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Columbus Community Pride 2018: Back to Our Roots Festival

Black fist rising up from the ground like a tree with Columbus scene in the background

Saturday, June 16, 11am-7pm
Mayme Moore Park, 867 Mt. Vernon Ave.

Join us for a day-long festival centering on QTIPOC and on those at the intersections of oppression. Our pride is taking no corporate sponsorship and police are not invited. The Columbus Community Pride Festival will feature performances and visual art by queer and trans artists of color, a community resource fair, outdoor activities for children (and the young at heart), POC-owned food trucks, and much more! Join us for a day of celebration, creativity, and joy — and help grow the promise of liberation for QTIPOC in Central Ohio and beyond!! Visual ASL Interpreters will be provided for all Community Pride events. Please contact the interpreter coordinators at cbuscommunityprideinterpreters@gmail.com to request close vision or tactile interpreters for all Community Pride events.

Stay tuned for announcements of performance and workshop lineups, food trucks, vendors, and community resources.

March to #EndFamilySeparation. “Stop the deportations! Not one more!”

People marching outside in shorts with trees in background carrying signs, one saying Give us your tired poor

Families in Columbus Ohio, along with their children, came together and took to the streets on Thursday, June 14th from 5-7pm EST. They came together at Goodale Park, to talk about and protest for the end of family separation. The protest and rally was in response to the “Military-Style” ICE raid that took place June 5th in Sandusky Ohio, on workers at Corso’s Garden Center.

Before the protest began, people listened to a very diverse group of speakers, from many different walks of life, as they shared their perspectives on the issue. These were people who were working day and night to support this cause and what had happened to the families of Sandusky Ohio.  

What Else Canadians Should Be Sorry For — Besides Burning the White House

World BEYOND War

Six-years after the British landing at Jamestown, with the settlers struggling to survive and hardly managing to get their own local genocide underway, these new Virginians hired mercenaries to attack Acadia and (fail to) drive the French out of what they considered their continent.

The colonies that would become the United States decided to take over Canada in 1690 (and failed, again).

They got the British to help them in 1711 (and failed, yet again).

General Braddock and Colonel Washington tried again in 1755 (and still failed, except in the ethnic cleansing perpetrated and the driving out of the Acadians and the Native Americans).

The British and U.S. attacked in 1758 and took away a Canadian fort, renamed it Pittsburgh, and eventually built a giant stadium across the river dedicated to the glorification of ketchup.

George Washington sent troops led by Benedict Arnold to attack Canada yet again in 1775.

An early draft of the U.S. Constitution provided for the inclusion of Canada, despite Canada’s lack of interest in being included.

Why Are the Poor Patriotic?

By David Swanson

We should be very grateful to Francesco Duina for his new book, Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country. He begins with the following dilemma. The poor in the United States are in many ways worse off than in other wealthy countries, but they are more patriotic than are the poor in those other countries and even more patriotic than are wealthier people in their own country. Their country is (among wealthy countries) tops in inequality, and bottoms in social support, and yet they overwhelmingly believe that the United States is “fundamentally better than other countries.” Why?

Duina didn’t try to puzzle this one out for himself. He went out and surveyed patriotic poor people in Alabama and Montana. He found variations between those two places, such as people loving the government for helping them a little bit and people loving the government for not helping them at all. He found variations between men and women and racial groups, but mostly he found intense patriotism built around identical myths and phrases.

Stop the Deadly Violence in Cameroon

By Tony Jenkins, World BEYOND War

Photo caption: Peaceful protestors in Cameroon calling for an end to violence, Anglophone marginalization, and arbitrary arrest. (Photo: Screen capture from the cover of the Amnesty International Report “A Turn for the worse…”)

Deadly violence in Cameroon is at the precipice of civil war and the world is not paying attention. World BEYOND War calls for immediate action by state and non-state actors, the media, and international civil society to bring an immediate end to this deadly conflict.

HENRY IV Theater Review

In his Los Angeles theatrical debut in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Tom Hanks proves he is as talented a stage actor as he is on the screen in Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump, The Post, etc. Wearing (I hope for Rita Wilson’s sake) a fat suit, bearded and with long flowing grayish/ whitish hair, Hanks - almost unrecognizable as the portly, comic character Sir John Falstaff - not only opened the epic about England’s power struggles but rescued the play during a “medical emergency.”

 

When the action during the first act of this Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles production was interrupted due to an ailing theatergoer, Hanks took to the boards, good-naturedly waving his sword at viewers, “ordering” them back into their seats and so on. Hanks’ improvisational panache saved the moment and in that hallowed show biz tradition, eventually the show went on, performed under the stars at the West L.A. V.A. Campus’ Japanese Garden. (Although the delay added time to the play’s already three hour-plus length, putting me in mind of the title of Orson Welles’ 1966 Falstaff film Chimes at Midnight).

 

Welcome Mike Pence: Big LGBTQ Dance Party

Man dressed a woman with huge blonde hair in curls going up in the air lots of blue eye shadow, red lips and a red outfit

Friday, June 15, 2-5pm
Outside the Renaissance Hotel downtown, 50th N. Third St. 
Mike Pence is coming to Columbus June 15, the first day of Pride! Help welcome him with a Big LGBTQ Dance Party! 

Taboo Word for Vagina Distracts From Inhumane Trump Policy

amantha Bee is a smart, talented, funny, incisive, edgy, 48-year-old Canadian/American mother of three. She is also the star of the TBS show “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” now in its third year. In 2017, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

The Great Waking Up

I don’t blame all of the planet’s ills on the Republican Party, but I find hope in the possibility that it’s on the verge of collapse.

I’m not talking politics here. I’m talking deep vision of humanity: a sense of who we are and how we impact Planet Earth and all its occupants. A smallness of mind has a chokehold on American political power and awareness. Maybe what I mean is that it has control over the money.

“The money just isn’t there” — to provide universal healthcare, to create environmental sustainability . . . to ensure that everyone has clean drinking water. I could name dozens more “nice ideas” that are financial impossibilities, relegated to the trash bin of wishful thinking. We all could.

The Bromance

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