Opinion

Vendors, Yummy Food & a Great Music Lineup! You can attend in person or if you want to stay home you can watch the Live Stream! Links live on Friday Sept 10!

Friday, Sept. 10
5:30 - Wahru’s Spirit Drummers
6:30 - Four Mints
8:00 - Nancy Wilson Tribute
9:45 - The Ark Band

Saturday, Sept. 11
1:00 - Transit Arts
2:00 - Billy Zenn & the Enablers
3:00 - Dougie Simpson & the Peace Band
4:00 - Carol Walker & The Bitterttones
5:00 -The Apostles
6:00 - Gregg Swann & The Late Crew
7:00 - Flex Crew
8:00 - Willie Phoenix
9:00 - Deal Breakers

There was plenty of hope for change around the country when President Joe Biden’s administration finally took office in January and for the most part, they’ve been able to right the shipwreck left behind by former President Donald Trump’s incompetent administration. Plenty of improvements have been made to normalize federal government operations –– both foreign and domestic –– so everyone is feeling a little bit better. To add to this positive trajectory, the Biden administration’s recent withdrawal from Afghanistan –– after twenty years of war, bloodshed and trillions of taxpayer dollars spent –– was the right step in the right direction at a new time for America. Unlike his predecessors, Joe Biden has finally been able to accomplish what other presidents could only scale down and talk about. It took major guts.

“Ten members of one family — including seven children — are dead after a US drone strike targeting a vehicle in a residential neighborhood of Kabul . . .

“The youngest victims of Sunday’s airstrike were two 2-year-old girls, according to family members.

“Relatives found the remains of one of the girls, Malika, in the rubble near their home on Monday.”

To understand the imminent likely outcome of redistricting and reapportionment of Congressional and state legislative districts in Ohio, one must look at who is calling the shots among Ohio Republicans, who dominate the process. I call it the Republican Rigging Ring.

There has been a distraction of 10 public hearings around the state hosted by the redistricting commission. They were poorly attended by commission members – Gov. Mike DeWine preferred to attend a Cincinnati Bengals practice – because what the public says is of little consequence to the Republicans in charge, who make up five of the seven members.

It was alleged at one of the hearings by none other than former Ohio Democratic Party chair and former unsuccessful candidate for Oho attorney general, David Pepper, that somewhere off the books, either behind closed the doors or on private Zoom meetings, Republicans leaders were meeting to carve up the state to their satisfaction, public be damned.

The Republicans are making diplomatic public statements promising fairness when fairness is the farthest thing from their minds.

What is on their minds?

Amid chaotic politics and anti-immigrant and refugee sentiments, Stadio Olimpico in Rome seemed like an oasis of social and cultural harmony. AS Roma and Raja Casablanca fans gathered in their thousands on a hot Saturday evening to cheer for their teams in a friendly match, the first in the Olimpico for nearly a year and a half. 

In some future lovely little war, perhaps with China or some other demonized target, some percentage of the U.S. public may suddenly exclaim: “Hey, since when does a draft include young women as well as men?!” Old tunes will be revised and sung in protest with lyrics about being the first one on your block to have your daughter come home in a box. The tragedies will be played out in tears and screams and flag-covered propaganda-regurgitating rationalizations. Dead women and men will be thanked for the service of stirring up World War III before being dumped in the ground to rot, as some of the living begin to envy them and wonder about the merits of the service they’ve provided.

In many ways, war is ever more and less visible. Of course in U.S. academia, the Pinkerist pretense that we are living through a period of great peace is accomplished by all sorts of statistical manipulation, but first and foremost by declaring civil wars to not be wars, and declaring U.S. wars to be civil wars — a tricky thing to do when the minute the U.S. leaves, Afghans, for example, decline to keep killing each other (damn them!).

But in the United States, war and militarism — or some weird shadow of them — are everywhere: endless thank yous, special parking places and airplane boarding, endless recruitment ads and weapons ads, countless movies and television shows. War is relentlessly normalized. And, oddly, the ubiquity of war celebration has made war so unquestionable that there are few objections when war is not mentioned — even on occasions when it should be.

The killing of four young Palestinians by Israeli occupation soldiers in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank, on August 16, is a consequential event, the repercussions of which are sure to be felt in the coming weeks and months. 

 The four Palestinians - Saleh Mohammed Ammar, 19, Raed Ziad Abu Seif, 21, Nour Jarrar, 19, and Amjad Hussainiya, 20  - were either newly born or mere toddlers when the Israeli army invaded Jenin in April 2002. The objective, then, based on statements by Israeli officials and army generals, was to teach Jenin a lesson, one they hoped would be understood by other resisting Palestinian areas throughout the occupied West Bank. 

That link between age and wisdom — is it just a joke?

Suddenly I’m curious in a real way. I just turned . . . 75. There’s a significance to that number that isn’t abstract, and I’m having a hard time ignoring it. Perhaps it has more to do with cataracts and hearing aids, not to mention wobbly knees, lost thoughts and techno-cluelessness, than it does with diamonds. But I find myself wondering, more than ever, what I have learned over the past three quarters of a century — and what, if anything, I understand.

I think about the chaos in Afghanistan, the insane war on terror, refugees massed and caged at the southern border, a child murdered on the streets of Chicago. When I was in my 20s, I felt certain the world from which such cruelty and stupidity emerged was being transformed. Our generation was changing it. Now, as I limp to the bathroom, I feel the throb of an aching heart. Things have changed in some ways, both for better and for worse, but mostly they have stayed the same. What I have come to understand is how little I know.