OCTOBER 12, 2017 – COLUMBUS, OHIO: The Estate of Jaron Ben-Rasu Thomas has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Columbus Division of Police. The lawsuit brings civil rights, wrongful death, survivor and loss of consortium claims. The family seeks declaratory, injunctive, and monetary relief for the violations of the Fourth Amendment rights of Thomas to be free from excessive use of force and his common-law right to be free from reckless conduct directly and proximately causing his pain, emotional distress and death. The lawsuit was filed on October 12, 2017 in the Southern District of the United States Federal District Court. 

In Las Vegas on 1 October 2017, it appears that one man (although it might have been more) killed 59 people and shot and injured another 241 (with almost 300 more injured while fleeing). The incident got a lot of publicity, partly because the man managed to kill more people than most mass killers. However, because the killer was a white American and had a Christian name, he was not immediately labeled a terrorist, even though his death toll considerably exceeded that achieved in many ‘terrorist attacks’, including those that occur in war zones (such as US drone murders of innocent people attending weddings).

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there is now an average of one mass shooting (arbitrarily defined by the FBI as a shooting in which at least four victims are shot) each day in the USA. By any measure, this is a national crisis.

The Afghanistan War documentary by Ken Burns III may someday be set for release in Spring 2074.

Or maybe not. The peace movement in the U.S. made Vietnam, rather than Korea, a topic for Burns. The peace movement is struggling to make people in the United States aware that the war on Afghanistan even exists, much less that it is entering its 17th year — making it something that people who still don’t recognize Native Americans as full humans call “the longest U.S. war.”

If there ever is such a PBS account of Vietghanistan, it will no doubt steer clear of the illegality, the lasting damage, and the wisdom of those who rightly opposed the crime before it began and all the way through. Yet such a film’s content will likely be so awful, and depict such evil madness, clearly counterproductive on its own terms, that some people will finally catch on.

Or we could skip to the future and just watch War Machine with Brad Pitt right now, which gets a lot of it right.

My wife and I recently ventured from our home in Montana on a two-week road trip to the Southwest. The excursion took us deep into Utah’s majestic canyon country and the West’s ongoing clash over our federal public lands, a conflict most recently inflamed by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s recommendation to shrink a number of our National Monuments. While the environmental, social, and political issues around these fights remain contentious, one thing has become clear: Strong public lands protections fuel thriving economies.

SeaBus Dance Company is excited to announce our upcoming project LOOM, an improvisational dance piece that will bring distant dancers and Columbus communities together. LOOM will premiere Friday, October 27th at Art of Yoga and will continue through the weekend with a October 28th show at MadLab Theater and a October 29th show at Flux + Flow Dance and Movement Center. Wherever you reside, we didn’t want you to miss it, which is why we included performances all across the city: in Franklinton, Downtown Columbus AND Clintonville! Just as LOOM aims to weave distal Columbus communities together with dance, its goal is also to gather dancers from across the country and present the converging of ideas, movement and narrative.