What is more sick about U.S. society?

1) It’s totally 100% acceptable to make cruel stupid jokes about people’s appearance.

2) There’s an exception. You shouldn’t do it if the thing you’re making fun of relates to their participation in mass murder.

3) Violation of that exception is such a sin that you must publicly repent and grovel.

4) This is true even if the sin was committed on a steadfastly unfunny and unintelligent television program that nobody watches.

5) The repentance is incomplete without declaring the participant in mass murder to be a “war hero.”

6) You also must promote militarism in general and instruct the audience to honor participants in mass murder with meaningless phrases like “never forget.”

7) You can claim to find heart-warming unity around mass-murder operations and have not a single campaign launched to remove a single one of your advertisers.

8) Only if the entire charade carefully omits any description of how one gets to be a “war hero” and does forget — always forgets — all of the following can it be truly redemptive:

British author and social commentator H.G. Wells may have coined the expression that originally popularized World War I as The War that Will End War, as his book, based on articles written during that vast military conflict, was titled. In any case, in one version or another, the expression was one of the most common catchphrases of the Great War of 1914-1918 and has survived as an expression, often used with a grimace of sarcasm, ever since.

 

Fifty years ago, in my twenties, I often hitchhiked the Pacific Coast Highway through Southern California. I slept on pristine beaches, swam in the ocean, and spent endless hours watching seals and dolphins ride the waves just a few yards offshore.

A favorite spot was in Santa Monica, where Sunset Boulevard meets the sea at Will Rogers State Park. This gorgeous stretch of white sand, framed by the Santa Monica pier to the south and the Malibu Hills to the north, seemed like paradise.

Today, fulfilling a lifelong dream, I live in the San Fernando Valley, a forty-minute drive from the Pacific, half of which is through beautiful Topanga Canyon.

This evening there was something else—an unwelcome terror.

This past Friday, I set off for my weekly bike ride along the beach. As usual, I parked at Will Rogers and rode my bike south down the concrete path about six miles to the Venice Pier. The final stretch, through Venice Beach, featured a constant cloud of the cannabis smoke that now flows free and easy in the land of legal pot.

Drawing of white woman with red bandanna on her head making a fist and showing her bulging bicep muscle and above the words We Can Do It

Tuesday, November 13, 2018, 1:00 PM.

Hearing for HB 53 – Remove requirement to join public employee union.

A Call to Action - this is our Bastille, so we are calling all warriors to the barricades. While people are up in arms about the Special Prosecutor investigation into election engineering and possible collusion with Trump regime, the real work is being done by a "look over there" political agenda that is meant to confuse and diffuse energies.

City skyline in the background and a garden in the foreground

Sunday, November 11, 2018, 2-4pm
Studio 35, 3055 Indianola Ave.
Growing Cities is a documentary film that examines the role of urban farming in America and asks how much power it has to revitalize our cities and change the way we eat. In their search for answers, filmmakers Dan Susman and Andrew Monbouquette take a road trip and meet the men and women who are challenging the way this country grows and distributes its food, one vacant city lot, rooftop garden, and backyard chicken coop at a time.

Q+A following the film to discuss the local food system in central Ohio.

$5 donation at the door. Come early to network at the bar starting around 1:15 pm.

People standing outside in winter coats at dusk one white man with brown hair, facial hair and glasses with a sign that reads Recuse and a white woman next to him

Hundreds of protestors lined the streets of Downtown Columbus during the evening rush hour on November 8 to urge Ohio Senator Rob Portman to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Mueller’s investigation of President Donald Trump and possible interference by the Russians in the 2016 Presidential Election.

The protest, one of many nationwide, was held one day after President Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, following the 2018 Midterm Elections. 

In a New York Times opinion editorial, George Conway, the husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, stated that it was “unconstitutional (for Trump) to fire Jeff Sessions.”

The protest began with a rally at Bicentennial Park, as speakers urged the protestors to contact their U.S. House Representatives and Senators, to protect Mueller’s investigation following Trump’s appointment of Sessions’ deputy, Matthew Whitaker as Attorney General.

These two young men may have an infinite number of things in common, but the actions they took this week do not. One used a pro-war ceremony at a professional basketball game to reject the celebration of militarism, and to protest war-profiteering advertising in sports.

Pages

Subscribe to ColumbusFreePress.com  RSS