The Afghanistan War documentary by Ken Burns III may someday be set for release in Spring 2074.

Or maybe not. The peace movement in the U.S. made Vietnam, rather than Korea, a topic for Burns. The peace movement is struggling to make people in the United States aware that the war on Afghanistan even exists, much less that it is entering its 17th year — making it something that people who still don’t recognize Native Americans as full humans call “the longest U.S. war.”

If there ever is such a PBS account of Vietghanistan, it will no doubt steer clear of the illegality, the lasting damage, and the wisdom of those who rightly opposed the crime before it began and all the way through. Yet such a film’s content will likely be so awful, and depict such evil madness, clearly counterproductive on its own terms, that some people will finally catch on.

Or we could skip to the future and just watch War Machine with Brad Pitt right now, which gets a lot of it right.

My wife and I recently ventured from our home in Montana on a two-week road trip to the Southwest. The excursion took us deep into Utah’s majestic canyon country and the West’s ongoing clash over our federal public lands, a conflict most recently inflamed by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s recommendation to shrink a number of our National Monuments. While the environmental, social, and political issues around these fights remain contentious, one thing has become clear: Strong public lands protections fuel thriving economies.

SeaBus Dance Company is excited to announce our upcoming project LOOM, an improvisational dance piece that will bring distant dancers and Columbus communities together. LOOM will premiere Friday, October 27th at Art of Yoga and will continue through the weekend with a October 28th show at MadLab Theater and a October 29th show at Flux + Flow Dance and Movement Center. Wherever you reside, we didn’t want you to miss it, which is why we included performances all across the city: in Franklinton, Downtown Columbus AND Clintonville! Just as LOOM aims to weave distal Columbus communities together with dance, its goal is also to gather dancers from across the country and present the converging of ideas, movement and narrative. 

By Madeline Stocker and Nicole Butler

Sparked by the outcome of last November’s presidential election, a fire is spreading across Columbus.

Even people who don’t usually pay attention to local politics are witnessing a shift in the political landscape of Ohio’s capital city. There has been a surge in anti-Trump marches, demonstrations outside the Statehouse and public outcry against the top-down legislation threatening to compromise the everyday lives of Columbus residents citywide.

In other words, ‘resistance’ has become a daily practice for hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens. But each day since last November, more and more Columbus residents are channeling their efforts into resisting the status quo here at home.

“I want to stand against the harmful and flawed policies coming from Washington D.C.,” said Ernest Whitted Jr., who lives with his wife on the South Side. “But I’ve started to notice that many of the decisions that hurt me and my family are made right here in my hometown.”

If the whole state of Vermont, the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Seattle, Minneapolis, Albuquerque, Davenport, Iowa, and even Oberlin, Ohio can change the name of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day – could Columbus, Ohio be far behind? Sadly, yes.

Following the Ameriflora controversy in 1992 – the international flower festival at Franklin Park celebrating 500 years since Christopher Columbus invaded North America – Native Americans descended on Columbus City Council playing drums and chanting. Council members refused to change the name of Columbus Day, but as an immediate concession to the victims of genocide initiated by Columbus and to make the Native Americans go away, agreed that a week starting on Columbus Day would be designated Indigenous People’s Week. But we never heard anything about that again.

There were some victories: our city hasn’t held a Columbus Day parade since the 90s, the Santa Maria is thankfully gone, and activists successfully prevented a Christopher Columbus statue made by a Russian sculptor, six feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, from being erected downtown.