Protest Reports
Two recent local news stories offer compelling, if baffling, insight into the priorities of the media in and around Columbus. On August 22, the media descended on Ohio State University to learn the future of Urban Meyer following the football coach’s handling of a domestic abuse scandal involving one of his assistants.
Two days later, the same news outlets failed to appear at the Franklin County Board of Elections to learn the fate of a citizens’ initiative to protect Columbus, and thus Central Ohio, from the toxic and radioactive dangers of fracking. During this hearing, the board would decide whether to place on the ballot the Columbus Community Bill of Rights (CCBOR) proposal to “establish a community bill of rights for water, soil and air protection” from fracking operations and its waste. Strangely, the same media that comprehensively covered Meyer and his football program demonstrated little interest in an issue that affects the health of all Central Ohioans and their environment.
On Friday, September 7th at high noon on Erie Blvd., north of Monroe St., in Schenectady, NY, the graphic above will be up on a giant billboard, and people will gather to discuss and promote the message.
Movie star Eric Roberts has joined the cast of TOWARDS THE MOUNTAINTOP: COMMEMORATING DR. KING and the 55th ANNIVERSARY OF THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON to re-enact Senator Bobby Kennedy.
Mississippi-born actor Eric Roberts has been nominated for an Oscar and three Golden Globes. His big and little screen credits are far too long to list here, but during the 1980s alone, they included “Star 80”, “The Pope of Greenwich Village”, “The Coca-Cola Kid”, “Runaway Train” and “Blood Red” - the only movie Eric acted in with his kid sister, Julia Roberts. More recently, Eric Roberts appeared in “The Dark Knight”, “Entourage”, “The Young and the Restless”, “Glee”, “Hawaii Five-O”, “CSI”, “Suits” and “Grey’s Anatomy” - to name just a few.
C.J. Hinke has produced probably the best collection I’ve read of writings by and about conscientious objectors and war refusers behind bars. It’s called Free Radicals: War Resisters in Prison.
President Donald Trump’s efforts to impose fascism exploded to the surface with the realization that his war on non-white people has escalated with his version of the Nazi SS – the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – separating children from their parents. Trump’s government has created “Tender Age” detention centers, in other words, prisons. The government has released video of the caged warehouses housing male children, but they have not, as of this writing, released pictures or definitively confirmed the location of the female children. Imagine turning over your teenage daughter over to ICE.
Amazingly, many Americans still support Trump and his racist policies. It appears that the American citizenry is experiencing the same creeping fascism as did Germany in the pre-war years. Children in prison. But not white children. Are gas chambers in our future?
The public outcry, possibly with a little help from the two women in his life, caused Trump to sign an unnecessary executive order to undo what did not require an executive order to create. However, he retained the right to hold immigrant families indefinitely.
Tear gas is among the least of the problems facing those who care about the murder and destruction of war. But it is a major element in the militarization of local policing. In fact, it is widely deemed illegal in war, but legal in non-war (although what written law actually creates that loophole is unclear).
Near the end of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King came to some radical conclusions about the fundamental root of oppression. “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” he said in 1967. “When you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.
“We have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights, an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society,” he said in a report to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “We have been in a reform movement…. But after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of revolution. We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.”
Five years ago, five activists and I set up a protest action at the Wendy’s restaurant located on South High Street in Columbus, Ohio. We lined up on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant with a 30-foot-long banner that stated, “Wendy’s Stop the Exploitation, Join the Fair Food Program.”
Customers did not turn away or stop driving into the parking lot, but when they sat at the outdoor dining area, they would shout out, “What’s wrong with Wendy’s?”
That’s the problem: not many people know what’s wrong with Wendy’s. It is necessary to reiterate the reason that larger and larger groups of farm workers and consumers demand that Wendy’s join the Fair Food Program.
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War
People, organizations, and governments around the world, and people and organizations in the United States, need to stand up at long last and nonviolently resist the lawless behavior of the rogue U.S. government.