Opinion

There was a big hubbub a year ago when the Columbus Dispatch editorialized against set-aside contracts for Black businesses and the Black community went ballistic. Former Mayor Mike Coleman had to sweep in and rescue the Dispatch and save a shred of its credibility in the Black community of 300,000 or so potential readers.

All that dovetailed with the takeover by the Dispatch's parent GateHouse of the better-known Gannett Corp. This created an amalgam of 200-plus daily newspapers whose flagship was the national newspaper USA Today. The name Gannett was adopted for the combined company.

The old Gannett was a pioneer in prioritizing social and economic justice for minorities, women and LGBTQ. Its policies became the law of the land for all the newspapers in the combined enterprise, including the Dispatch.

There was a big hubbub a year ago when the Columbus Dispatch editorialized against set-aside contracts for Black businesses and the Black community went ballistic. Former Mayor Mike Coleman had to sweep in and rescue the Dispatch and save a shred of its credibility in the Black community of 300,000 or so potential readers.

All that dovetailed with the takeover by the Dispatch's parent GateHouse of the better-known Gannett Corp. This created an amalgam of 200-plus daily newspapers whose flagship was the national newspaper USA Today. The name Gannett was adopted for the combined company.

The old Gannett was a pioneer in prioritizing social and economic justice for minorities, women and LGBTQ. Its policies became the law of the land for all the newspapers in the combined enterprise, including the Dispatch.

As Jews and refugees increasingly come under attack, the ​Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts returns to live theater with the world premiere of a play about a Jewish immigrant. Tevye in New York! imagines what happened to the Ukrainian dairyman depicted in the popular Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, which in turn is based on Sholem Aleichem’s short stories written in the 1890s. As those familiar with Fiddler may recall, the show ends with a pogrom (race riot) that, with only a three day notice (!!!) expels Tevye and his family from their Ukrainian village of Anatevka, and those beleaguered, bewildered, wandering Jews embark on their long march to America.

For Derek Chauvin, nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds have turned into twenty-two and a half years — the prison sentence he recently received for the murder of George Floyd.

Chauvin famously knelt on George Floyd’s neck last year, as he lay handcuffed and helpless, for those nine-plus minutes, while three colleagues stood by, indifferent to the murder so obviously underway . . . police administering the death sentence to a man accused of trying to use a counterfeit $20 bill at a nearby convenience store. Unfortunately for the smirking Chauvin, his crime was caught on cellphone video and shocked much of the nation and the world. And a year later, something almost unprecedented happened: A police officer was held accountable for killing a black man.

But is this “justice” or is it simply bureaucracy? George Floyd is still dead. His young daughter remains robbed of her father; his loved ones, his family, still have a terrifying void in their lives. And the racist social structure in which Chauvin acted, though now under intense scrutiny, remains intact. People continue to needlessly suffer and die at the hands of our militarized police.

A new freely downloadable book.  I would like to announce the publication of a book, which discusses the reasons why the institution of war continues to threaten human civilization and the biosphere, and the steps that might be taken to rid the world of war. The book may be downloaded and circulated free of charge from the following link:

https://eacpe.org/app/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Why-War-by-John-Scales-Avery.pdf

Albert Einstein's letter to Sigmund Freud

“Why War?”, the title of this book, was also the title of a famous letter written to Sigmund Freud by Albert Einstein.

Since the assassinations of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy (and the Vietnam War that had much to do with all three) it has been hard for historically-literate and open-minded Americans to generate much patriotic fervor on the Fourth of July. But they should have been skeptical long before those idealism-shattering events. My own seriously deficient high school education in world and American history has necessitated decades of catch-up reading and research in order to find the truth about the dark, covered-up  underbelly of America.

The killing of a Muslim family on June 6 in Ontario, Canada, again presented an opportunity for Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, to brand himself as a voice of reason and communal harmony. However, Trudeau’s amiable and reassuring language is designed to veil a sinister reality which has, for many years, hidden the true face of Canadian politics.

Remarks for Peace and Justice Works, June 24, 2021

Thank you for inviting me. I’d like to speak briefly and spend a good deal of time on Q&A. I’d like to start by considering this question: If it’s true that madness is more common in societies than individuals, and if the society we live in is aggressively hastening (as I think is well-established) climate collapse, ecosystem devastation, wealth inequality, and institutional corruption (in other words, processes that are clearly counter to conscious, stated desires) is this society perhaps no exception to the rule? Is it perhaps insane? And are there perhaps other interconnected madnesses that we don’t see entirely clearly, precisely because we are members of this society?

For a while, I have been in favor of the United States lifting the embargo they and their allies placed on Cuba. I have felt that the policy was nothing more than an imperialistic desire to have Latin America run by those they prefer to have in power.

I feel that the United States should be concerned with what goes on in their own borders as opposed to dictating how other nations operate and so forth. If it is NOT within our borders, it most certainly is NOT our business to get involved and dictate how others should operate. The imposition of this policy has been the result of a bloody game of chess that the US and USSR were playing with one another during the Cold War period.