Tuesday, October 2, 7-9pm, Columbus Mennonite Church, 35 Oakland Park Ave.

Show your support for Edith Espinal by joining our neighbors and local communities of faith for a vigil as Edith reaches one year in Sanctuary at Columbus Mennonite Church.

A press conference will be held at 6pm before the vigil begins.

Hosted by Solidarity with Edith Espinal.

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The Free Press is happy to announce that the family of Bill Moss is awarding the Bill Moss Award for an Outstanding African American activist posthumously to Columbus photographer Kojo Kamau. His work is on permanent display at the Columbus Museum of Art and exhibited across the U.S. and internationally. He traveled extensively and documented the varieties of cultures in North and South America, Europe, the Caribbean and Africa. He is also known for photos of celebrities. He created an organization to promote and encourage blacka artists in 1979 called Art for Community Expression (ACE). Kojo passed away in December 2016 but his legacy lives on in Columbus. 

The Free Press Awards ceremony is Monday, October 8. 6-10pm at Woodlands Tavern, 1200 West Third Avenue in Grandview. There will be food, drink, an awards ceremony and live music by Willie Phoenis, Coffee House Rebels, Something Else and Gilded Sun. All are welcome, $10 at the door or sliding scale. 

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I stumbled upon Moroni for President purely by chance and boy, am I glad that I did. It just so happened to fit into my schedule covering the LA Film Festival so I popped into the ArcLight Theatre, not knowing what I’d see. Based on its name, I thought it might be a satire based on Trump about a moron running for the White House. But to paraphrase an old saying, don’t judge a film by its title. It turned out that Finnish filmmaker Saila Huusko and Dutch co-director Jaspen Rischen’s directorial debut was actually a documentary about someone named Moroni Benally, who indeed was actually running for president.

‘When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it – always.’ M.K. Gandhi

As we remember Gandhi Jayanti on 2 October, the Mahatma’s 149th birthday and the International Day of Nonviolence, there is plenty of room for despair.

Never before has the Earth and its many inhabitants been under siege as they are now, more than 100 years after Gandhi started warning us of the predicament in which we are embroiled and presenting his strategy for addressing it before it spiraled out of control.

We expect 17-year-olds to have learned a great deal starting from infancy, and yet full-grown adults have proven incapable of knowing anything about Afghanistan during the course of 17 years of U.S.-NATO war. Despite war famously being the means of Americans learning geography, few can even identify Afghanistan on a map. What else have we failed to learn?

The war has not ended.