Vote for Joe

Three young couples from Texas, Iowa and Ohio, respectively, have come to LaGrange, Georgia, as part of a MissionYear   Project.   They are volunteering for the Alterna Community here, which is a cluster of homes set up for immigrant families in the area.   These couples have set up a community garden for Alterna, help with after school tutoring for immigrant family youth, help out with house repairs, etc…   In addition, these young couples are active in the community volunteering for Habitat for Humanity, coordinating a church youth group, working at a home for single mothers…   One of the volunteers, Dustin White, has become a vocal advocate for better housing among the low-income throughout the community.   As part of his advocacy work, he takes people on tours of the town’s ‘other side of the tracks,’ literally.   During a tour he gave me, White said primarly low-income Blacks and Hispanic immigrants, for generations, have lived in rough housing settlements on the south side of the tracks.   He took me down hardscrabble street after street of small, one-story, run-down houses.   Patches of missing roof shingles, peeling paint, single pane broken windows, clap board walls with no insulation, rusted appliances (many not working)…   Dustin took me in one small home where the floor tile was broken up, an old rusty bath tub lay on it’s side, many of the appliances didn’t work, a window was broken… “This one is advertised as ‘ready to rent,”‘ White scoffed.   He said while seemingly totally unsuitable to live in, a new immigrant family (because of finances) would be forced into such a dwelling — and might well live in it with another family.   Close by this home is the rather bare bones Williams Griggs Recreational Center.   We took our kids there to play some hoops.   We, it turned out, were the ‘token whites’ there this day.   Dustin White had told me that although the “Colored” signs have been taken down on the third gas station bathrooms, and the like, here, the community was still fairly segregated.   Note:   White told me there was a non-profit organization in LaGrange called DASH, which helps renovate homes.   White, and his wife Jamie, have recently published a book called Disguised in their Eyes.   It’s about the inner city poor.   They suggest at one point in the book that those more well off convert their garages to apartments and take the rent money to fund programs like DASH, so more people can have access to adequate housing.   Good idea.

I was interviewed by the LaGrange Daily News the other day.   I said to reporter Joel Martin that in some areas I would be viewed as quite liberal, while in other areas I would be viewed as quite conservative — like with abortion.   And speaking of abortion… I just read in the New York Times that Utah has legislation pending that would criminalize “illegal” abortions.   For instance, a 17-year-old pregnant girl in Utah paid a man $150 to beat her up with the hopes of inducing a miscarriage.   The Utah bill’s sponsor, Representative Carl Wimmer, said:   “A woman going out to seek any way to kill her unborn child, no matter how heinous or brutal, couldn’t [currently] be held liable.”   Heinous?   Brutal?   In a “legal” abortion, the baby is dismembered and suctioned out of the mother’s womb.   Have we as a society gone mad?   I mean, the whole   abortion thing — both legal or illegal — is absolutely insane!   As is this nuclear weapons thing.   I told Mr. Martin that our daughter Sarah posed to me one day.   “Dad, America has enough nuclear weapons to blow the world up 200 times.   Why not have enough nuclear weapons to just blow the world up: once.”   Good question.

We met with a group of Hispanic immigrant families who are all part of the Alterna Project in LaGrange Tuesday night.   They live in a cluster of homes on Jefferson Street here as part of a “housing co-op.”   Social justice advocate, and former La Grange College professor,  Anton Flores bought these homes and has entered into a cooperative agreement with the immigrant families.   Flores has structured it so these families are paying for these homes basically at cost.   Flores told me what motivates him is “Christian love…”   This evening our family heard a tremendously poignant story from a family who came to  La Grange  some 10 years ago.   Farm working jobs had dried up in Vera Cruz, Mexico, and the family had moved to crowded Mexico City for work.   The father began working for a distribution company and was making a mere $50 a week.   They lived in one room,  not much larger than the size  of a typical American storage shed.   His salary was just enough to make rent and food each month in Mexico.   He had a wife and a six-year-old son.   They were desperately trapped in a poverty loop, with seemingly “no way to get ahead.”   And they lived in an area infested with drugs, violence and gangs.   “We were continually afraid to go outside on the street,” the wife said.   There were regular robberies, homicides, child abductions…   They were torn.   While the family  didn’t want to leave their extended family, their homeland, their culture… “Besides the danger, we weren’t even able to afford shoes for our child,” said the mother.   They decided to come here where the father got a job as a house painter and eventually started making enough to “get ahead a bit.”   They also had another child  and are quite involved with the Alterna community now.   “Here there is safety for our children — and they never go without shoes,” the mother added, a tear coming to her eye.

We’re in motion on yet another series of tours for Campaign 2012…   Heading south on I-75 through Tennessee, we saw a billboard that simply read:   Less Speed.   Less Pollution…   We make it a point of driving no faster than 55 mph on the highway, no matter what the speed limit is.   Because of the pollution, and safety…   In Canton, Georgia, there’s a sign in the YMCA locker room asking members to keep their showers to five minutes, to save water.   To saver water, and energy, it’s my belief all Americans should be taking, like,  three minute GI showers.   “Tough talk for tough times,” our new campaign motto goes…   In La Grange, Georgia, I talked with Dustin and Jamie White, who are in the area from Ohio on a Christian mission.   The Whites periodically take homeless people into their place.   Dustin talked of one man they’d helped who had been on the streets, then got into recovery for cocaine addiction, reunited with his family and has a solid job now.   And it was this young couples’  willingness to risk  that helped get the ball rolling.   Tough people for tough times.   How do we end homelessness in America?   Well for one, more people like the Whites.

I recently gave a talk at the University of Notre Dame.   It was sponsored, in part, by ND’s Center for Social Concerns.   The Center is recognized nationally for it’s community-based learning courses.   What’s more, students do “immersion experiences” in gang war zones in Chicago, migrant farm labor camps in Florida, in the back woods of Appalachia…   Students also go throughout the Third World to help with providing food, health care, adequate housing, education… for those in dire need of all of these.   In addition, the Center sponsors seminars on such subjects as: human trafficking, authentic human development, poverty…   Executive Director Rev. William Lies, points to Catholic Church teaching that explains:   “Solidarity is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far.   On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good…”   Average Joe translation:   If we know 24,000 people are starving to death every day in the world, we in America need to be sacrificing our butts off (way less food, way less energy use, way less entertainment…), so people in the Third World can have at least the basics in adequate food, medicine, shelter…   That is, if we’re taking the Gospel message seriously.