Vote for Joe

The New York Times   today carried a front page article about Sacramento, California’s non-profit Municipal Utility that has come up with a creative strategy to get people to use less energy.   On their monthly bills, the Utility  include a “Last Month Neighborhood Comparison.”   That is, you are compared to 100 random homes of comprable size in your area.   The 100 homes are dubbed as: “All” — and you are compared against their mean average energy use.   Then there is another graph  where you are compared to  20 neighbors who were “especially efficient in energy savings.”   This is dubbed as “Green.”   A social pyschologist interviewed for the article said the age-old “keeping up with your neighbors” is a strong motivating factor, even when it comes to conservation…   Personally, our family tries to be as “green” as possible when it comes to home energy savings.   Our family of five lives in a relatively small two-bedroom apartment in Cleveland, Ohio.   We don’t use air conditioning.   We use energy saving flourescent lights and only turn them on (Wait ’til you hear this!) in just the rooms we’re using.   We don’t use a television.   Our refrigerator is half the size of most regular refrigerators.   For winter, we put plastic on all the windows.   Instead of using the central gas heating, we have a couple portable heaters that we just turn on in the rooms we’re using, at the time we’re using them,  during the day.   And in those rooms, we generally keep the temperature between 55 to 62 degrees, and often wear sweaters and hats.   (I read once that you lose 70% of your body heat through your head.   My wife Liz will say that with the ‘hole’ in my head, that might be closer to 90% for me.)   Sure we get a bit cold in the winter, a bit hot in the summer.   But in the face of  potentially more and more  global warming catastrophies, we think it’s worth the sacrifice.   What’s more, in the context of our spirituality (Catholic), sacrificing is actually a spiritually good thing, period. Note:   We would do well to become a Society of Conservers vs. a Society of Consumers.   For more on our environmental position paper…

I was talking with a Cleveland city school teacher yesterday who is also quite active doing social justice work  with the Catholic Workers here.   She said farmers will continue to grow coca plants in, say,  Columbia “as long as their is money to be made.”   Her point being that as long as people stay impoverished, in their desperation they will turn to whatever they can to feed their children and themselves.   Common sense.   Our administration’s ‘War on Drugs’ would, among other things,  be a tremendously stepped up humanitarian aid outpouring into the Third World.   Speaking of war…   Bumper sticker sighting:   “War doesn’t decide who’s right.   Just who’s left.”

I was on the St. Ignatius High School campus this morning and talked with youth minister Augi Pacetti.   He said this week that some of the students were doing “The Great Garbage Challenge.”     For five days, students will carry around a plastic bag (everywhere)  that they fill up with the garbage they generate.   This is to make  one’s waste visible and bring it to the forefront of one’s consciousness, Mr. Pacetti explained.   It should be eye opening for most of the students…   I couldn’t help but think how helpful it would be for many of us to be able to also   carry around a ‘bag’ for five days of all the carbon dioxide each of us emits from our vehicles, our home heating, our consumer purchases (it takes the burning of fossil fuels to produce most items).   Note:   The Obama Administration is moving swiftly on applications by California and 13 other states for much stricter automobile emissions and fuel efficiency, the New York Times   reported today.   While this is, indeed, a step in the right direction, our  environmental policy  on global warming would be  much more  agressive than  the Obama Administration’s, across the board.    Much of the  global warming data now indicates that these gradual, incremental shifts in policy —  “…is like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic,” I just told the Ashtabula Star Beacon newspaper.  

Our daughter Sarah, son Joseph and myself went to a Public Hearing tonight on a zoning variance for the addition of a cremation machine at the funeral home around the corner.   The hearing room was full. Neighborhood people were concerned about the mercury emissions.   Seems when people are creamated who have mercury fillings in their teeth (which is a whole lot of people), the mercury is emitted through a smoke stack and deposits, well, wherever the wind is blowing, or not blowing… A professor from Case Western Reserve University, Kathleen Fagan, MD, said mercury causes damage to the developing brains of unborn children and babies less than one year old.   “Health effects can range from decreases in IQ and developmental delays to muscle weakness, seizures and mental retardation.”   During the question and answer period, our Sarah stood and said she has spent a good deal of time with two autistic children.   And if there is any possibility the mercury  could cause this type of condition (or others), then why would anybody want to risk it?   Good question…   A representative from the cremation machine company said the EPA assures people that the mercury release from crematoriums is minimal and well within it’s standards for safe emissions.   Shortly after, a man rose and said during the Vietnam War the government told military people that handling “agent orange” wasn’t cancer causing.   Yet they found out later that  it was.   The man wondered:   Do we want to find out the same thing about mercury emissions — after the fact?     Good point.   Note:    During one juncture in  the hearing on the cremation machine, the moderator asked if there was any: “burning questions.”   No pun intended, but I had to laugh.

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day today, we read the kids some passages from the book: Let My People Go, which is about slavery in early America…   During our campaign tours we have retraced the Civil Rights March   from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and followed an Underground Railroad Route   from Georgia to Ohio.   On another Martin Luther King Jr. Day during Campaign 2004, I told the Range News   in Arizona that even though we’ve made significant strides in civil rights for Blacks, there are still many Blacks (Hispanics, Asians, Whites…) who are ‘slaves’ to things like transgenerational poverty loops in metropolitan and rural America — not to mention around the world.