Opinion

Stand!, a new movie musical about a general strike that took place a century ago, may be more timely than ever, as American unions consider staging industrial actions to oppose any attempt by Trump to seize power. (See: https://inthesetimes.com/article/labor-unions-general-strike-trump-2020?link_id=3&can_id=253721911aaf5ea03cd942a989a6a0c5&source=email-we-wont-let-him-unions-nationwide-are-planning-a-general-strike-if-trump-tries-to-steal-the-election&email_referrer=email_988903&email_subject=we-wont-let-him-unions-nationwide-are-planning-a-general-strike-if-trump-tries-to-steal-the-election.)

Chris Lombardi’s fantastic new book is called I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Dissenters, Deserters, and Objectors to America’s Wars. It’s a wonderful history of U.S. wars, and both support for and opposition to them, with a major focus on troops and veterans, from 1754 to the present.

The greatest strength of the book is its depth of detail, the rarely heard individual accounts of war supporters, resisters, whistleblowers, protesters, and all of the complexities that catch so many people in more than one of those categories. There’s an element of frustration for me, in that one hates to read about generation after generation growing up believing war is good and noble, and then learning that it isn’t the hard way. But there’s also a positive trend discernable through the centuries, a growing awareness that war is not glorious — if not the wisdom that rejects all war, at least the notion that a war must somehow be justified in some extraordinary way.

The Community Festival (ComFest) is seeking applications for its 2021 Community Grants program. Each year, ComFest invites grant applications to support and sustain innovative programming demonstrating a commitment to ComFest’s principles and mission which are rooted in community, social justice and progressive activism. 

ComFest established the grants program in the spirit of giving back to the community. Since 2006, over $320,000 has been awarded to local organizations.

To learn more about ComFest’s Grants program, application requirements, read about previous grant recipients and submit an application, please visit https://www.comfest.com/committees/grants.

The deadline for submitting applications is Tuesday, January 19, 2021. Applications received after the deadline cannot be considered.

In his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World Carl Sagan lamented as follows:

I have a foreboding of [a] time when... awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The dumbing down... is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media... but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.... The plain lesson is that study and learning – not just of science, but of anything – are avoidable, even undesirable.

As part of a new national campaign to deliver better treatment and pay to all “essential workers” the Columbus City Council unanimously passed a resolution supporting an Essential Workers Bill of Rights last Monday. 

Essential Worker resolutions have also passed in Lakewood, Toledo, and Dayton, and are under consideration in Fremont and other cities across Ohio. The Columbus resolution can be read here (search “To Support an Essential Workers Bill of Rights”). 

The city of Columbus is asking for the public’s help with an independent investigation into the actions of some Columbus Police officers during the Summer 2020 protests and riots.

On June 1st, Mayor Andrew J. Ginther established an email hotline outside of CPD’s chain of command for the public to send complaints, video, and photographs related to officer actions during the protests and riots.

An independent committee established by the city reviewed complaints received, and separated the complaints to be investigated either criminally or administratively.  To ensure each complaint received an independent review, the city hired a retired FBI agent to investigate any complaints deemed potentially criminal by the committee.

In order for a full and independent investigation to be done, the city needs help identifying all parties involved in the encounters, whether it be a member of the public or an officer participating in the actions seen in the photos/videos.

In June 2019, Joe Biden promised wealthy so-called donors that nothing would fundamentally change. At this moment hundreds of millions of people — from those shooting off fireworks to those ranting as though they will soon shoot up public places in their MAGA hats — seem convinced that everything will fundamentally change. Biden was wrong. Everybody else is right. Either everything will change for the better or one or both of the twin dangers of environmental and nuclear apocalypse will change everything for the worse.

What should someone who cares about ending war think? How can we get from the euphoria of electing a warmonger to mobilizing people to end war? How should we talk with the people who are celebrating? And how with the people who are outraged?

By squealing “Frankly, we did win this election,” at 2:24 a.m., Nov. 4 and trying to stop counting all ballots cast, serial adulterer Donald Trump, who cheated on his wives Ivana, Marla and Melania, and is now cheating on America. The “unindicted co-conspirator” in the Stormy Daniels case – who illegally paid hush money to muzzle the porn star so her revelations about their July 2006 liaison wouldn’t affect the outcome of 2016’s election – and similarly connived payoffs for a Playboy model he started an affair with in June 2006 shortly after Melania gave birth to Barron, is now trying to commit adultery on America by bamboozling his way into a second term.

“Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Please sit. Thank you. This is without question the latest news conference I’ve ever had. Thank you. I appreciate it very much. And I want to thank the American people for their tremendous support, millions and millions of people voted for us tonight. And a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people and we won’t stand for it. We will not stand for it.”

It’s Wednesday morning. The election is still up for grabs as I write, creating a post-Election Day void of painful proportions. A blue wave didn’t wash over the newly constructed wall around the White House, flush out the least competent president in American history and present the planet with President Joe, the guy who would make it all better.

Stephen Wertheim’s Tomorrow, The World examines a shift in elite U.S. foreign-policy thinking that took place in mid-1940. Why in that moment, a year and a half before the Japanese attacks on the Philippines, Hawaii, and other outposts, did it become popular in foreign-policy circles to advocate for U.S. military domination of the globe?

In school text book mythology, the United States was full of revoltingly backward creatures called isolationists at the time of World War I and right up through December 1941, after which the rational adult internationalists took command (or we’d all be speaking German and suffering through the rigged elections of fascistic yahoos, unlike this evening).