Op-Ed

There are times my boyfriend is mean to me, makes me cry, and then makes love to me. It has happened several times, so I see a pattern emerging. Do you think he is turned on by crying? Dear Reader, If you did not say that he is first mean to you, then I would suspect something else. However, because he is mean to you, it is my opinion that he is not turned on by crying. He is turned on by pain and control. He is abusive. This is not about love or sex, it is about hurting you and your feelings. The more control over you your partner feels, the more it turns them on. This is not consenting behavior. You are being taken advantage of and abused. Domestic violence does not discriminate. It can happen to any person in any kind of relationship – heterosexual, homosexual, friendships, marriages, family, elder care, children, professional, etc. There are no boundaries between class, ethnicity or region either. It can happen to anyone. It usually catches a partner off-guard. A relationship begins rosy and then the darkness emerges. An abusive partner seeks control and sometimes the easiest way to feel in control or bigger is to tear down their partner.

Why is Attorney General DeWine making unfair and untruthful statements to Ohio voters? DeWine recently rejected the petition language for the citizen’s initiative entitled the “Voters Bill of Rights.” The proposed amendment would have granted Ohioans the same rights recognized in the European Union – making voting a Constitutional right. DeWine was quoted in the Columbus Dispatch as saying he rejected the petition’s language because it failed to provide “fair and truthful statements” about matters concerning voter identification practices and voters being purged from the voting rolls due to failure to vote. Here are the facts now denied by Mike DeWine. In 2012, the Free Press obtained public records from all 88 of Ohio’s county Boards of Elections (BOE) documenting that 1,092,392 voters were removed from the voting rolls since the 2008 presidential election. Cuyahoga County, which includes Democratic-rich Cleveland, led the Buckeye State with 267,071 purges. Franklin County which includes the capital of Columbus, removed 93,578 voters. Franklin County went 58% for Obama in the 2008 election.

I've tried, I really have. But, as much as I'd like to, I just can't work up any enthusiasm for the Winter Olympics. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a number of the events. I think it's the coverage that's throwing me off. NBC and its many affiliate networks aren't happy unless they can provide a story line that is either tragic or triumphant. And they're so formulaic in the way they present these stories. What's so strange to me is all the footage they have of some of the athletes. For example there's the American figure skating pair of Meryle Davis and Charlie White and their heartwarming tale of growing up skating together. Their parents must have foreseen the need to video tape the duo from an early age, no doubt banking on the future of their progeny as Olympians. How else can you account for the seemingly endless hours of tape of the pair. And it's not just Davis and White. Is there an American athlete in the games whose early life wasn't documented by their parents? If, on the odd chance, there isn't any archival footage, NBC has done us the favor of going out to get some.

Like some of you, I have a dislike for forced holidays, and do not celebrate this holiday that some say was created by corporations (my personal joke, the Greeting Card Industrial Complex?) However, many do celebrate this day of love, with their romantic partner.   For those rebelling against the masses, and those who want to do something different for the holiday, I have some advice. Challenge yourself to find a way to express love and kindness to your partner, yourself, a friend and a neighbor – whoever you encounter, whoever is near. Find a new way of giving of yourself that you may not have done in a long time, if ever.   I'm remembering Valentine's Day in grade school. Covering old shoe boxes in tin foil, felt, glitter, glue, heart shapes and other kinds of trim. Stuffing inside little cards with names misspelled and silly sayings, sometimes to people we didn't care that much about. However, it still felt good to spread some love around, even if it wasn't romantic.   Perhaps you could buy a package of child's Valentine cards and place them in a series of mailboxes on your street. Don't write any names or addresses on the card or envelope.

When the big snow hit central Ohio last week I happened to be in Whitehall. I was there for reasons that are unimportant.    But that's where I was when we were inundated by the big snowfall. I weighed my prospects for returning to the luxurious digs of the Free Press. After much mental give and take, I ventured forward.    I was pleasantly surprised to find the roads clear, even the side streets. By the time I reached Broad St. at Hamilton Rd. I thought I was in the clear. Traveling West toward downtown everything was fine until I reached the Whitehall/Columbus border.    That's where the plowed road ended and a mountain of snow began. Columbus had not deemed Broad St. plow-worthy apparently. Traffic slowed to a crawl as motorists made their way through the ever-darkening sludge.    Things did not improve until I reached Gould Rd. which just happens to be where Bexley begins. That municipality did take the trouble to plow Broad St. Later I learned that there were lots of places in Columbus that had not been plowed.

When we think of Martin Luther King, Jr., most of us think of King the dreamer, who spoke to the more than 200,000 people amassed in front of the Lincoln Memorial on that sultry August day in  1963. We think of the man whose soaring rhetoric–some of it extemporaneous–let us in on his dream of living in an America where his four children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. The King of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom has been defined as the man who was looking to build a color blind America in which all men and women were bound together by their very humanity, and neither their race or ethnicity mattered. King is frozen in the American psyche: a deeply religious man who merely wanted to see peace on earth and good will among the races.     Ever since that famous speech, he has been co-opted by politicians and consumerism. Every year he becomes more cardboard cut out and less radical. It is as though we have a vested interest in remembering only the King who constantly turned the other cheek, exhorted blacks to love their enemies, and eschewed violence.

As a child in the sixties living in Poindexter Village, I remember running and playing in the safe surroundings of the apartment buildings on our court. I didn’t know, or care at the time, that Poindexter Village was one of the oldest public housing communities in the United States.   I had no clue that it was named after the honorable Reverend James Poindexter who, in 1882, was the first African-American to serve on the Columbus Board of Education and was also the first elected to Columbus City Council in 1880.  He was the Pastor of the historic Second Baptist Church from 1848 to 1898. I didn’t know any of that history. I just knew we lived in the “Village.”   As I used chalk to draw pictures on the sidewalk, little did I know that I might possibly be drawing on the same piece of ground that Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, the great African American artist, had drawn on when she lived there from 1940 until 1957, the year after I was born, before I could meet her in the village and possibly become a person in her “A Street Called Home” series about Poindexter Village and Mt.

So there I was, watching the movie Argo about the six Americans escaping Khomeini's Iran in 1978 in the aftermath of the embassy takeover and subsequent hostage situation. None other than the mighty Ben Affleck is the hero of the movie. Ahem. Otherwise it's a great movie. I mean, he hasn't changed his stone-dumb facial expression since 2003's stinker Gigli with J-Lo. Be that as it may... When the plot really started kicking in, when the idea of pretending to be making a science-fiction movie in Iran to smuggle out the six, Led Zeppelin's "When The Levee Breaks" comes on. It doesn't work. In the song, the levee is breaking or about to; in the movie, the tension was just being set up. Wrong. A bit later in an outdoor, sunny, pool-side Los Angeles mogul scene, with John Goodman doing a slimy L.A. film producer as fellow-cine-snake Alan Arkin and he schemed to get Affleck and his 'actors' out alive, on came a Van Halen tune. That worked. The energy was interesting. But the flow of the movie was jarringly marred by the Zep choice. Worse than Affleck's cast-iron face. Now, did a show ever do its music better than the The Sopranos? I think not.

In hindsight I realize it was a mistake. Oh, I had good intentions, but, alas, I have erred. For Christmas I gave Mrs. Peaves a tablet computer. Now she has become one of “those people.” You know the type. Always tinkering away on their smart phones, twiddling their thumbs to the tempo of a quick-paced Samba. God knows what most of those people are up to, perhaps launching a plan to commit some crime, or gossiping about their friends more likely. A year ago Mrs. Peaves was not exactly what you might call tech-savvy. Frankly she was pretty much tech-ignorant. She was afraid of the computer, actually. On the odd occasion when she needed to use one, I had to stand over her shoulder and guide her through the steps. It's tedious work, I can tell you. But then, around nine months ago, she dropped her cell phone in the toilet. That wasn't a good day for anyone, I assure you. The end result was, Mrs. Peaves was forced to get a new phone. Her contract was up anyway, so she received a new one for free, free that is if you don't count all the fees associated with it. What she got was a smart phone.

There is a reason white people can't seem to stop appropriating black culture, a reason that white American culture, despite being the dominant aspirational culture for the rest of the world, seems so boring to the people it portrays. White supremacy has paid a price for its place at the top, and that price is its people's humanity, humanity in all its beautiful and brutal, maddening and serendipitous contradictions. Contradictions that must unwaveringly be excised or, perhaps more accurately, replaced with more civilized ones. America's racists have been dying of thirst, so it's time to sing about them. Every time Sherman's in the Super Bowl he be actin' like his shit don't stink. Moments after Richard Sherman tipped Colin Kaepernick's pass to prompt a game-sealing interception, he tipped one of white America's greatest contradictions, that of the graceful winner, which Twitter promptly intercepted, complete with covert and overt racist social media updates and litany of defending posts in the black blogosphere.