People

Wade Rathke, founder of ACORN and Chief Organizer of ACORN International, joined us from Mississippi to take about the Voter Purge Project. This protects eligible voters against disenfranchisement by monitoring, reporting on, and organizing against wrongful voter purging. Wade has a list of purged Ohio voters and asked for volunteers to help call them and get them re-registered. Volunteer for Wade Rathke’s voter purge project - OHIO

Definition from the Greek paradigm meaning pattern: “A paradigm is a scheme for understanding and explaining certain aspects of reality.”

For the last 2000+ years we’ve been in the Piscean Age which focuses on, among other values, money, power and control. The Aquarian Age is the new paradigm we entered in 2012. The focus of the Aquarian Age is love, brotherhood, unity and integrity. This book talks about the paradigm shift that we are currently experiencing on Earth. Paradigm Shifts don’t happen quickly; they can take hundreds of years to emerge, yet it seems like an abrupt change. As we saw in Who Moved My Cheese, people resist change and cling to the status quo with everything they’ve got. In our world today we see intense tribal and ethnic loyalties. Politics has become polarized all over the globe; you either agree with me or you are my enemy.

We’re still in the throes of this birthing process: bringing forth the new world order. As painful as the process is, no matter how tenaciously we cling to the old ways, the new paradigm WILL arise out of the ashes of the old paradigm.

The story that I am about to relate could well have been a contemporary adaptation of Dickens, yet I feel that even Dickens would have been impressed at the amount of adversity that I am about to tell. There is no exaggeration. I have even omitted parts, but that doesn’t make this story less brutal.

A little empathy is needed to understand this story. You would have to be a monster not to feel some compassion. This is a story of a poor Guatemalan family who escaped the brutality of their own country’s oppression and soul-crushing poverty to only find more heartache in the middle of Ohio.

I work locally as an interpreter and when I first met Huli at his school on the westside of Columbus back in 2017, he was a 10-year-old from Guatemala who was having nightmares. Not the nightmares most of us have sometimes. His nightmares were bloody and horrible and full of violence, impacting his school performance, his relationships, and himself.

First, heartfelt thank you goes out to Mercer County Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Ingraham for answering prayers for leniency. Wisdom, kindness, compassion. Justice as it should be.

There’s a story here, one that winds through small town America, Halloween, a drug bust, qualifying medical conditions, hostile prosecution, an arduous three years, a half million dollars and justice for patients in the end.

It all began in Rockford, a village of 1,120 people in Mercer County on the far west side of Ohio.  White rural Republican red state, it’s a place where miles of soybeans, wheat and corn align razor straight roads. A “Mayberry” of the Midwest.

Ghosts and goblins have been known to haunt Halloween, usually as costumed kids ringing nearby doorbells in pursuit of candy and cookies. A knock on the door of the Keeling family on October 31, 2017, however, took on more ghoulish proportions. 

Let’s talk about Mindfulness. Mindfulness is one of the main components of yoga and one of its biggest benefits. Mindfulness is PRESENCE. 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.

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

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

Speakers were Mia Santiago, one of the founders of the Columbus Freedom Coalition spoke about that group that works with prisoners and on social justice issues.

OSU Professor Pranav Jani discussed the current struggles to make change with the city and police force and had a great analysis on how we can keep the momentum going.

We saw a series of photos taken by Paul Becker who has been a persistent documentarian of the events happening since the George Floyd murder protests began.

Mary Jane Borden spoke about the racist drug war. Victoria Khan, Angelica Warren and Amy Wolfinbargerof the Ohio Rights Group spoke on marijuana issues. We heard about the atrocious drug charges brought against Peggy Sue Kimmel and Glenn Keeling of Mercer County, Ohio.

On my 5th anniversary as a columnist for the Columbus Free Press, I will forgo commenting on the media and political scene and, instead, share my day-to-day reflections on the first two months of the pandemic.

It started on March 15 when I and 11.7 million Ohioans were ordered to shelter in place. I wondered how I would cope. I decided to write my way through it with a nightly post to my 785 Facebook followers and anyone else looking in on the social network.

I initially prefaced my remarks with the following: "Captain's log: Day 1 completed in ContagionNation." After a few posts, I dropped the last part and simply wrote: "Captain's log: Day _." I finally ended the posts on Day 62.

Here they are:

1. I have nothing on my calendar for the next 2 months. Not even tennis. Please do same. Stay home. Hunker down. It makes me sad to stare into the abyss of social isolation, and I'm an introvert. I, we, and you must do our duty to starve this virus into oblivion. We will. More Courage.

2. Lights out.

3. Virus 1. Vote 0. (A reference to Ohio's delayed primary election.)

4. Dogs happy. Owners home.

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).

Late Tuesday afternoon when Mayor Ginther joined protesters near the Statehouse, several young African American self-appointed protest leaders – some barely out of their teens – approached him wanting to talk. The Mayor turned to them and one of the young African American protest leaders didn’t hesitate. He’s known for his icy confidence and at that moment it was coursing through his veins.

His name is “Jay Kay,” a 21-year-old who works in the kitchen of a local sports bar. He graduated from a Grove City high school in 2017 but could not find any reasonable way to raise tens-of-thousands for college and potentially start a career in media. His doesn’t come from privilege and far from it.

If you want to know the character and mindset of the young people who are peacefully protesting, get to know Jay Kay, who refused to offer his real name for safety reasons.

What sets him apart from many of the young protesters is what radically changed his soul at the onset of his teens. The shooting death at the hands of Columbus police of an older close friend who was popular in his former Hilltop neighborhood.