Vote for Joe

I was just telling someone yesterday that for Martin Luther King Day two years ago,  our family rode on a Koinoinia float in the Martin Luther King Day parade in Americus, Georgia.   Koinoinia was the backwater Selma and Montgomery of the early 1950s.   It was on the Koinoinia Farm that Blacks and Whites lived and worked together in community, with Blacks receiving equal pay, etc.   This was unheard of at the time in the segregated South.   And  the farm  became a lightening rod for protests, boycotts and violence.   Yet Clarence Jordan, the Koinoinia Community founder, wouldn’t back down.   Shortly after, I told the Montgomery (AL) News that it will take the same kind of vision, courage and sacrifice to help free people now from the “slavery” of inner city and rural poverty in this country and throughout the world.   Note: We are just readying for another series of campaign tours.   And we are trying to raise donations:   Schriner Presidential Election Committee, 2100 W. 38th St., Cleveland, Ohio 44113.   Thanks.

In the last blog entry, I wrote about global warming and how crucial it is to reverse it now.   I recently told the Mount Vernon News during an End Global Warming Bicycle Tour, that our family has created a Kyoto Protocol Home Zone and we urge everyone in America to consider the same.   As an example of  one of many  winter energy saving strategies we’ve developed (we live in relatively cold Cleveland, Ohio),  our family is  using a portable, oil-based radiating heater in our apartment.   In a room comprable in size to a master bedroom in many suburban homes, we have set up a series of inexpensive, moveable walls to provide privacy for the children.   The walls have openings in the bottoms and tops for heat flow. During the winter months, we all sleep in the same room with the portable heater on.   Concurrently, we turn the central heating furnace off because, well, it’s exceedingly senseless to heat rooms you’re not using!   We are in a three-unit house and learned the other day that one unit of comprable size to ours had a heating bill of $200 for the month of December.   Our heating bill for December was: $75.   Note:   In a story today about driving in India, the New York Times mentioned that a new car is being introduced there.   It is called the Tata Nano and is a mere 10 ft. long by 5 ft. wide.   And it has a small, two cylinder engine in the rear.   It is the world’s cheapest car, list price: $2,500.   And it is one of the least polluting.   We should be moving to this kind of vehicle en-masse in  America for the purposes of local driving, in tandem with going to way more mini-electric cars, bicycles, walking…   Anything less, it would seem,  is like rearranging deck chairs on the ‘Global Warming Titanic’ at this point.

We played “Social Justice Football” with the kids at the Catholic Worker House this week on a  somewhat soggy field.   In Social Justice Football, everybody gets a chance to run, pass, catch…   And although the score was 21 to 14, in Social Justice Football that really doesn’t matter.   (Except to the team that won and the team that lost, of course.   Ok, so I’m not a purest.)   Note:   During our Campaign 2000 travels, we came across “Itch Field” (a lot of misquitoes)  in tiny Arthur, Illinois.   Some Amish guys had cut this ball diamond out of a corn field, ala Field of Dreams.   I was told there was competition at “the Itch,” but not too much competition, during the games.   As an example, a guy who was developmentally disabled played first base next to another infielder who could have been on a high school All Star team.   If only the society at large  mirrored this paradigm more, huh.

New Year’s eve… This week our family participated in a “Books to Prisoners” event at C-Space in Cleveland.   C-Space has a pretty extensive library of donated books.   Prisoners, in turn, write  specifiying certain topics they’re interested in.     And once every few months, volunteers converge to help match the requests with books on hand.   The project is colloquially referred to as: Book ’em…   Tim Musser, a friend of ours and a passionate peace activist, helped out at the C-Space event.   A couple weeks earlier, Tim had given me the book The Horrors We Bless (Rethinking the Just-War Legacy).   At one point, author Daniel Maguire writes about global warming and how this crisis, ultimately, could lead to a whole lot more world peace.   “Since global warming threatens everyone, there is new reason for an international ecumenism.   Shared fear can make friends of former foes,” Maguire writes.   Note:   In prefacing the latter, Maguire uses the Ministry of Tourism on the Maldive Islands (just a couple feet above sea level) to illustrate how imminent the threat of global warming is:   “Come and see us — while we’re still here,”  says one Maldive tourism brochure.   Note 2:   Global Warming; genocide in Darfur; crisis in Pakistan; ongoing carnage in Iraq; scores of children starving in Ethiopia, Uganda, Nigeria; increasing nuclear proliferation…  It would seem to me  it’s time for some significant global, and  ecumenical, New Year’s resolutions this year.

Our family attended a Christmas party with a twist the other night.   It was with a group of young, “20-something” Christians who had started a home church here in Cleveland.   One of the activities at the party was making rather neuvo-hip necklaces out of beads from Uganda.   As people made them, others at the party would buy them — as donations to an outreach in Uganda…   On a campaign tour through southern Colorado several years ago, I interviewed a woman in Durango who had just returned from a missions trip to Uganda.   She said she stayed with a family that’s parents, and several of the children, had AIDS.   And there was little food, little water, little medicine… and they all slept on burlap bags on a dirt floor in their hut.   What’s more, this was not the exception in Uganda.   I told the newspaper in Durango the next day that as president I would go to Uganda, sleep on  a dirt floor in solidarity, and plead with the American people: to help more.   Note: I saw a bumper sticker in Cleveland today that said:   “Except for Slavery, Facism, Communism and Nazism —  War Hasn’t Solved Anything!”   The statement gave me pause.