I recently attended a talk by one of the pastors of this church, Graffiti Church. Amidst the ‘homeless sweep’ of our cities in recent months, this church, conversely, ‘sweeps’ people up in Christ’s arms. The ministries here are tremendously varied. There is an after-school program for latch-key kids. There are various meal programs. There are referrals for drug addiction and alcoholism help. And on, and on… The pastor said the church’s mission statement calls for “radical inclusion,” patterned after, well, the way Jesus approached the world. I wrote a newspaper article about the talk, emphasizing the “radical inclusion” part. What’s more, our position paper on poverty also emphasizes this, in spades.
(Catching up on the last couple months, cont.) Bluffton, Ohio has been recently named the 2nd most bicycle friendly town in Ohio. This is, in no small part, because of the Bluffton Lions Club, which has, over the past decade, or so, done ongoing fundraisers to put in an elaborate bicycle/walking path system throughout the village. During our campaign research, I met with Dan Burden in High Springs, Florida, who had developed a “Walkable Community Model.” He’d travel the country giving presentations on it. (*And Time Magazine labeled him one of the “…top environmentalists in America.” Our administration’s Transportation Position Paper outlines a series of strategies to shift the transportation paradigm in America. And, believe me, it doesn’t revolve around “DRILL BABY DRILL!” Note: The photo above is a “bicycle car,” owned by the local bike shop owner. It’s for both cold and hot weather transportation… During the last couple months, I also did a number of outdoor house painting projects — to keep my populist persona (“Joe the Painter”) up, while putting food on the table as well. I do some of my best political thinking from the ladder… I also continued to write for a local newspaper (“Joe the Journalist”). And I’ve been to some local town high school soccer and football games, even though I don’t have kids in high school anymore. Too much focus, of late, has been on professional sports, and not enough focus on local sports. (Although this is easier to do, because I’m a beleaguered Browns fan. Lol, sort of. Not to mention, but I will, that I play a bit of ad hoc local sports myself.
Continuing to catch up on the last few months… Part of our campaign is to ask people to consider, well, going back to the 1950’s. Not in every respect, like, for instance, Segregation. But back to a time when neighbors knew neighbors, the pace of life was slower, and society was much more “wholesome.” *Anyone remember that word? Anyway… For a look at our paradigm around this, see… I’ve read a good number of articles of late, watched quite a lot of news on the current “immigration crackdown.” Hispanic illegal immigrants, now across the board, are being rounded up and deported. Our campaign did several “Southern Border Tours” during our research. Many of these people are fleeing extreme abject poverty, tremendous gang violence, political oppression… I looked at this, in depth, while doing the research. Our position paper on Hispanic Immigration is 180 degrees different than what is playing out now… I wrote a newspaper article about a local man who will be heading up a new “Youth For Christ” campus in a nearby town. He said what he tries to get across to youth is that Jesus modeled a “relational thing,” connecting with those, at every level, throughout society. And from the Bible reading I’ve done, it seems Jesus was particularly interested in reaching those on the margins of society (like these Hispanic people in dire straits).
Catching up on the last month(s)… I wrote a newspaper article series on a workshop collective of 15 Rwandan women who, in trying to recover from the genocide, do extremely beautiful, and painstaking, embroidery art (using multi-color fine thread) to capture different aspects of cultural life in Rwanda. One piece will take up to three months, the artisan working full-time, to make. Rwanda is one of the poorer Third World countries, and some of these women were widowed during the genocide and have found a creative way to take care of their families. Our administration would try to find a series of ‘creative’ ways to help take care of Rwanda, and other struggling Third World countries as well. *See our foreign policy position paper… Staying with helping internationally: I also interviewed a local woman who is a pharmacist, and went to help in the immediate aftermath of the March, 2025, 7.7 magnitude earthquake in Myanmar. Some 5,352 people were killed, and thousands more were severely injured. She was part of a Samaritan’s Purse Field Hospital that did triage there for a month. She said, as just one example, she dispensed a good deal of pain medication, but not as much as she anticipated. She said that in impoverished countries, like Myanmar, people don’t have a lot of access to strong pain medication — so they simply bear suffering the pain… On the lighter side: I also interviewed a woman who grew up in rural Iowa during the 1940’s. She went to a one-room school-house for the first eight years of her education, with the most students in the school, ever, being: 15. She said what she particularly remembers is each of these one-room school houses in that area forming baseball teams, and they would play each other. What’s more, the farmer fathers, if you will, would clear out their pick-up trucks and take the players, spectators, and so on, in the back beds of those trucks. “You couldn’t do that today,” she smiled. For our take on education, see…
Catching up on the summer of 2025 (part 5)… I took this photo, about a month back, near sunset, looking west from my office. Look at the bottom of the cloud, on the right side. Now this could be passed off as a Rorschach ink blot, kinda looks like thing, except, well, look at that! It sure looks like the bottom half of America, doesn’t it? And, frankly, America is in trouble across the spectrum. Wholesale abortion, the gay agenda going mainstream (including transgender), terrible environmental stewardship, being tremendously short, as a whole, on social justice outreach, spiritually corrosive media entertainment across the board, rampant addiction (alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, compulsive overeating…), and I could go on. I have put together a couple audios, which get to the heart of why this is happening, and how to change it — before it’s too late. All indications are that the sun is, currently, setting on America. To listen to these audios, got to…
History Museum football helmet, circa the 1950s. …photo by Joe
Catching up on the summer of 2025 (part 4)…. I wrote a newspaper article this summer about a local man who played football for Cincinnati University in the 1950s. He played without a facemask, broke his nose eight times during his collegiate career, and who knows how many concussions he got. About the same time I was writing this, on July 28, Shane Tamura shot and killed four people in a building that housed the NFL headquarters. He, too, was killed. But Tamura left a note asking that his brain be studied for CTE, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. He had played football in high school in California. Now, if this was a one-off situation, it would be easy to dismiss. But CTE keeps coming up again and again now, including in a significant study done on a group of deceased NFL players. While I grew up playing football *(see), and love the sport, it’s becoming time to seriously assess if we want to keep sending our children down an athletic path that could seriously hurt them for life. Note: I was also recently reading parts of a book titled The Big Scrum (How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football). The book noted that there was an increasing number of deaths and maiming in football in the late 1800’s, and a cohort of college presidents, and such, were calling for the abolishing of football. At the time, Roosevelt wrote an article for Harper’s Weekly, defending football against “…the noisy crusade of the (football) prohibitionists.” The sport, he wrote, was integral to a “…vigorous and manly nation, where there is a certain slight element of risk.” Yet, and here was the caveat: He also wrote: “The brutality must be done away with, and the danger minimized. The rules for football ought probably to be altered…” Note 2: We would do well, as a collective society, to lobby for a series of changes that make our current brand of football much less violent. Problem is, we, also as a collective, have become absolutely addicted to watching the football violence. Note 3: We would also do well, for many of our kids’ sakes, to start to like the game of soccer more. Most of the rest of the world does.
Catching up on the summer of 2025 (part 3)… I did a series of stories on the new Ray Brown Memorial Park slated to be dedicated soon in Alger, Ohio. A history professor at Ohio Northern University, who is an avid baseball fan, learned that Negro League pitcher Ray Brown, who is in the MLB Cooperstown Hall of Fame, is from Alger. Yet nothing had been done in the village to honor his memory. The professor was able to procure a $100,000 grant, commissioned a large mural, got an Ohio Historical Marker, which will all go in at Alger’s baseball park. The money is also funding a number of other upgrades to the park… Staying with athletics: I interviewed a 77-year-old man from Sweden, who was running across America. (*Move over Forrest Gump!) What’s more, this is his 9th time (You read that right!) doing this, over the past three decades. No one has even come close to attempting that. And, funny (and sad), I’ll go to the track some evenings and ruminate: ‘Should I run one mile, or two, tonight?’ LOL, sort of. Note: I’m consistently reading now that Trump wants to make the displays at the Smithsonian more “patriotic.” A good number of people are saying, in one way or the other, that he is trying to “whitewash” American history. Our campaign, on the other hand, does anything but whitewash American history. Rather, we not only look squarely at it, but propose a series of significant reparations to make the whole thing right, or rather, as right as we can make it at this point. For our Native American position paper, see… For our Black Amends position paper, see…
Catching up on the summer of 2025 (part 2)… I wrote a newspaper article about a local couple, both trained paramedics, who go to rural El Salvador every year to help with various medical missions. They are motivated by their Christian faith. “This might well be the only chance many of these people have to receive any type of formal medical care during the year,” said Rachel, who is pictured here. The poverty is staggering in these areas, yet America is currently spending $140 billion on deportations. Think what that money would do in Mexican, and Latin American, rural areas. Our position paper on Hispanic Immigration is a much saner, and much more spiritually sound, approach to this issue. See… One of the village council meetings I reported on, included the village administrator talking about her participation in a new, and local, Housing Coalition effort. The coalition will be undertaking an initial housing study, to tabulate figures on such dynamics as to, for instance, what local home buyers are looking for in the way of, say, duplexes, versus single family units, versus tiny homes… And to the latter, one of our platform proposals is suggesting local zoning commissions change zoning codes to allow for tiny home structures to be built on more properties — as part of a multi-dimensional approach to significantly impacting homelessness. That is, besides providing a physical, permanent tiny home structure, things like church care teams could form around a person, as they are getting on their feet, and getting established. The care team could plug the formerly homeless person in with social services, with a church, with job training, with education, with counseling… As opposed to just sweeping people off the streets and into over-crowded shelters, what we propose would be a much more thorough, systemic, and exceedingly more spiritual approach. For a look at how we would approach poverty in general, see…
Catching up on the summer of 2025 (part 1)… I wrote a series of newspaper articles about Ohio Northern University’s Healthwise Mobile Clinics (the newest one is pictured here). It’s a rural healthcare safety net, if you will. It makes 17 monthly stops over a seven county area here. And the clinic includes a doctor, a nurse, a pharmacist, and university interns. All services are free. The director told me, during one of the interviews, that there is, indeed, a shortfall in regard to people having access to doctors, having access to affordable medication, and so on. It’s our campaign’s belief that everyone should have access to quality healthcare, be able to afford medication, and so on. And our administration would work to help subsidize more Mobile Clinics like this across the country. For more on our healthcare platform, see… Our agricultural platform revolves around moving the society back to a small farm agrarian-based society, including much more farming classes being taught in schools. During June, I interviewed a local farmer who won Indiana’s “Outstanding Agricultural Teaching Award” several decades back. As a high school teacher, he headed up a Work Occupation Program, as it related to agriculture. He would place students on various farms, where they would work half a day during the school year. This gave future farmers much needed “…real world experience,” he said. For more on our agricultural platform, see…Note: I heard a radio news spot recently on how more and more youth are starting to use, of all things: Botox. Why? Because with more and more their own social media exposure on their platforms, they want to look as good as possible. I’m sorry, but this kind of thing gives me more wrinkles — not to mention (but I will) that it is the absolute height of vanity, and a waste of money that could be much better spent, like on youth in the Third World who are living in slums and are continually food insecure.
Migrant children organize for a soccer game in Ohio
As I type this, the deportation riots rage in LA. Meanwhile, this photo is of migrant farm worker children who are going to a bi-lingual school while their parents work in the fields here. (I just wrote a newspaper article about this Migrant Education Program.) In the winter, the kids will be in California with their parents during harvest season there, then down south to Texas, Georgia, etc. Poverty and insecurity follow them everywhere. Cart blanche just deporting as many “illegals” as possible, people who, for the most part, have come here to escape poverty, to escape violence… is absolutely nuts on a spiritual level! Many who hold this highly protectionist sentiment, whether political officials, or those who voted for them, won’t have to worry about being deported from Heaven. They’ll never get in — the wall will be that high for them at the border of Heaven. For more on our Farm Worker position paper, see…
