Vote for Joe

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.

More on our Sweet Home Alabama Tour…   Coming across the border from Georgia, we first stopped in Phenix City, Alabama.   This was once billed at “the most corrupt city in America.”   With the Army’s Ft. Benning nearby, soldiers regularly came to town here.   There were illegal gambling parlors all over, prostitution, taverns everywhere, mob influence…   At Patty’s 50s style diner here, one of the employees, Barbara, told me that in the mid-50s marshal law was declared in Phenix City, with federal troops descending on the town to shut down a lot of the illegal activity…   On the walls at Patty’s are old 45 records, pictures of Elvis Presley, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe…   And a whole wall dedicated to the Andy Griffith Show…   While in Phenix City, I gave a pro-life talk at St. Patrick’s Church.   I said that we’d just crossed the 50 million abortion mark in America and for this to end, pro-life people need to go to the streets and mount a dramatic, sustained protest — like the protests to end Segregation in the South.   While in Phenix, we met with Fr. Thom Weise who spent time with Mother Theresa and Dorothy Day (co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement).   He had an absolutely great sense of spirituality about him.   Fr. Thom gave us a tour of the town, including a stroll down a scenic river walk.   Fr. Thom, 74, road his push-scooter side-by-side with our son Jonathan along the walk…   The next day, I talked at Mother Mary’s School, an all Black elementary school in Phenix City.   The topic, again, was abortion.   Our daughter Sarah, 14, also talked to the students. She explained she had protested abortion all over the country.   She said she had prayed with others on the street, held protest signs, pleaded with mothers not to go into the clinic…   Sarah exhorted the students to consider doing similar things…   I then talked at an eighth grade class at St. Patrick’s School in Phenix City.   I asked the students:   “If you were president, what’s the first thing you’d do?”   One boy didn’t skip a beat, immediately saying:   “I’d end the war.”   I asked why.   “Because my father is over there.”   My heart fell as I looked at this kid…   After the school events, we got a tour of The Riverside Antique Mall, complete with the first Thunderbird model ever built (1955) and the last Thunderbird model ever built (1995).   Both were cherry red.   The antique mall also has the largest lunch box collection in the world — and I’m not making this up.   (It had just been featured on CNN’s Most Unusual Museums Show.)   These particular lunch pails primarily had scenes from movies and television shows.   The rarest was a metal lunch pail with Hop-a-Long Cassidy on it.   Cost: $600.   I decided to pass on that…   After the tour we headed south, stopping in Montgomery (see last entry), then it was on to Owassa where Jonathan and I passed out a flier to a man out watering flowers in his front yard there.   Unsolicited, he said he had an answer to gridlock in D.C.   “Throw everyone out and start over,” he offered…   Then it was further south to Evergreen, Alabama, where I put up a campaign flier at Piggly Wiggly Grocery Store.   (Ya gotta wonder why you would name a place where people were going to get there food: “piggly,” complete with a big graphic of a pig no less.   I mean what’s that going to do to the average shopper unconsciously?   Anyway… From here,, it was on to Atmore, Alabama, where we parked our camper for the evening in a dirt lot next to a Chevron station, amidst a few 18 wheelers.   It was late.   And after we got the kids to bed, I went into a small restaurant at the station to do some writing.   My table was right below a wall hanging that read:   You might be a redneck racing fan if:   1)   Your drive to the race track takes longer than the race.   2)   You can change a tire faster than you can change a diaper.   3)   You get in and out of your car through the driver’s window. (Incidentally, this is how I get in our campaign vehicle.)

I was interviewed by the Americus Times-Recorder yesterday.   I noted Koinonia Farm, where we’re currently doing some research,   has a perma-culture.   (This is a design system for sustainable human habitats that work in harmony with nature to provide an abundance for all our needs.   For instance, Konoinia’s perma-culture has fruit trees, berries, gardens, pastured livestock… all working together in a closed, organic eco-system.   People from all over the country come to Koinonia to learn about perma-culture.   I told the reporter that when we get to the White House, one of the first things we’ll do is tear out the toxic, chemically-treated green lawn (the one that’s polluting the groundwater) and put in an organic perma-culture.   And we’ll ask many Americans to do the same.   Note:   Koinonia is a Christian cooperative farming community located in rural Sumter County, Georgia.   It was started in the 1940s.