Vote for Joe

Inter-Religious Center photo, BYU.edu

I just finished reading a rather in-depth National Geographic piece on Afghanistan, written 20 years into America’s war here (and just prior to the final U.S. withdrawal). The war was sparked by “9/11,” and created havoc, and death, across Afghanistan. Instead of doing a targeted strike on Osama bin Laden, who admitted to “9/11,” and, perhaps some other al Qaida upper-level operatives in response; we rather, in a knee-jerk revenge fashion, targeted the entire country. President George W. Bush, during a memorial service for the victims of 9/11, famously said at the time: “Today we will pray. And tomorrow we will get revenge.” Doesn’t seem a Biblical New Testament principle, does it? Anyway… Just in human cost, estimates are there were some 3,000 civilian deaths a year, for the seven years prior to when the article was written, and 43 percent of these were woman and children. We lost some 3,000 people on 9/11, and that attack wasn’t initiated by Afghan women and children. There should have been a proportional U.S. response, not this.

book cover

A couple days ago, two National Guardsman were shot in D.C. by an Afghan national who, previously, had worked with the dangerous, CIA-led so called “Zero-Units” in Afghanistan. This man, as so many of our war veterans, may have had PTSD from the experience, and, again like a few of our war veterans over the years, snapped. However, the D.C. shooting is now cascading into a major, Trump Administration crackdown on a significant number of immigrants here across the board. It’s unconscionable, and the distinct possibility of ‘spiritual’ suicide for those backing this. As (providential coincidence) would have it, I’m currently reading the above book. The first half of the book is a chronological history of what led up to the Japanese Internment during WWII. An internment that was later deemed tremendously unjust. And an internment that led the U.S. Government to formally apologize and pay financial restitution/amends to the Japanese families, etc., impacted. The book notes the steps the government, aided by a good deal of the press, whipped up a lot of sentiment against Japanese Americans. It is a playbook now being used by the government again, with the target being Hispanics, Muslims, and so on. History, as it often does among a majority populace with little, if any, spiritual mooring, is simply repeating itself.

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.