Last night I talked with a man in his mid-20s at a Catholic Worker street outreach at our neighborhood in Cleveland. Nice guy, but hurting tremendously. He’s currently living in his car and parks in a friend’s driveway on the east side of town at night. The man is originally from Fremont, Ohio. He has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, manic depression and sometimes cuts himself. I used to do dual diagnosis work with drug and alcohol and mental health patients. And I know that, ideally, this man needs a supervised group home setting and a “Care Team” of people around him. That is, he needs someone to take him places, someone to fundraise so he can get a college education (he wants to go to school), someone to tutor him, people to just be his friends… But he, like so many people down here, is falling through the cracks. Why? Because those more well-off care very little, if at all. That simple.
3/24/09
Shootings at Columbine, at Virginia Tech and at so many other schools these days are the far end of a violence continuum. The other night I went to an information session in Cleveland about how to short circuit some of this violence. And more, how to teach youth healthy coping skills in general. Morris Ervin, from the Los Angeles area, is a teacher who stresses non-violent approaches and he has been featured in several documentaries. He works with Black and Latino gang members in L.A. He said a key is to create safe venues for, not only dialogue, but the healthy expression of feelings. And Ervin stressed it’s essential, when possible, for this to begin at home… This evening there were also students from instructor Kathleen McDonell’s peer support group at Euclid High School. Each shared how learning about “non-violent communication” and processing feelings in general have helped them. One youth, who was rather large in stature, said he had a lot of problems at home. Consequently, he’d take his anger out on the football field or with his peers. “I was mean,” he lamented. But after getting involved with Ms. McDonell’s group, he said he learned to open up about his feelings and be more empathetic towards others having problems as well. As a result, he said he’s become a lot more relaxed, friendlier and is now a volunteer peer mediator when conflicts come up at his school. Note: Several years ago, I researched the “Ulster Project.” Host families in the U.S. would take in one Catholic youth and one Protestant youth from Northern Ireland for a year. The intent was to break down prejudices, to break down hate and create hope for peace in the next generation. After hearing the tremendous changes these Euclid High School students had gone through in their own journey towards “peace,” I couldn’t help but think there is, indeed, hope yet for this world. Note 2: Our administration would propose a U.S. Department of Peace that would rely on such consultants as Ms. McDonell and Mr. Ervin to ramp up non-violence efforts in schools across the country.
3/21/09
I talked with Rachel Napolitano from Cleveland’s Community Development Corporation (CCDC). She is the project coordinator for Kids Growin’ Green. This is a CCDC “Community Garden Project” for children from 2nd to 5th grade. This will be the second year for the garden. Ms. Napolitano said it is vital kids in the city are connected to the earth in some way, and this has been an excellent venue. What’s more, she said when the kids are gardening they have a tendency to open up more about their lives, their problems. A new twist this year, the group will be applying for a 4-H Club status so they can interact with other groups of kids, and so on.
3/18/09
I talked with a group of students from Creighton University in Oklahoma last week at the Catholic Worker around the corner. They told me they were here for their Spring Break. That is, while a good number of college students were off caught up in frivilous revelry in sunny, southern Florida, these Jesuit students were here in overcast, 30 degree Cleveland, Ohio. They told me they were spending the week volunteering at several Soup Kitchens and at a drop-in center for the homeless because, well, that’s what their faith calls them to… I couldn’t help but think of a young couple we met during a campaign stop in North Carolina several years ago. They were engaged and were to be married soon. For their “honeymoon” they were going on a two week trip to Guatemala to do humanitarian outreach work. “We are concecrating our marriage with an act of service,” said Heather. Note: While traveling through southern Alabama in 2005, I saw a billboard that simply said: “That love thy neighbor thing? I meant that.” –God It seems these Creighton students and the young couple in North Carolina have figured out how to do this.
3/16/09
The economy. It appears to be going in the tank. People are pointing fingers at Wall Street, at banking institutions, at over extended consumers… Yet is there, perhaps, a base moral component many of us are simply not seeing? That is, we are approaching 50 million abortions in the U.S. What’s more, we are absolutely trashing the environment with all the carbon dioxide emissions (read: global warming). Then there are all the suburban Americans living (comparitively speaking) in ease, while billions of our brothers and sisters live in tremendous abject poverty in Third World slums. I could go on with this, but the point is: In the face of all this, maybe what’s happening with the economy is our ‘Jonah/Nineveh moment.’
3/14/09
I talked with Bridgette Kelly who recently returned from a Witness for Peace trip to Nicaragua. She toured both the rural areas and the city of Managua. Ms. Kelly said small subsitence farmers there are being tremendously hurt by globalization (NAFTA, CAFTA…) that allows for corporate farms in America to undersell these Nicaraguan farmers — at their own local markets. This is a tremendous social justice travesty. What’s more, Ms. Kelly said of her stop in Managua that she had never seen so many “thin, hungry people.” Meanwhile, 66% of Americans are now considered “overweight.” If you do the math, wouldn’t it make sense (spiritual common sense) for some of us in America to cut back on our food intake and help these people more in Managua? Sure it would.
3/11/09
There was an article yesterday that said NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander had a “set of little globules attached to the struts on Phoenix’s legs.” Researchers say this could indicate there is indeed water on Mars. As I read this, I couldn’t help but think we have spent billions of dollars on Mars missions to, among other things, find out whether there’s water there or not. Yet we know for sure that millions of people on this planet don’t have safe drinking water. Couldn’t that money have been better spent on, oh, helping purify the water for all these desperate people?! Note: On a campaign stop in Wapokeneta, Ohio, I told the newspaper there that as president I’d lobby to end the Space Program and funnel the money into more foreign aid. Incidentally, Wapokeneta is the hometown of astronaut Neil (“One small step for mankind…”) Armstrong. We try not to pander to anyone.
3/9/09
We’re concerned about Iran and North Korea developing nuclear missiles. Meanwhile, we have thousands of nuclear missiles aimed all over the world — including at Iran and North Korea. HELLO AMERICA! During an interview in northwestern Ohio, I posed this question to an ABC News reporter from Toledo: “What if we let the weapons inspectors into Montana?” Note: A friend of ours in Cleveland, Fr. Ben Jimenez, said recently: “Nuclear disarmament begins at home.”
3/7/09
The New York Times reported today that President Obama will be reversing Bush administration limits on federal financing for embryonic stem cell research at a ceremony on Monday. According to the article, Obama said this signals a general return to “sound science.” And one proponent sited in the article said that this will return us to an era of “scientists making scientific decisions.” …The article calls these “human embryos.” The word “human” should be, oh, a big hint to us. Who out there hasn’t initially been: a human embryo? Translated: We’re killing people at the earliest stage of their life. I mean, it wouldn’t take an ethics professor, a scientists or even a president who went to Harvard to figure this one out. Note: The national news carried a story today about a man in Cleveland who killed his new wife, her sister and three young children with a semi-automatic weapon. It happened on W. 89th St. just two miles west of us. Today I took our kids to a Recreation Center halfway between W. 89th St. and our place. While playing basketball, I noticed a 10-year-old kid standing nearby. He had a pronounced scar that ran from the corner of his eye all the way down to his chin. I asked what happened. He, rather matter of factedly, said someone knifed him when he was five. America’s big cities are becoming such war zones.
3/4/09
A New York Times story this week noted President Barack Obama sent a secret letter to Russia’s president last month suggesting that he would back off deploying a new missile defense system in Eastern Europe if Moscow would help stop Iran from developing long-range nuclear weapons… As president, I would nix all plans to build missile defense systems, anywhere, I told the Gainsville (TX) Daily Register during a campaign tour. I mean, how does this square with the Gospel message? Thousands are dying of hunger everyday worldwide and millions of people don’t have clean drinking water. Yet we’re willing to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into even more protection for us in the face of so much potentially relievable human suffering. C’mmon. Note: I saw the following two bumper stickers on the same car yesterday: 1) I think. Therefore I am. 2) I have no idea where I’m going. Apparently this person’s not ‘thinking’ enough. Just like some of us might not be ‘thinking’ enough on this missile defense system thing.