campaign stops:

Welton, Dateland, Gila Bend, Buckeye,
Camp Verde, Flagstaff, Gray Mountain,
Tuba City, Kayenta
Arizona Tour
- In Gila Bend, Arizona, I met with Chris Kouach.
He is from Stockton, California, and is a quite active member of the Green
Party. Chris, his wife and their young son had just been visiting
San Luis, Arizona -- the southern most point on Highway 95, about 20 miles
south of Yuma. (Kouach's wife's parents live there.) Chris
said he had just bought some land in San Luis -- to build a library on.
He said he hadn't traveled much in his life, and when he saw the poverty
in San Luis (many new legal, and illegal, immigrants), he was quite moved
and wanted to help. So to help supplement education for new immigrants
there, Chris believed an additional library for the town would help
tremendously. And the library would have a Green Party twist, so to
speak. Some of the sections are to include books on the environment,
organic farming, small scale appropriate farming technologies...
- We stopped in Tuba City,
Arizona (just outside the Hopi Reservation). I stumped with a group
of Native American Boy Scouts, Eagle Scouts and their adult leaders.
(They were doing a service project on the ground of the Church of Latter
Day Saints here.) One of the leaders said: "Finally, this
is what I've been waiting for: an 'average Joe' for president."
Later that evening, I played in a pick-up game of basketball with some
Native Americans at St. Jude's Gym.
- In Kayente, Arizona, where a
majority of the populace is Navajo, Fr. Jerome Herff said in one week he presided
over three funerals, all involving drunk driving incidence in the
town. He told me a professional counselor in his congregation did a
documentary on trans-generational Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome in the
Navajo Tribe as a result of colonialization -- and all the atrocities that
went along with that. The theory being a beaten people (through unconscionable
"ethnic cleansing") internalize the anger, the shame -- then
turn it on themselves, their families. This then leads to heightened
levels of trans-generational depression, alcoholism, suicide...
Fr. Herff in Kayente also
told me he supports the group: "Feminists for Life." He said
the group, which has chapters nationwide, goes into liberal universities
like Brown (Ivy League), and so on, to educate young, impressionable college
students about Life issues -- so they just aren't getting all their
information from Pro-Choice groups.