I did a blog talk radio show this week. I was asked about illegal immigration. I said during a “Border Tour” we went to Juarez, Mexico, where some 200,000 people live in total abject poverty. The streets were dusty, the homes were cobbled together shacks and the children were hungry, some dying. “A New York Catholic Worker newspaper this month carried an article on immigration. It started: “As politicians and mainstream media rally around the birth of border walls, violent raids and anti-immigration ordinances, Christians kneel around a little refugee baby who was born unwelcomed and on-the-run…” Just one of many Bible stories that would fly in the face of obsessive ‘American protectionism.’ Note: During the Border Tour, I told the Hobbs (NM) Sun newspaper that we should look at both legal and illegal immigrants as a tremendous spiritual opportunity to help… For our position paper on immigration…
12/8/01
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.)
12/6/07
Our family saw the showing of a documentary on Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day the other night at St. Augustine’s Church in Cleveland. Before it started, someone passed out copies of the magazine: Alternatives for Simple Living. The December issue is titled: Whose Birthday Is It, Anyway? One of the articles was titled: What Jesus Wants for Christmas. It starts: “When we celebrate a birthday, we are careful to give what the person really wants or needs. Is there any doubt what Jesus wants from us? He insists that in order to give to Him, we must find Him in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned. By helping to provide a goat for a farmer in Honduras, a decent home for a family in rural Mississippi, or food for those who are victims of war, you can give Jesus a birthday gift he really wants…” As mentioned in an early blog entry, for Christmas this year we have decided to “give” our children the opportunity to help those less fortunate. Our Joseph, 10, has just spent a week restoring a used bicycle for a child in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Shaker Cycle in Cleveland is collecting used and new bicycles to send to a school of 1,100 students in Haiti, many of whom have to walk many miles to get to school every day. Note: The Dorothy Day Documentary, Don’t Call Me A Saint, featured the life of a woman who adopted voluntary poverty in solidarity with the poor and worked exhaustively to help them at every turn. During one of our campaign tours, I told the Havre News, in Havre, Montana, that it is spiritually essential we all help the poor (both here and abroad) more, and this starts — for many — with lifestyle cuts to free up more money.
12/4/07
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.
11/29/07
During at talk to a Political Science Class at Baldwin Wallace College earlier in the week, I said our lifestyles are such that the U.S. emits 25% of the world’s carbon dioxide (the most of any country). And according to a good number of scientists, global warming is already triggering super- charged hurricanes, super- charged cyclones, drought and famine in the more arid countries… These storms, these droughts, are wreaking all kinds of havoc and carnage. So when you connect the dots, I said to the students, us Americans are (that’s right): terrorists. And if we don’t start conserving in a major way, in tandem with going to much more alternative energy, we’ll continue to be (that’s right again): terrorists. I mean, do we think this is all lost on God?
11/28/07
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.
11/27/07
I gave a talk tonight to a Political Science Class at Baldwin Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. Professor Tom Sutton said as Franklin Delanore Roosevelt asked the country to sacrifice during war time, the professor said he is personally thinking about sacrificing for the duration of the Iraq War. He said he was considering imposing a 50 cent a gallon of gasoline tax on himself. Professor Sutton said he’d then send the money to a fund to help soldiers coming back with, say, PTSD symptomology, or other problems. I have so often heard on the campaign trail how it almost feels, to many Americans, like we’re really not at war as we go on with our day to day tasks with hardly a thought to Iraq. Making a personal choice to sacrifice for the war effort on a regular basis, I believe, would be a good thing.
11/24/07
We attended a “Fair Trade Party” at Beth and Al Mancuso’s place in Cleveland. They were selling fair trade goods and food, coffee, tea, etc… from Third World countries. The intent is to help the poor in, say, Latin America, South America, Africa… get a “fair” price for their crops, their art, their clothes… I recently told the Wheeling Intelligencer newspaper that our administration would highly favor this type of fair trade imports and would stridently discourage free trade that considerably advantages, say: corporate farms in America that can grow at such volume and ship cheaply enough that the farm can actually undercut subsistence farmers in Venezuala trying to sell to their local markets up the street. This is not being “American strong,” this is an absolute social justice travesty. Note: One of the people at the the Mancuso’s Fair Trade Party had a sweatshirt on with a picture of a Native American and the words: “Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.” How apt.
11/22/07
Thanksgiving Reflection: We had Thanksgiving Dinner at the Catholic Worker House among the poor and homeless of Cleveland (currently the poorest city in the country). The camarderie, and grace, this evening was palpable. The turkey wasn’t bad either… On a board in the house the following was written for the occasion: “And don’t forget this country was formed on the conquest of stolen land and that millions of indigenous people were slaughtered at the hands of the white man.” …How true, huh. And it’s not enough, we believe, to just lament the fact. It is up to us to make it right — which means way more than a legislative, formalized apology. We need to make significant tangible amends and go about the task of forming, through a melding of cultures, what God probably intended for America since the beginning — or rather, since 1492. Note: To view how we might go about that, see our Native American position paper.
11/20/07
We are moving into the Christmas season and many people in America will spend all kinds of time and money shopping for Christmas presents for people who, in most cases, already have more than enough. Meanwhile, famine sweeps through Somolia, Darfur… with scores of starving little children pleading through hollow eyes for a mere sip of milk. Then there are the million homeless people in Bengladesh in the aftermath of last week’s catastrophic typhoon, who are sleeping in the mud, or desperately looking for their loved ones, or desperately looking for food… And we’re headed for the Mall while singing stuff like Silent Night or The First Noel. Are we (spiritually) nuts? Do we think that the child who was born on Christmas Day and went on to say all this stuff about helping the poor, would think heading to the Mall — in the midst of so much potentially relievable human suffering out there — would be a good idea? Hardly. Let’s give our suburban children only one gift this year. Let’s give them a gift with eternal ramifications. Let’s give them an example of how to really help others — until it hurts.