Kick-Off Meeting for Columbus City Council Reform Working Group
March 9 - 6:30PM
Martin Luther King, Jr. Branch Library, 1600 E Long St, Columbus, OH 43203
Kick-off meeting on 2017 campaign to reform Columbus City Council. Help organize our thinking around a new campaign and strategy to victory on election day.

For months now, our country has endured the tacit denigration of American ingenuity. Countless statements -- from elected officials, activist groups, journalists and many others -- have ignored our nation’s superb blend of dazzling high-tech capacities and statecraft mendacities.

Fortunately, this week the news about release of illuminating CIA documents by WikiLeaks has begun to give adequate credit where due. And not a moment too soon. For way too long, Russia has been credited with prodigious hacking and undermining of democracy in the United States.

Until I remember that I, too, am a human being, I have been with increasing frequency drawn to the conclusion that human beings have evolved with such an obsession with other individual humans that they simply cannot attribute proper importance to far-reaching policies.

If you want to excite a crowd, you don't tell them that virtually every official in Washington is in complete and harmonious agreement on massive military spending, more nuclear weapons, occupying Afghanistan, bombing Iraqis, bombing Syrians, bombing the hell out of Yemenis, and drone murdering at will. That's about as interesting as subsidizing fossil fuels and rendering the earth uninhabitable. Who cares!

If you want some sign of life out of an audience, you tell them that a particular politician is an idiot or a clown or a racist or a sadist or a misunderstood saint. Now, that has value. That has meaning.

Ojibwe Nation tribal member Winona LaDuke - Ralph Nader’s vice presidential candidate on the Green Party ticket in 2000 - appeared Feb. 23 at the 4th Native Women in Film Film Festival, where an anti-pipeline documentary about LaDuke world premiered. Another indigenous rights movement notable - Pearl Means, widow of American Indian Movement leader Russell Means - flew in from North Dakota to co-present the documentary she executive produced, End of the Line: The Women of Standing Rock at the filmfest at Laemmle’s Monica Film Center in Santa Monica, California.

The last time I wrote, I said that I was on my way home from the DAPL protest at the Sacred Stone Camp in the Standing Rock reservation. Well, I got as far as Jamestown, ND, rented a motel room, and found I simply could not sleep. I was worrying too much about the few protesters I had left behind, and was afraid that I was wrong in my opinion that the camp would not be raided. So, I emptied my car of all my gear so that I might be able to carry people back with me, then went back to the camp.

There were very few people left. It was an incredibly surreal landscape. There were literally tons of perfectly good gear laying abandoned. Lumber, sleeping bags, dozens of ti pis, semi-permanent dwellings people had built, tarps, wooden platforms, wood burning stoves--literally every kind of camping gear you can imagine, and some I'd never seen before (like a propane powered instant hot water tank).