Vote for Joe

While the immigration debate continues to heat up, we went to the Casa Juan Diego House of Hospitality in the heart of Houston to look at this issue ‘up close and personal,’ so to speak.   The Casa Juan Diego is a cluster of 10 Catholic Worker Houses that take in illegal immigrant women, children and men.   Men like Juan.   Juan and his brother lived in rural Guatemala. He told me he made $2.75 a day as a woodworker, his brother made $1 a day as a small farmer.   Their elderly mom got sick and needed a heart operation.   It would cost $2,000.   They came to America together to raise money for the operation.   It took them three months of walking, stealing away on the outside of train cars, being shaken down and extorted by Mexican immigration agents…   They, consequently, have been put up at Casa Juan Diego in Houston.   Here their room and board is free and they have access to medical attention.   During the day, they hire out from street corners to do day labor.   But because of the recession, work is sporadic at best, said Casa volunteer Josh Johnson.   Johnson has heard the heartbreaking stories, over and over.   Of immigrants who have lost limbs falling off trains in Mexico on their way north.   Of desperate mothers and children who have died in desert crossings near the border.   Of immigrant women who have been raped and killed by drug cartels…   Johnson said “first generation immigrants in this country,” for the most part, are not criminals.   But if they are marginalized and not helped, the next generation is more prone to commit crimes.   He also said that often immigrants don’t come here to live long-term.   But rather they are here to make enough to raise both themselves, and family back home, out of dire poverty.   Note:   Mark and Louise Swick, co-founders of the Casa Juan Diego House, have recently published the book The Catholic Worker Movement   (Intellectual and Spiritual Origins).   The ethos of the Catholic Worker Movement is to, well, do just what they are doing in Houston.   Help those less fortunate.   For more on Casa Juan Diego, see…

We did a street corner, whistle-stop event in downtown Orange, Texas, yesterday as part of our Deep in the Heart of Texas Tour.   Afterward I was interviewed by reporter Tommy Man Jr. of the Orange Leader newspaper.   I said we’ve just crossed the 50 million abortion mark in America, global warming looms like a scary doomsday scenario, violence and drugs have turned the inner cities of America into war zones, we have a $12 trillion National Debt…   And the common denominator?   For about the past 20 years, we have had presidents out of Harvard and Yale.   I said that this might, oh, indicate that what you learn at Harvard and Yale doesn’t equip you to solve these kinds of societal problems.   In fact, maybe what we need in D.C. is some “good old fashioned common sense.”   I mean…     While in Orange, I also interviewed Vivian Kelly who is the director of Birthright here.   They provide counseling, food, clothing, monetary help… to women who choose to keep their baby.   “We were able to save 41 babies last year,”   said Ms. Kelly…   Incidentally, a bill just passed in Oklahoma that requires women to undergo an ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the unborn baby before getting an abortion.   This includes information about the arms, legs, internal organs, heartbeat… All the things that, well, human beings have.   Note:   Tonight we protested abortion on a street corner in Orange.   The sign I held simply said:   Abortion Kills Children.   And it does.

Our Louisiana Gumbo Tour continues…   While we’ve been down here, the Deep Water Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf 50 miles south of New Orleans.   As of today, the oil spill was at 42,000 gallons a day and had already spread out over 1,800 square miles.   And indications are it could get much   worse…   Earlier today, I talked with Jim Mathus back in Cleveland.   He recently retired from the Army Corps of Engineers as a marine engineer and he also worked for Shell on some of their oil rigs, also in the Gulf of Mexico.    Mathus drew a corollary between these rigs and, say, one’s car engine.   He said these oil rigs have a lot of working parts, just like a car engine.   If a piston in a car engine breaks, for instance,  oil can spew out on a manifold, igniting a fire.   The dynamics can be somewhat simimilar (on a rudimentary level) to these oil rigs, Mathus said.   The bottom line with this is that, in a sense,  it seems that we’re playing Russian Roullette with things that can be fraught with human error.     The gun being held to: the environment’s head.   Note:   According to a recent Newsweek article, environmentalists warn that the thousands of gallons of mud that deep water drilling unearths contain toxic metals — mercury, lead and cadmium — that may end up in the seafood supply.   What’s more, hurricanes Rita and Katrina led to 125 spills from platforms and pipelines on the Outer Continental Shelf, releasing nearly 685,000 gallons of petroleum products into the ocean, also  according to the Newsweek article.   Note 2:   At Sunday Mass at St. Aloysius Catholic Church  in Baton Rouge, we learned one of the parishioners here had been killed in the Deep Water Horizon explosion.   He  was the father of two children.    Like with the coal miners, are these oil rig workers becoming part of the “inevitable collateral damage” of our energy gluttony in this country?

We headed out of New Orleans yesterday toward Baton Rouge, Louisiana.   We picked a backroad (LA 18) that looked on the map like it was going to be a ‘scenic byway,’ and it was.   That is, it was ‘scene’ after ‘scene’ of some of the biggest chemical  plants we’ve seen throughout the country.   There was Monsanto, Dow Chemical, oil refineries… and even a nuclear  power plant  site.   Sandwhiched in between were small — and quite poor — primarily rural Black villages.   We stopped in Vascherie, where I talked to some older gentleman sitting in the shade in front of a general store.   At the town limits here is a sign that says:   “No Thanks Petroplex, our health is not for sale!”    According to the men, the citizens here were mounting a spirited fight to keep yet another refinery (with  even more  potential pollution, etc.) from coming in.   (Petroplex International is proposing a petroleum storage facility with a 10 million barrel capacity in St. James Parish, Louisiana.)   Note:   I couldn’t help but wonder that if this was a White affluent rural area, would there be all these toxic chemical plants, refineries, a nuclear power plant…?   Of course not.   Note 2:   In the last blog entry, I wrote about the phenomenal amount of toxic chemical farm runoff  into the Mississippi River watershed.  Much of this is farm chemicals from Monsanto.   And while Monsanto (some organic farmers refer to the company as: “Monsatan”) is part of the problem, so are the farmers using the chemicals, and so are all of us consumers creating a demand for this, in essence, “chemically treated” food.

We have headed into southern Louisiana on our Louisiana Gumbo Tour.   (We, again, pride ourselves on originality.)   We stopped in New Orleans where I gave a talk to an in-home gathering in the heart of the city on Constance St.   The day before, President Obama had outlined his plans for prioritizing going to Mars.   He said we would now do space travel in a “smart” way.   During my talk, I questioned the use of the word “smart.”   I mean, all the best minds at MIT, Harvard, Stanford… have come up with these ultra-sophisticated, ultra-expensive spacecraft… to take us to places like Mars — where there’s no gravity, no oxygen and no food.   Duh!   Wouldn’t the billions we’re spending on NASA be better spent on things like, oh I don’t know, MAYBE ENDING WORLD HUNGER!   Maybe ‘smart,’ the way we currently construe ‘smart’ to be, should be trumped by common sense…     The neighborhood where I gave the talk in New Orleans is a hardscrabble one, fraught with a lot of violence.   In fact, the weekend before in New Orleans there were eight shooting deaths throughout the city.   Our cities (LA, Chicago, Cleveland…) are turning into absolute war zones.