chess game goes on around a “nuclear Iran,” like with the rain forest dynamic, it’s time the U.S. look squarely in it’s own backyard — or at least in it’s ‘backyard’ out West.  That is, I once posed to a reporter from ABC News in Toledo, Ohio:  “What if we let the weapons inspectors into Montana?  What would they find?”  Hint:  Some 2,000 nuclear missiles aimed all over the world, including at Iran.