We just got an absolutely excellent endorsement that appeared on the relatively new Political Cortex website. See item #5 at:
http://www.politicalcortex.com/story/2008/2/29/1676/21672
Note: It was my birthday today. My sister Patti gave me a card with a picture of a cat sitting on a globe and looking at the camera. The cover read: Is that you’re birthday cake?! Then inside: “Talk about global warming!” I laughed, sort of.
Buckeye Back Road Tour: We went to Lordstown High School where I talked at a Candidate’s Forum put on by political science teacher Terry Armstrong and his classes. Mr. Armstrong took a good number of students to the Iowa Caucuses, helped arrange for some students to go to Hillary Clinton’s talk in Lordstown the week before, and contacted the candidates for this forum so his students could be informed voters. What a refreshing teaching style, huh. …I turned the talk into quite an interactive, and unscripted, “Town Hall Meeting,” if you will. The students became tremendously animated and engaged in what turned out to be a lively debate. One student asked me my stance on embryonic stem cell research. I said I believed life began at conception and that this was a form of abortion. Some of the students grumbled. I asked to see a show of hands: “How many of you have been embryos?” The grumbling subsided a bit. The students wanted to also talk about immigration, poverty in the inner city, the Iraq War… One student pointed out that before we went to war with Iraq, Saddam Hussein was “torturing” people. I asked the students how many of them thought water-boarding (simulating drowning), which the U.S. is doing with terrorist suspects now, is “torture.” A majority raised their hands indicating they believed it was. “So we’re doing the same thing Hussein was doing?” I asked. That seemed to give everyone pause. Almost as much pause as when I said that we went into Iraq looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction “…yet we have 10,000 of them aimed all over the world!” Many say we’ll never use them. I say: “Tell that to the little children who were incinerated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Note: The first local candidate to speak after me was the current County Coroner. He ended his talk to the students by saying: “You can be thankful you’re seeing me socially here — and not professionally at my office.” A coroner with a sense of humor. He got my vote.
While back in Cleveland, my daughter Sarah and I attended a session on Sabbath Economics at the Catholic Worker House. One participant said that our society has become absolutely nuts with complexity. That is, we now spend so much time almost frenetically trying to decide between all the different types of washing machines, all the different types of options for cars, all the different types of clothing… In the last blog entry, I talk about stopping in Plain City, Ohio. Maybe we as a society should consider going to ‘Plain City’ figuratively as well. The Amish have. Or actually, they have never left. In our research travel, we have stopped in Amish communities in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois… The Amish live simply. They ride in buggies with few options. They wear plain clothes that all look pretty much the same. They don’t worry about whether to get the television screen with the higher resolution, or not. Because, well, they don’t watch television. In living simply, the Amish have way more time for God, for family, for community… And when you think about it common sense wise, isn’t that the kind of trade off we should all be considering?
Buckeye Back Roads Tour: We’ve been buzzing (‘Buckeye buzzing,’ if you will — sorry)around the state this last month. The following are some more vignettes from the road: In Plain City, Ohio, I put up a black & white flier in the Pioneer Club Coffee Shop that said: “Hello Plain City! …from the ‘plain’ candidate.” Once again, we’re doing this all without paid political consultants. A patron in the shop started to argue with me over our stance on illegal immigration. We propose amnesty and he said he thinks we should: “…send them all back. Just ask the Native Americans about illegal immigration,” he added in all seriousness. What an ironic twist, huh. I should have then told him our platform point about giving the Native Americans back some of the land we stole. (I’m sure that would have gone over big, too. Ah, these unscripted campaign stops.) But I was in a hurry, so I gave him our web address… In Lancaster, Ohio, I sat in on a talk about “death and dying” by a Catholic nun who specializes in the topic. Someone in the audience said she’d just recently read in Time Magazine that 65% of an average American’s healthcare costs go to — their last two months of life. This money is sometimes spent on, what the Catholic Church would term, “extraordinary” medical measures. And these measures amount to billions and billions of dollars every year — while many in the Third World don’t have even the basics in medicine, period. During the Q&A part of the presentation, I mentioned that this might be, oh, a little self-indulgent on our parts. It’s kind of like American funerals. We spend 4,000 bucks on a casket for one dead American, while that money would build two nice Habitat for Humanity homes for a lot of ‘living’ Ugandans (Haitians, Nigerians…). This all would once again beg the question: Have we Americans become insanely blind when it comes to social justice? Note: The guy in Plain City who wanted to send all the illegal immigrants back, prefaced that statement with: “I love my country…” Funny, I’d just seen a bumper sticker in Columbus the day before that read: “Even though I love my country… it’s time we start seeing other people.” Note 2: We’ve just arrived back home in Cleveland for a brief pit stop.
Ok, it’s crunch time for us! We need a vice-presidential candidate — with a consistent life ethic — who will stand in solidarity with us on a ticket. Short of a tremendous miracle, what is possible for us this time is to actually win Ohio, which would be a phenomenal victory and a great spring board into the 2012 Election season. (“Wouldn’t that be the feel good story of Campaign 2008,” a reporter from the Ashtabula Star Beacon said to me when I explained the strategy.) Besides all the extensive cross country campaigning we’ve done, in the last eight years we have campaigned in Ohio for 16 solid months of that time and have been on the front page of most newspapers in the state, a lot of regional network TV news, etc. However, we can’t start getting petition signatures to get on the ballot in Ohio until we have a vice-presidential candidate. It’s that simple. For those of you following our campaign, you know we’re giving it 100% on this end — against all odds. We’re asking someone to step up to join us. We’re not even asking that person to campaign, necessarily. Again, just to stand in solidarity on the ticket so we can move the campaign to the next level in Ohio… I can be reached at 419-792-9059 or joeschriner@hotmail.com So often we hear people lament about the state of presidential politics. Here’s a chance to impact it. Note: We have just put a new page up on the website displaying how our campaign has impacted some of those we’ve encountered along the way.
Buckeye Back Road Tour: We headed west out of Columbus stopping at Dan Kremer’s Eat Food For Life Farm in Yorkshire, Ohio. Mr. Kremer is an absolute evangelist when it comes to organic farming. His orientation is that farming could well be considered a pro-Life issue. That is, with modern farmers using toxic herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers, the soil is being tremendously depleted. In turn, a given crop’s nutritional value diminishes in kind. What’s more, some of the toxins get into the food creating ‘chemical cocktails’ in the consumer — that can, ultimately, cause cancer and other disorders. (During an Election 2004 campaign swing through Ohio, I told the Bellefountaine News that because of these modern agricultural practices, we have become our own worst enemy when it comes to: chemical warfare.) Mr. Kremer looks at farming as a vocation and adheres closely to Catholic Rural Life principles. All his crops are organic, his chickens are free range and his cattle are grass fed. And he carries other local farmers’ organic products (honey, nuts…) at his Farm Store on the property as well.
Buckeye Back Road Tour: We stopped in Columbus where we learned about Saint Paul’s Outreach. This is a group of Catholic college students who are living in community and trying to evangelize on Ohio State campus, and beyond. Saint Paul’s views itself as “set apart.” And it is. We got there on Friday and asked what they were doing that evening. The students said they would be holding Eucharistic adoration, a prayer service and then watching the movie The Passion of Christ. Not exactly, oh, what all the other OSU students were doing that Friday night. Brendan O’Rourke told me the Saint Paul’s Outreach students were supporting each other in living a “universal call to holiness.” He said for instance, that his community members (in line with Catholic Church teaching) don’t believe in pre-marital sex. To that end, the guys “interact properly with the sisters,” said O’Rourke. This means no co-ed living situations, girls and guys out of the respective houses by 9 p.m., and a general ethos of respect toward one another. Conversely some of the dorms are co-ed at OSU, it wouldn’t take Freud to figure there’s probably a good deal of sleeping around, and many on the campus dress as, well, sex objects. Continuing with this, O’Rourke said that it is his take that society is continually bombarding people with sexual imagery (immodest dress, sexually explicit media forms…) at this point. And with the constant stimulus, it creates a tremendous urge to act out sexually. Meanwhile, the St. Paul’s guys played board games with our kids Saturday night. How tremendously refreshing… I also talked with St. Paul’s Brian Fischer. He said St. Paul’s Outreach is experiencing a growth spurt, with other chapters starting up around the country. Fischer said long term projections (based on God’s timing, of course) are to have St. Paul’s Outreach headquarters in as many states as possible, with satellites then forming at colleges around the state. For more on the program, see: www.spoweb.org. Note: The day before we arrived at OSU, Hillary Clinton gave a talk at OSU’s French Field House. One of her college platform topics she addressed was rising interest on college loans. Given the chance, I would have talked — at length — about these St. Paul’s Outreach students.
Buckeye Back Roads Tour: I talked at St. Mark’s Church in Lancaster and St. Francis Church in Newark this last week. The topic: abortion. During one of the talks, I said for all the carnage at Northern Illinois University this week (six dead, some 15 injured in the shooting), there were about 4,400 little babies who were dismembered and suctioned out of their mothers’ wombs that same day in America. Shouldn’t that be front page news, everyday? Of course it should… We did whistle-stop events in downtown Newark and downtown Columbus this past week as well. One man-on-the-street in Columbus queried: “You’re really running for president?” I replied: “Well, someone had to do it.” He smiled… In Lancaster, I interviewed Carol Sullivan who has been a Red Cross Volunteer since 1985. She’s responded to numerous crisis all over the country, including 9/11, Hurricane Katrina… While she is a retired nurse, Ms. Sullivan is a woman who believes her faith would call her to continue to work for God. She is what we colloquially refer to as an “extra-mile American.”
Buckeye Back Road Tour: We headed northeast into Lancaster, Ohio, where Fr. Peter Gideon at St. Mark’s here said during a Sunday sermon that studies show the average American eats a hefty 1,775 pounds of food a year. I couldn’t help but think in Uganda, Nigeria, Haiti… it was, oh, a little less. What’s more, a significant percentage of what we eat is red meat. The book “Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger” notes: “…each pound of edible beef represents seven pounds of grain (fed to the animal, in addition to grass, hay, etc.) [And] it is because of this high level of meat consumption that the rich minority of the world devours such an unfair share of the world’s available food.” And it gets even more nuts social justice wise. Our daughter Sarah is currently reading the book “What Do People Eat?” It explains that for most farmers these days it is more important to produce lots of food cheaply than it is to give an animal a nice life. So cows, chickens, pigs… are now often confined in extremely tight, abusive conditions on factory farms and pumped full of hormones, etc., so they grow as quickly as possible. “This is because people usually buy cheaper food,” writes author Kate Needham. Translated: It’s us who are significantly responsible for these animal rights abuses. It’s us who are significantly responsible for World Hunger.
Buckeye Back Roads Tour: We continue to buzz about the back roads of Ohio. Some vignettes from last week: In West Union, Ohio, St. Vincent DePaul volunteer Margo Rammel gave us a tour of her facility. In the background, two relatively desperate calls were recorded on the answering machine in the background. They were for help with heating bills because there were shut off threats. “People are in dire straights here (Adams County),” said Ms. Rammel… In Lawshe, Ohio, Clinton Beaver is struggling. He was on his porch when I approached with a flyer. Mr. Beaver said he’s been trying for some time to be “gainfully employed,” but all he’s found is some part-time work at Wilmington, Ohio’s airport. He said he’s currently sweating a $540 property tax bill… In Wamsley, I talked with Terry and Jerry, twin brothers who both had beers in their hand. Straight out of the Dukes of Hazard, one of the brothers smiled at me and said (tongue-in-cheek) that they were quite politically connected in the county. “We know all the judges,” he laughed… Then it was on to Sweet Ridge, Ohio (pop. …if you blink), where Robert Ruggles, sitting in an old leather chair in a used car lot shack, said there’s got to be “something crooked” about presidential candidates spending millions of dollars on a job that pays only $200,000, or whatever. I told him we weren’t spending, oh, as much…