Joe as an Independent Candidate, again.
[After the Green Party venture in the Summer of 2007, Joe switched back to running as an independent. And has continued on that path, until present.]
Listen to the story here:
During last Sunday’s talk [at First United Methodist Church in Wellington, Ohio], Schriner asked the congregation to stop using central air conditioning, decrease their driving significantly, plant trees to provide natural absorption for carbon dioxide, and buy significantly fewer consumer goods. Manufacturing plants burn fossil fuels in order to produce consumer goods. –Wellington Enterprise
Schriner’s current focus is on spreading the word about reducing the creation of harmful carbon dioxide by decreasing the activities that generate it. He is doing this by riding with his family through Ohio via bicycle as part of his: “End Global Warming Tour.” Wellington Enterprise, Wellington, Ohio
Driven by both their concerns and those mentioned to them by other parents, Schriner is concerned with continually declining moral values portrayed in media that gradually influence and desensitize people, until the abnormal is considered normal. With irony he notes that parents let their children watch actions of immodesty and immorality on TV that they would not allow otherwise. –Idaho County Free Press, Grangeville, Idaho
Nationally syndicated columnist Dru Sefton (Newhouse News Service) asked a group of people across America what “…allegiance to America” meant to them – in 100 words. Joe Schriner was one of them, and the following was the answer that appeared toward the top of her column:
“Loyalty to America should be loyalty to Americans – in promoting the common good. That is, Shaker Heights Ohioans patriotically say: “Liberty and justice for all,” then head into Cleveland’s inner city to bring liberty to children dodging hunger, needles and bullets. Santa Monica Californians sing about “spacious skies” in “America the Beautiful,” then they bicycle to work in Lost Angeles so those spacious skies don’t fill with global warming gasses for the next generation Seneca, Kansas farmers stop putting toxic chemicals on their “amber waves of grain,” so people eating bread in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, don’t get cancer. And on…”
During his speech (at an Organic Farm Festival in Yorkshire, Ohio], Schriner said studies show continual applications of artificial farm chemicals (herbicides and pesticides) deplete the soil and can lead to cancer and other disease in some consumers. – Daily Advocate newspaper, Greenville, Ohio.
“Each home could become a Kyoto protocol Home Zone,” said Schriner, referring to the worldwide UN environmental plan that the United States declined to become part of. –Northwest Signal newspaper, Napoleon, Ohio
Joe explained he is concerned about the mounting level of violence on the streets and in the womb. He is also concerned about pollution, poverty and apathy in the country. –ruralnorthwest.com (Idaho online newspaper).
…he [Schriner] believes social problems are the result of a complex web. For instance, poverty loops catch kids who are growing up in the inner city, where they are dodging bullets and drugs – just trying to survive. They often don’t see a way out… so some join gangs. –ruralnorthwest.com (Idaho online newspaper).
Rome, Georgia
Excerpts from Joe’s blog entries during this time…
6/27/09
‘loneliest highway’
We went to Mass at St. Peter’s in Chillicothe, Ohio, yesterday. Just before singing the final hymn, the priest noted it had been “one of President Kennedy’s favorite.” After Mass, I approached the priest, told him I was running for president as an independent candidate, and said I wondered if he wanted to know my favorite hymn for the next Service. He smiled, politely… In Chillicothe, we connected with Rte. 50, which is our next tour route. It stretches from coast to coast and is known as: “The loneliest highway in America.” Once again, defying any type of political logic, we press on… In Hillsboro, Ohio, I talked with a woman who had taken her child out of the public high school in ninth grade “…because the kids were continually making fun of her.” During one of our previous tours, I told a newspaper in Cheboygan, Michigan, that the ‘Columbine killings,’ and the like, don’t happen in a vacuum. It’s a build-up of years of ridicule, bullying and a variety of other psycho-social dynamics that push kids over the edge… In tiny Belfast, Ohio, we stopped at Boltes General Store (established in 1955). It had an old wooden floor, a juke box, a decorative Shell Oil pump from the mid-1930s… Great place! I put a campaign flier in the window and they gave me a commemorative Boltes General Store pen, which I will cherish — because my other pen had just run out of ink. Have I mentioned it’s a low budget campaign?
10/29/10
…an American town being wiped out every day.
In Hagerstown, Maryland, we stood in solidarity with a group protesting in front of a downtown abortion clinic there. I mentioned that this day in America there would be about 4,400 babies killed in their mothers’ wombs. In fact, I said, this is no different than all the people in a small town in America (pop. 4,400) being wiped out, every day. “Yeah, and it’s always someone else’s town too,” one woman lamented… In Hagerstown, I also talked with Ned Smith. Smith had recently gone with a group from CEASE (Center for Exchange And Solidarity) to El Salvador. He said he saw poverty practically everywhere, especially in the wake of CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement). Smith said subsistence farmers in El Salvador were being driven out of business, and off their land, as mega-corporate farms in America (as an example), now flood the markets in El Salvador with cheap grain. Something to be America Proud of? Hardly. Note: I recently read an interview with author Chris Hedges. At one point, he said: “The ethic of corporations is to turn everything, from human beings in the natural world, into commodities that they will exploit into exhaustion.”
8/29/11
The Spot, a talk, and: common sense on climate change
We traveled to Sidney, Ohio, where I stumped at “The Spot” Restaurant on the downtown square. There’s a rather nice plaque outside the eatery with a picture of former President George W. Bush. It says he made an impromptu campaign stop here on Aug. 24, 2004. He ordered a hamburger and a piece of pie. Subsequently, they named a hamburger after him. (In Staunton, Virginia, at the Lunch Box Restaurant, they named a sandwich after me during Campaign 2004 as well, so there! They called it the: “average Joe Brat(wurst) Sandwich.” After stumping at The Spot, my daughter Sarah and I gave a talk in a sixth grade class at Holy Angels School here. Sarah talked to the youth about her experiences living near inner city Cleveland. (We had moved there intentionally about five years earlier to work among the poor.) After the talk, I was interviewed by reporter Jennifer Bumgarner from the Sidney Daily News. I said our platform revolves around “common sense.” For instance, I said common sense says that we don’t jeopardize our kids’ futures by allowing climate change to go on. I mean if it’s real and we sacrifice, great. If it’s not real and we sacrifice, so what? Either way, we end up with a ‘greener’ America. Note: Ms. Bumgarner also asked me about jobs. I said one way to increase jobs is to impose strict trade barriers on imports, which would force us to make more stuff here. More common sense.
4/26/12
“…just white”; Bread Basket; Mustang Sally in Ft. Oglethorpe; b-ball in the mountains; Java Jo’s
Catching up on the end of the tour… The “Georgia on My Mind Tour” (original, huh) included stops in Thomasville, Albany, Columbus, and Ft. Oglethorpe. During one of the TV news interviews, our young son Jonathan told the reporter he might get a little bored with living at the White House. “I mean, all you’d pretty much see is just white,” he said, somewhat seriously. The reporter smiled. So did we… In Albany, Georgia, we met with the staff at the Bread Basket Bakery. This is a bakery with a purpose. The proceeds from the bakery fund a rather nice halfway house for recovering women in Albany… In Ft. Oglethorpe, we attended one of their monthly “Cruise-ins.” Old fashion cars are parked up and down the main street here and speakers on telephone poles blast out such tunes as Rockn’ Robin; the theme from Happy Days; Mustang Sally… I knew the lyrics to the latter and started hamming it up by singing along — much to our teenagers’ chagrins… Following this we drove through Tennessee north into Kentucky. On the last night of this tour, we stopped at the University of the Cumberland’s in Williamsburg. It was quite a night. Our kids got in a pick-up basketball game with some college students in this small, “old school” type gym. Watching the sunset over the mountains through some arched gym windows, with our kids playing a spirited basketball game on an old wooden floor in the foreground, was, well, something like a Norman Rockwell scene, in motion. We have had so many of those types of scenes, so many small town wholesome moments, in the traveling over the years. And Liz and I, as parents, have been tremendously blessed with it all. Note: The next morning on the way back to Ohio, we stopped in Dry Ridge, Kentucky, where we decided to ‘wet our whistles’ (sorry) with, of all things, Java Jo’s coffee. I passed out some campaign cards there and one of the workers, Robin Bowers, said she had two daughters — in the Marines. She said while she was on board with military cuts that were about blatant waste, she didn’t want to see any cuts to things that would help her daughters on the battlefield. — “…as they are protecting our lives.” Note 2: At 3:58 p.m. Monday, “the beaver” landed back in Bluffton, Ohio. We travel in a “vintage” (that is when it’s not acting up) 1978 Dodge Beaver Motorhome. As coincidence would have it, Bluffton University’s mascott? That’s right: “the beaver.”
Click to read the full article.
