Opinion

“We won't be in a position to make permanent progressive changes until the bad governments are changed permanently into good governments. And all governments are bad governments now and will remain bad governments until we have a global humanity.”

The words are those of Mark Haywood, in an email to me last week about my column, “Embracing Ecological Realism.” I think the words nail it. And I would add that “global humanity” includes a connection to Planet Earth, to life itself. And my intention is to put these words in a political context that is free — so I pray — of cynicism.

The irony is that this is ancient wisdom. We used to know this, once upon a time. Then we got civilized and became conquerors. We are now at the end, or nearly so, of this dark, bloody path. And while global humanity’s next step is uncertain — we must plunge into a new way of being — the wisdom of our fathers and mothers can guide us:

“For instance, an Ojibway friend of mine gave me a sheet of paper entitled ‘Twelve Principles of Indian Philosophy.’ The very first principle on that sheet read as follows: WHOLENESS . . .”

Let’s talk about  Mindfulness. Mindfulness is one of the main components of yoga and one of it’s biggest benefits. Mindfulness is PRESENCE. It is what Ram Dass talked about in his 1974 book Be Here Now. Eckhart Tolle expounds about presence in The Power of Now. Really, when you think about it, there is ONLY NOW, the present moment.

You’ve heard the saying “The past is history, the future a mystery and the present is a gift.” You cannot breathe in the past or future moment, only this one and the next and the next until your body dies. The breath is a constant that only exists in the now.

Here’s a great practice:

4 times a day, say at 10, 2, 6, and 10, stop what you are doing and notice your breath. You have to set an alarm on your phone or you’ll forget. Trust me on this.

 So 4 x/day, stop and notice 3 the breathes. Don’t change it, just notice it. Just 3 breathes. You can build to 5.

At the December Free Press Second Saturday Cyber-Salon, we discussed a progressive agenda for 2021, both locally and nationally. Many local activists reported on their goals and events for the new year.

Connie Hammond described the work of the Central Ohio Worker Center (COWC) and their victory in having Columbus City Council pass a Wage Theft Ordinance. Their main issue is wage theft and they will hold a seminar on it in February 2021. Their new member orientation will be January 16:

At the December Free Press Second Saturday Cyber-Salon, we discussed a progressive agenda for 2021, both locally and nationally. Many local activists reported on their goals and events for the new year.

Connie Hammond described the work of the Central Ohio Worker Center (COWC) and their victory in having Columbus City Council pass a Wage Theft Ordinance. Their main issue is wage theft and they will hold a seminar on it in February 2021. Their new member orientation will be January 16:

1. Reports on the climate collapse have stopped in some cases the nonsense talk about needing the United States to "lead," and even gone beyond urging it to get out of last place, and begun demanding that it do its fair share to undo its share of the damage. That's the same thing we need on militarism, when U.S. weapons are on both sides of most wars, almost all foreign bases are U.S. bases, and most people in the U.S. can't begin to name its current wars, drone murders, or nations with U.S. troops in them. We saw this past year that moving even 10% out of militarism, even explicitly to address a health crisis killing huge numbers of people in the United States, was too great a blasphemy. The biggest chance of reducing militarism, winding back the nuclear doomsday clock, and funding a serious Green New Deal is to make demilitarization part of a Green New Deal. That means telling your misrepresentative and senators that, and telling every environmental organization that. Here are some resources to help:

Many questions remain surrounding how Casey Goodson was killed and the officer who killed him, Deputy Jason Meade.

As more details emerge about Meade – like his background as a pastor and his controversial Christian views on policing – activists are asking: have these views affected his judgment on the job? 

Meade’s recently resurfaced 2018 interview for the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office “Connecting with the Community” YouTube series, along with a 2018 audio recording of a sermon he gave at a convention for the Ohio State Association of Free Will Baptists, offers insight into Meade’s contentious logic between police use of force and the teachings of Jesus.

In his sermon at the Baptist convention, he said, “I learned long ago why I’m justified in throwing the first punch. Don’t look up here like ‘Oh police brutality’.”

He continues his ramblings about use of force ending with, “Jesus was the manliest man in the history of mankind.”

When Neera Tanden emailed her colleagues in support of forcing Libya to pay for the privilege of having been bombed, many misunderstood, including one of her colleagues who emailed back objecting to creating what he supposed was an obvious financial incentive for bombing more countries.

Now that Tanden has been nominated for high office and will face confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, we have an obligation to get this right. The top ways in which Tanden has been misunderstood are:

Our post-election hope couldn’t be more fragile.

Does Joe Biden see his mission as merely reclaiming situation normal from Donald Trump? How aware is he of the big, beyond-our-lifetimes future and the crucial need to address climate change? Is he able to acknowledge that human “interests” go well beyond national borders? And if so, how much political traction would he have to have before he could begin turning vision into policy?

You may have heard that the U.S. House of Representatives just passed a bill to spend $741 billion renaming military bases that have been heretofore named for Confederates. You may think that’s a grand idea but still wonder at the price tag.

Of course, the secret is that — even though most of the media coverage is about the renaming of bases — the bill itself is almost entirely about funding (part of) the world’s most expensive military machine: more nukes, more “conventional” weapons, more space weapons, more F-35s than the Pentagon even wanted, etc.

Annually, the military appropriations and authorization bills are the only bills to go through Congress where the bulk of the media coverage is always devoted to some marginal issue and never to what the bill essentially does.

Almost never does media coverage of these bills mention, for example, foreign bases, or their huge financial cost, or the lack of public support for them. This time, however, there has been mention of the fact that this bill blocks the removal of U.S. troops and mercenaries from Germany and Afghanistan.

When a podcast titled “Whites of the Roundtable” is focused mainly on Central Ohio’s most prestigious old-money suburb Upper Arlington (UA), by railing against any affordable housing moving in, this old-money suburb probably has a white supremacy problem.

But it’s no laughing matter when on an invite-only and unsearchable Facebook group called “UA Golden Pride,” veiled threats are made against a UA Ohio House of Representative Democrat.

Or when UA’s most vocal right-winger takes his explosive anger to Facebook as UA Golden Pride cheers him on.

The Free Press wants to be clear, UA is not the Republican stronghold it once was even though it still has the lowest percentage of Black residents in metro Columbus.

In 2016 it went Clinton by 15 points (3,300 votes), and while the Free Press was unable to obtain 2020 presidential vote totals, Ohio House of Rep. Catherine Allison Russo, of UA’s District 24, won her re-election over Republican Pat Manley by 15 points (12,000 votes).

UA is jammed with million-dollar homes and good people. For some of them it’s win-at-all-costs, an attitude reflective of Ohio State’s football program.