Vote for Joe

ELF bicycle car …photo by Joe

(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.

Joe

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…

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.

Rural El Salvador missions trip

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…

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…