Vote for Joe

During our pit stop in Cleveland inbetween campaign tours, my wife Liz and I have been coaching a soccer team at the local Rec. Center.   (Liz is from New Zealand where soccer is big.   I’m from Cleveland where only recently did I learn what a soccer ball looks like.)   Anyway,   Liz is the head coach and my main role is to say stuff like:   “Nice kick kid!”     And I’ve had the opportunity to say that a lot the past six games.   Tonight was the last game,   and our “Comets” fought to the end —  coming up just one agonizing goal short.   Our final record was 3 and 3.   But more importantly, I believe,  is this was six games where these inner city kids were lost in play, learning lessons about determination, sportsmanship, discipline….   What’s more, many of these youth don’t have a Dad at home to say: “Nice kick kid!”   So they need to hear it somewhere.   And in all this, somehow, sometimes: there’s grace.   Note:   The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently did an article on Mount Pleasant,  a predominately poor and Black region of Cleveland.   The article noted that in the 1960s, eight of ten Mount Pleasant children had two parent families.   Now two of ten children there have two parent families.

The front page of the NY Times carried a piece on the worsening situation in the Congo.   A Civil War in the Congo, which ended in 2003 (and was the bloodiest in modern African war), is heating up again.   There is now the beginning of heavy fighting and scores of people are being displaced.   The article said much of the war is over a “quest to control unusually rich minerals and farmlands.”   What the article doesn’t say is that many of us in America are complicit.   That is, these resources, while “rich,” are limited in Africa.   If we had cut back on our lifestyles in America, in tandem with, say, scaling back tremendously on things like the Defense Budget, we could have mobilized so much more help to allow people in the Congo to be as sustainable as possible — so they don’t have to fight over their limited resources.   During a talk at Baldwin Wallace College recently,  I said  it is my belief God gave us an abundance in America to help, not hoard.   What we do now foreign affairs wise, church  outreach wise (the average Christian tithes approximately 3%),  is a pittance in comparison to how much we really could help.   And I don’t think this is lost on God, for a minute.   It’s just that we  have a hard time connecting the dots spiritually.   However, once we know… Note:   “Several weeks ago, Time Magazine did a Special Report titled: America by the Numbers.   The following is a set of some of those numbers: “The vast majority of Americans believe in God, and more than 90% own a Bible, but only half can name a single Gospel, and 10% think Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.”     –That simply amazed me.   I mean, I thought everyone knew Joan was his sister.   Whoops… There goes my conservative supporters.

I’ve just been approached by Ryan Yocum of the Ohio News Network.   He’s an “average Joe” in Columbus  who does a show about “average Joes” and sports.   He’s coming to Cleveland to film me playing pick-up basketball with some of the youth at the Rec. Center up the street.   I’m going to tell him to have his camera man bring the telephoto lens so he can get me ‘skying’ like, oh,  LeBron James.     (My wife  Liz recommended I not do that.)… To stay with the sport’s theme:   While campaigning in Ohio for Election 2004, in one of my lighter moments, I actually told CBS News in Columbus that when we get to D.C. I was going to have  “…a big buckeye put on the top of the Capitol Dome.”   And we still lost Ohio.    Go figure.   Note:   The New York Times carried a piece today about “wave farms” being proposed for the Pacific to harness clean renewable energy.    One application would be to place a field of buoys with turbines turned by waves  about three miles off shore.   Experts predict, ultimately, that wave action could provide up to 10% of American energy needs.   And even more percentage wise: If we started cutting back dramatically on our energy use!   (During Campaign 2004, we traveled to Old Orchard Beach, Maine, where a similar wave action pilot project was underway in the Atlantic.)

Notes from my wife (and ‘almost First Lady’)  Liz:   “As we often do when we are home in Cleveland, I and the children volunteered at the Storefront Drop-In Center on Saturday morning.   The Storefornt is a Catholic Worker place for the homeless and others in need in the neighborhood.   We serve food, provide a shower…   This particular cold, wet morning we provided shelter and a place to socialize for a few hours.   I was able to hand out some socks recently donated to the Center.   This particular morning, I was struck by the lack of gratitude extended me while I was doing this.   Than I realized that perhaps I wasn’t owed anything.   That is, if I have enough — then anything beyond that doesn’t belong to me anyway.   In fact if I have more than enough, maybe — given current global distribution of goods and food — I am a thief.   I am taking from my brothers and sisters who can’t get work because it’s gone off shore.   Or I’m stealing from others who work in sweatshops in these jobs off shore, so I can own two pair of Nikes at an affordable price to me — but a year’s wages to the shoe’s maker.   Then there are those on unemployment lines (and in the Storefront) who have been pushed off their small farms by big corporate farming, so I can buy  an affordable  burger for a buck…   Why should any of these people say thanks to me for giving them (socks this day) what, in a more just and equitable world, would belong to them in the first place.   Note:   The next week I cleaned out a few extra pairs of socks, and gave them back to my brothers and sisters.

My wife Liz and I attended a Bible Study at the Catholic Worker house in Cleveland.   We’ve been studying the book: Sabbath Economics: Household Practices. Liz and I were asked to summarize the chapter on Solidarity.   In part of this chapter, author Matthew Colwell   writes: “…solidarity implies an alignment of ones location, life, vision and hope with that of the poor and marginalized.”   I said as an example of this, several years ago students at Bluffton College built a “tent city” and slept out in the March cold in “solidarity” with people in Afghanistan being displaced to refugee camps when  the U.S.  started bombing that country.   These students not only entered into some of these refugees’ “location,” but they also raised money for a Habitat for Humanity home to be built in Afghanistan.   (A Habitat home there costs $2,000.)   Some Bluffton communtiy members, including our family, put up tents  on campus  in solidarity with the students. And our daughter Sarah, then six-years-old, told  a reporter from the Lima News that we were lucky to have a tent — because she had just seen  people sleeping in cardboard boxes in Juarez, Mexico, during a “Border Tour” we’d just completed.