Opinion

Back in the mid-sixties, in the heady days of Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society Program,’ I was working in my first job out of college as an ‘intergroup relations professional’ at the Detroit Commission on Community Relations. I spent my days helping to enforce newly enacted ‘open housing’ and ‘equal opportunity’ ordinances designed to begin reversing centuries of injustice against African Americans in the Motor City. 

With two sociology degrees focused on race relations on my vita, I was assigned to design and facilitate a program of ‘racial sensitivity training’ for Detroit’s entire -notoriously racist - police force. The program was funded under the then newly created Federal Office of Equal Opportunity.

The U.S. government was created with the mandate to not establish any state religion or to forbid any religion. There were a couple of ways this could have gone.

Here’s one path that was not taken. The freedom of religion and the separation of religion from the state could have encouraged a widespread understanding of what a crock of malarkey religion all is. If no religion can actually persuade everyone of its claims, if people choose their various and sundry religions based on factors wholly unrelated to persuasive argument, then why not let religion fade away with other myths and superstitions?

Here’s a large part of what actually happened. The freedom of religion created the practice of respecting as beyond question multiple conflicting and contradictory dogmas because each was declared by some person or group to be their religion. The right to believe what you declare it important to you to believe is more widely cherished in the United States than is the right to a decent standard of living.

Did you miss the June Free Press Second Saturday Cyber-Salon?

If so, here's a run-down of what happened and how you can be involved next time!

By peace journalist Salem Bin Sahel from Yemen (@pjyemen on Instagram) and Terese Teoh from Singapore (@aletterforpeace), World BEYOND War, June 19, 2020
https://worldbeyondwar.org/peace-letters-in-yemen/

Epstein came to my attention when I was an investigative journalist for one of Columbus, Ohio's alternative newsweeklies, Columbus Alive. Not many people know that the infamous Jeffrey Epstein spent a lot of time in Columbus in the 1990s and owned the second most valuable house in Franklin County (where Columbus resides), in the plush Stepford suburb known as New Albany. I investigated central Ohio billionaire Les Wexner's and Jeff Epstein’s ties to the intelligence community more than 20 years ago. Much of this is captured in two books – The Fitrakis Files: Spooks, Nukes, and Nazis and The Fitrakis Files: Cops, Coverups, and Corruption (CICJ Books, freepress.org).

Well, he deserved to die, didn’t he? He fought, he ran, he grabbed the cop’s taser and fired it. And he was intoxicated, apparently. And he was blocking traffic.

“If an officer is hit with that Taser, all of his muscles will be locked up, and he’ll have the inability to move and to respond,” said a Georgia county sheriff, referring to the killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta on June 12. “This was a completely justified shooting.”

Completely. Justified.

600 people have now signed a petition in Charlottesville, Va. at http://bit.ly/cvillepeace

Almost all of the signers are from Charlottesville.

The petition is addressed to the Charlottesville City Council and reads:

We urge you to ban from Charlottesville:
(1) military-style or “warrior” training of police by the U.S. military, any foreign military or police, or any private company,
(2) acquisition by police of any weaponry from the U.S. military;
and to require enhanced training and stronger policies for conflict de-escalation, and limited use of force for law enforcement.

Here are some of the comments people have added when they signed:

I join in with many Black leaders in this community to call for a demilitarization of our police force and the defunding of resources that should be better spent on other public services.

Militarized police encourages brutality and excessive force. We need to go the other way.

In 1953 author Simone de Beauvoir asked Must We Burn De Sade? regarding the French Marquis and his sadomasochistic books. Today, as the twin plagues of Covid-19 and police brutality disproportionately ravage African Americans, we’re likewise asking: Must Gone with the Wind be gone?

On June 10 - the birthday of Hattie McDaniel, who won one of the 1939 epic’s eight Oscars, including Best Picture - HBO Max blew GWTW off the streaming service’s lineup. As statues of historical figures linked to slavery and racism are being razed, removed and defaced at Bristol, London, Montgomery, Richmond, Boston, Philadelphia, Louisville, Barbados, Antwerp, Belgium and beyond, the question is being raised: What should be done about televised/ cinematic systemic racism and bigoted, Confederate TV/movie monuments, like GWTW?

Senator Bernie Sanders has finally done something that some of us thought would give his presidential campaign a big boost four years ago, and again this past year. He’s proposed to introduce legislation to move a significant amount of money from militarism to human and environmental needs (or at least human needs; the details aren’t clear, but moving money out of militarism is an environmental need).

Better late than never! Let’s make it happen with an overwhelming show of public support! And let’s make it a first step!

With the recent killings of Black citizens by police that made national and international headlines, Columbus’ troubling history on this topic has resurfaced. A graphic that originally circulated via social media four years ago after the killings of Henry Green and 13-year-old Ty’re King went viral in the past couple of weeks. On June 10th, The Columbus Dispatch posted an article, “Fact Check: Is Columbus the Most likely place in America for police to kill black people?” Their ruling of the graphic is that the information presented is false, however the analysis in this article is deeply flawed.

Let’s start with the title.