House Move

On Saturday, August 11th, the historic 1858 Wells Sherman House was moved to a temporary location about a block from where it once stood. I was not there to witness it, as I was on vacation at the time and not due back until later that night, but when I arrived home late that evening, I drove down the street to where it is currently sitting in storage until we resolve a long standing bitter dispute with another local organization over its permanent location. Supposedly, tomorrow members of our group and members of their group are going to meet with an at-large City Council member acting as mediator, something I have been hoping would happen for a very long time now. I've been calling for a third party mediator for quite a while and was considering who to ask to act in this role when the Council member volunteered to act in this role. It is my hope that the long, bitter and divisive struggle between our group and theirs will be put to rest once and for all and that we can at long last move the house to our intended location once we appeal to the Planning Commission, who rejected our proposal back in July owing to the emotional pleas of the other group, who, despite not owning the property in question, is claiming rights over it due to their using it as a de facto park for the past 20 years, with claims that it is the one and only green space in the entire downtown area. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are four parks in downtown Kent, so that excuse does not wash with me. If all goes well tomorrow and the dispute is resolved to everyone's satisfaction, then we should be able to proceed forward and move the house a second time after we receive our zoning certificate if all of the hoops we must jump through to get it go well. Who knows how it will turn out, but I dearly hope that we can get the house off the street where it is being stored, because that particular street has a notorious reputation for hooliganism, violence and vandalism and I am most uneasy with keeping the house there. So we shall see how events play out in the coming weeks.

SAY, WHAT?

While I was away on vacation, I heard the news that Mitt Romney had chosen Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin to be his running mate. One has to wonder if he really wants to win this election. Given his choice of extremist running mate, I'd say not. Paul Ryan is an acolyte of Ayn Rand, who preaches selfishness and greed as virtue. I am having a hard time trying to figure out how Ryan squares his Catholic faith with Rand's philosophy. The Roman Catholicism with which I was raised preached the social gospel of caring for the least of us. It must be a difference between Generation X Catholics and Baby Boomer Catholics, of which Vice President Joe Biden is a member. We Boomers grew up in a fairly liberal Catholic Church that was ruled by Pope Paul VI and before that, Pope John XXIII. Generation X Catholics came of age in the more conservative Catholicism of Pope John Paul II. So they tend to be a different breed of Catholic and tend to be far more conservative than we  Boomers. I just can't figure out how Paul Ryan can be such a fan of a philosopher who preaches that greed and selfishness are a good thing when that runs so utterly contrary to the Catholic faith. Now, I'm all for the idea of self reliance, admittedly, and it does bother me to see multi-generational welfare families growing up dependent on government assistance when welfare is really meant to be a temporary stopgap to give people a hand up, not a hand out. It also bothers me to see people deciding to live on welfare out of some sense of entitlement and deciding to forgo being a productive member of society. But there are also huge barriers for a lot of people to get out of the welfare trap, like child care, which is free if you collect welfare. If you go to work, you lose that free subsidy and have to pay for it. Few jobs pay enough to be able to help women pay for child care, so that can turn into a substantial barrier for a lot of single moms, of which there are so very many who live in subsidized housing. I see this all the time through my job, where a mom has two or three kids, all with different last names, which I assume means different absent fathers who are not playing a role in their kids lives. That is another problem, men who shun responsibility for the children they father, but I could write an entire blog about that alone. What people need are ladders out of poverty, classes that will teach them the skills they need to get out of the projects and into self sufficiency. There are organizations that are doing this right now and are helping people to learn the tools they need to survive as productive working people who are earning a living and able to buy a home in a good safe neighborhood. But if people like Paul Ryan have their way, none of these things would exist and welfare and any kind of social program that helps people would be cut out of the budget entirely to give huge tax cuts to billionaires, er, "job creators". We've tried this economic theory for decades and my question to the GOP is this: Where are the jobs if giving billionaires big tax cuts is supposed to work? They can't answer that question because they know that theory has already been found wanting. And hopefully voters will see through the thinly veiled message of the current GOP ticket and will vote the other way, but then again, as I have said before, never underestimate the capacity of the American people to vote against their own economic self interest.