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.
2/16/08
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.”
2/14/08
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.
2/11/08
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…
2/9/08
Buckeye Back Road Tour: We stumped in downtown Bainbridge, Ohio, yesterday. At Paxton Restaurant, Don Shoemaker told me he refers to Bainbridge’s Fall Festival of Leaves as the Fall Festival of Theives. “The carnies come in every year and take all our money,” he smiled. Shoemaker, who is a dairy farmer, said his biggest lament is so many farmers have to have additional jobs off the land to make ends meet these days… We then drove into Chilicothe, Ohio, the state’s first capitol. I talked to a man who said he used to live in Missouri and supported one candidate for governor who, for social justice reasons, proposed turning the State House there into a homeless shelter. (Coincidentally, that’s what we propose turning the White House into. I mean, ‘what would Jesus do’ with all the space?)… Today we took a back road into Kinnikinnick. (I still can’t pronounce it and someone took great pains to teach me how to pronounce it.) Anyway, Kinnikinnick is a Native American name for: “bark from the willow tree.” The Native Americans actually smoked this. Something the country won’t have to worry about me ‘inhaling.’ …Then it was on to Aldelphi, which is 7 miles from Tar Hollow. There on the street I met Terry Seymour who was wearing a Michigan sweatshirt. I told him I was an Ohio State fan, but was going to give him a flyer anyway. He smiled and told me that in 1908, Ohio State had lost to Michigan 88-0 — and they actually called the game in the middle of the third quarter. On the train ride back, apparently the Ohio State guys came up with the words to their “fight song.” (Michigan fans like to tell ya that kind of stuff.) I then walked into Henerson Hardware in Aldelphi, and right into the middle of the town brain trust. A group of guys were sitting around in the circle discussing, well, things. Dressed in jeans, a flannel shirt and dirty work books — I told them I was running for president. It was like one of those old Merrill Lynch commercials, everybody got real quiet. Ok, some I’m not a household name yet.
2/7/08
Buckeye Back Roads Tour: We stopped in a number of small towns and burgs in Adams County, Ohio, this week. In Unity, Ohio (Amish country), we visited Ryan’s Grocery. It is a very small store with old wooden floors and a couple black van seats positioned near a space heater. A spot, I’m sure, where the town brain trust meets regularly and a scene not unlike one Norman Rockwell would have featured in his painting. Owner Eugene Ryan, 82, told me he’s the third generation to own the store. But, sadly, none of his children want to take it over. Besides, it’s struggling (like many similar, small local stores these days) to stay afloat because the big stores are taking a good deal of his business. Mr. Ryan, who is Presbyterian, said Jesus was continually saying in the gospel message that we are to “help” those around us as much as possible. Yet, Mr. Ryan continued, we’ve instead set up a system where we primarily “compete” with those around us. The folly of man vs. the wisdom of God, Mr. Ryan concluded. Note: For a remedy to our hyper-competitive equation in America, see our position paper on what we feel would be a saner version of the economy.
2/4/08
Buckeye Back Road Tour: We stopped in tiny Dunkinsville, Ohio, early this morning. There was a church with a yard sign out front that had a flag and the words: God Bless America. I left a flyer for the pastor and wrote on the top: God Bless America (and the rest of the world, too)… We then went to Mass at Holy Trinity Church in West Union where, wouldn’t you know, the opening song was, well, This Is My Song. A few lines: “This is my home, the country where my heart is; Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine; But other hearts in other lands are beating, With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.” Referencing the song, Holy Trinity Pastor Fr. Ted Kosse said that maybe we “have this immigration thing wrong.” That is, “home is home,” he continued, and seldom do people want to leave their home for another land. It’s just that the poverty is often so extreme that people are forced to go elsewhere just to feed their children, etc. (At one point, our research took us to the border town of Juarez, Mexico, where 200,000 people live in cobbled together shacks with no running water, no electricity and the adults are making a mere $3 a shift at multi-national factories.) Fr. Kosse suggested we mobilize many humanitarian initiatives into some of these other countries to help make them as sustainable as possible, so people didn’t have to leave their homes. Note: Several days earlier during another church service, Fr. Kosse noted that we are currently spending $2 billion dollars a week on the Iraq War. And he said he thought this money could be much better spent on water purification systems for the Third World, on food for those starving in the Third World, etc. Today he said our policy on Iraq exudes “arrogance.” That is, the U.S. seems to be erroneously saying with it’s actions that it is “working on God’s behalf to take care of the globe.” What’s more, Fr. Kosse said to the Iraq culture (and others in the Middle East) our blatant sexuality and blatant greed are the anti-thesis of their cultural moores; yet these things are now invading, and tremendously influencing, some Iraqis. Fr. Kosse also added that the U.S. also displays “blatant selectivity.” He pointed to China and their human rights abuses and said we wouldn’t take them on over it because China is a “big boy.” However, we’re not afraid to take on smaller countries.
2/2/08
Buckeye Back Road Tour: We spent last the evening with Moses Keim, his wife and his son’s family in Oliver Township, Ohio. They are Amish. We talked about declinining, moral standards (like modesty of dress), our nuclear proliferation, abortion… I find many Amish to be extremely clear thinkers, filled with common sense and unfettered by much of society’s mad, convoluted rush at this point. And Mr. Keim is no exception. He is well read and quite a deep thinker. This evening we also talked about an accident that occured just up the road from the Keim’s. An Amish buggy with a family of six was hit head on by an SUV a couple weeks back. Although the whole family was ejected from the buggy, everyone, except the mother who had some head trauma, miraculously escaped serious injury. Mr. Keim said it would be best if we went back to a society where horse power was provided by, well, horses. That is, a decentralized society where people buggied, bicycled or walked most places locally. (This could also include, say, some slow solar powered and electric vehicles for local tansportation as well.) Meanwhile, gasoline would be reserved solely for public transportation and some necessary trucking. He continued that this would immediately curtail our dependence on foreign oil, which in turn would de-escalate international tensions. I couldn’t help but think how dramatically this would also cut back on our global warming emmissions, moving us toward much better environmental stewardship. And the streets would be safer, with an exponent of 100. And before any of us scoff at the proposal, maybe we should all be doing a whole lot more ‘deep thinking’ about it.
2/1/08
Buckeye Back Roads Tour: We campaigned in West Union, Ohio, where I was interviewed by People’s Defender newspaper reporter Carleta Weyrich. She lives on a farm and said she is concerned about rural issues, as are many people in Adams County. County Commissioner Brian Baldridge told me that many people here are now doing the “6 O’clock shuffle,” as he colloquially refers to it. That is, with the relatively new, four-lane Route 32 coming out of the Cincinnati area, many here are now commuting an hour each way into Cincinnati to work. This, for one, sends continual plumes of global warming emmissions upward. And with the advent of Route 32, Adams County will soon be in the jaws of urban sprawl, a cancer that is eating away at farmland all over the country. As a solution, we propose the “20-hour-work-week-shuffle.” Translated: We ask people to cut back dramatically on their lifestyles, go to things like house sharing to halve expenses, and job share in local settings.
1/31/08
Buckeye Back Road Tour: We were in Peebles, Ohio, today where my son Jonathon, 4, and I walked about the town passing out flyers. Afterward we went to the Village Inn Restaurant to get Jonathon some hot chocolate (well, I have to take care of the staff). While in the restaurant, I heard someone ask a friend for a cigarette. The friend suggested they should quit. “What I should do, and what I do — are two different things,” the smoker smiled… Later today I wrote a letter to the editor of the Peebles Messenger. (When you don’t have millions for advertising, flyers, local articles and letters-to-the-editor are often the best you can do.) In the letter I mentioned that many people these days seem to be like this smoker, not doing what they “should do, or not do” Then I mentioned, for instance, that there’s an astronomical 60% divorce rate in the country. In no small part because people are not turning most television off. During a talk to a Moral Theology Class at Bluffton College several years ago, I said that husbands and/or wives sit for hours watching prime time television featuring provocatively dressed men and women. (The actual act of intentionally watching these shows, in no small part, breaks the 9th Commandment about ‘coveting your neighbors wife/husband.’ And the reason you’re seldom, if ever, confronted by a priest or minister about this these days is because, you guessed it, the priests and ministers are watching the same prime time shows.) Anyway, unconsciously the other spouse starts to get angry and jealous about this viewing and begins acting out overtly or passive aggressively. This continues to escalate — compounded by other dysfunction — and eventually the couple becomes part of the 60% divorce rate, and children tragically get caught in the crossfire as well.