People

To your surprise, perhaps, my answer is an emphatic, unqualified NO. In this Busting Myths column, I will be schematic, but I am prepared to expand my understanding of both city and state in response to readers’ questions. For background, I refer you to my essays on DeWine, the state, and Ohio Republicans published in Columbus Free Press since September 2021, available on the website.

Is Mike DeWine actually a governor?

By “actually a governor,” I mean the following: Does the occupant of the Office of the Governor fulfill the duties of the elected senior administrator the State of Ohio? My answer is emphatically NO. Clues leap off the pages of his second State of the State Address on Mar. 22, in his fourth year in office. Supposedly the pandemic prevented 2020 and 2021 speeches, but it didn’t stop almost daily news conferences for most of the first year, or the State Legislature from meeting. (See Anna Staver and Mary Jane Sanese, “Police funding, mental health among Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s focus in State of the State.”)

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost extends his streak of violating the law and science. Yost, who agreed to much-too-small settlements by three large drug distributors with the state (see Eric Lagatta, “Columbus address to join state opioid settlement against three large drug distributors”), now claims with no evidence that there is a causal connection between Spring 2020 Covid “stimulus checks” (under Trump Administration, which Yost never mentions) and opioid drug deaths in Ohio. (See Titus Wu, “Ohio AG Dave Yost says federal Covid-19 stimulus checks fueled opioid deaths. Is that so?”)

Here’s what happened at the March 2022 Free Press Second Saturday Cyber-Salon, Saturday March 12.

Watch video here.

Facilitated by Free Press Board member Mark Stansbery, the salon addressed “Peace in the World.”

Harvey Wasserman, anti-nuke activist and senior Free Press Editor, spoke first about the nukes in Ukraine. He told us five of the 12 nuclear reactors in Ukraine were built by Soviets and all are over 30 years old. Chernobyl is one of the smallest ones and is now under control of the Russians. The explosion at Chernobyl in April 1986 was the worst nuclear accident in the world, overshadowed later by the meltdown at Fukushima, which was the equivalent of 100 times the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the Chernobyl disaster, the the Russians seeded the clouds above Ukraine so that it would rain the radioactivity over them instead of Russia. Even a nuclear plant that is shut down is a radioactive threat.

Six and a half weeks ago I broke humerus bone (upper arm). I had surgery to put a pin put into my arm. This is the 1st bone I’ve broken in my 73 years. It SUCKS!

I’m an alpha female, mother, grandmother and keeper of the casa. It has been quite challenging to “let” my sweet husband do for me the things I’ve always handled. Like undressing myself: I had to ask him to peel my sports bra off over my head! Very humbling, to say the least. Thank God we’ve been married for several decades. This experience is an exercise in patience. I’m having to adjust to my new normal. It’s made me reflect on all of the things I’d taken for granted – like undressing myself.

I have been teaching yoga since the 80s and I miss it terribly. My body misses it. I especially miss doing the yoga pose Down Dog (DD). I think about all of the times in a yoga workshop when the teacher kept us in DD for a long time and I’d think, when will it end. Now, I can’t wait to be able to pop out a Down Dog. Never thought I’d see the day where I was craving a nice long DD!

Six months ago on August 3, 2021, Nina Turner walked off the stage of a crowded ballroom in Cleveland taking the hope of a progressive stronghold in Ohio with her. Although her race against Shontel Brown in the 11th Congressional district was heavily publicized, Turner lost the Democratic primary receiving 44.5percent of votes to Brown’s 50.1percent.

Although Turner recently announced she intends to run again in the 11th district, her likelihood of winning appears unlikely. The good news is, she isn’t the only Progressive taking on an incumbent Democrat in Ohio.

In August 2021 Morgan Harper announced her candidacy for the U.S Senate, vying for Rob Portman’s vacant seat alongside Congressman Tim Ryan and tech entrepreneur Traci Johnson.

John Cranley is the best candidate for governor. It is time for Democrats, Progressives, Independents and fed-up-with-Trump Republicans to get behind the former Cincinnati Mayor.

His running mate, State Sen. Teresa Fedor, is the best candidate for lieutenant governor, too.

The Cranley-Fedor ticket has the best chance of turning around moribund, but beautiful, Ohio that has been in the grip of the GOP corporate establishment and  socially unconscious right-wingers for the better part of three decades."The public be damned" is their motto (with apologies to railroad magnate William Henry Vanderbilt who uttered the phrase in the 19th century).

No wonder folks of all stripes did flips over the announcement of the proposed Intel plants in Licking County. We are used to factories leaving Ohio, not coming here.

Today, I tell a story. It is both familiar and out of the ordinary. It focuses on a new friend whose personal and family history merits widespread attention in Columbus, Ohio, and across the nation. The family is second- and third-generation Palestinian Americans who contribute in remarkable ways to our society, culture, and polity.

For understandable but not acceptable reasons, it is much more common to tell stories about Black, Latino, and Asian brothers and sisters than Middle Easterners. Prejudice remains.

The grandfather to today’s younger generations emigrated from Lebanon to Columbus 40 years ago. Born in Palestine, he immigrated to Lebanon at age 10 during the 1947 war. After graduating from high school and university, he worked with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for more than 25 years. As a refugee, he had a life-long commitment to education and service for which he is remembered by all who knew him. He was devoted both to adaptation and to the transmission of Arabic and his heritage.

We are all grieving. For the loss of simply being able to hug friends and family; to gather at the local watering hole and share a drink with friends, old and new. We’re grieving the loss of routines and patterns of life, of normalcy.

I think we’ve moved past denial. Many of us are pissed off at the “stupid virus” as my grandson and I call it.

We’re all bargaining “I’ll wear my mask in the grocery store but not in the park.” Not that there’s any real entity to bargain with.

Depression? Oh yeah. We are all experiencing some level of depression: loss of “normal,” freedom, hugs!

Acceptance, I guess so. We all have a stash of face masks and hand sanitizer at the ready. We’re starting to accept that this virus will most likely be with us, in some form, for a long time to come. That is the new normal. For now.

So, where do we go from here? How do we move forward? Remember the quote from Emmanuel?

“Your life is not your master, it is your child.” The mirages of people’s minds become the reality of their lives, whether they have any conscious intention or not.

So, what DO you want in 2022?

There’s been plenty to be grateful for in 2021, but like many things in our American democratic republic, the wheels of progress move slow and 2020 kept its claws dug into the year that followed it. Frankly, we should have known this was going to happen when six days into the new year, the world watched as an insurrection and near-constitutional crisis played out on live TV, all due to the results of the 2020 presidential election. Many of us will never forget where we were on that weirdly historic day. I was flipping back and forth from C-SPAN –– to watch Congress count the Electoral College votes –– to One America News Network, which was the only station airing a peculiar rally (in full!) that President Trump was holding on The Mall. I remember the cameras were only aimed at the stage so I couldn’t see how many people were in the crowd, but slowly the two networks’ coverage merged together and I could see that unlike his inauguration four years before, Trump finally did attract a crowd to D.C.

The Columbus Police Department (CPD) did a sloppy job handling the kidnapping and murder of Imam Mohamed Adam.

The family of the Somali Imam Mohamed Hasan Adam is unable to pay respect for their son and bury his remains properly after he was shot dead last Friday. Holding the remains for more than 24 hours violates the Islamic law of burial as well as the Jewish law of burial. CPD did a lousy job from day one when Imam Mohamad was kidnapped last Wednesday evening. It took an army of volunteer Somali search and rescue teams to locate the Imam. Sadly, he was found dead already. He must have been shot three hours before the Somali search teams located his body inside his car.