Blog Center: Kurt's Blog - Archived Entry

Last Friday I left Austin for a nine day trip that includes family (my daughter leaves for the Peace Corps in Tanzania), political (voter registration and outreach in St. Louis) and business (visits to customers in Ohio and Indiana) matters. One family matter we hope it doesn’t include is seeing my son-in-law off to Iraq….as a minister, it looks like he’ll be accepted into chaplain training for the reserves and will not be deployed to Iraq, for now.

The farewell party for my daughter went very well, I am so very proud of her and what she is willing to sacrifice for those who are not as fortunate as she. She will be in charge of developing a health care program for a small Tanzanian village and coordinating the construction of a health care facility for the village. A very noble cause indeed….but forgive me for noticing, I’ll think she’ll miss good old American beer!

Phase one of the St. Louis voter registration took place at a Native American Pow Wow with volunteers from the St. Louis Driving Votes chapter. Before I left for the event, I had an opportunity for a little research on modern Native American life in America. I was surprised to find out that the first female soldier killed in Iraq was a Native American, a fatality in the same group as Jessica Lynch. Not surprisingly, education levels among Native Americans are the lowest among minority groups while poverty and unemployment rates are the highest. I think its very fitting that perhaps many Native American tribes are finally getting a bit of payback with the financially successful casinos they run across the country. White man’s greed took away most of what they had…and now white man’s greed is providing a nice source of revenue for fortunate tribes.

The business portion of the trip has taken me to southern Ohio and central Indiana over the past two days. Both are havens for a number of religious right Republicans. While searching for the local NPR station on my ride from Columbus to Cincinnati, I found four religious broadcasts, three Rush Limbaugh broadcasts and two Bill O’Reilly broadcasts. Man, do I wish I had my “Nobody Died when Clinton Lied” sticker on my rental car!