Achievement is a thing done successfully, typically by effort, courage or skill. Attainment, realization, accomplishment, fulfilment, implementation, execution, performance. As I look back over the year 2017 I find myself thinking about what, if any, achievements have been accomplished and what makes these achievements successful and relevant to the American people and who has benefited from these achievements.  

In November, Vice President Pence said President Trump was responsible for our economy being improved by 1.5 million new jobs. Pence and Trump himself have said and see the success of the stock market as an achievement for Americans. They both feel that Trump is responsible for the manufacturers “confidence” in producing goods here in America. Pence says, “we’re just getting started” in regards to the “accomplishments” of Trump.  Pence and Trump both fail to acknowledge that another one of Trump’s achievements this year is to be deemed “historically unpopular” by the American people.  

Theater troupes and filmmakers persist in telling and retelling A Christmas Carol year after year. And why not? Charles Dickens’s ghostly morality tale makes a moving case for redemption and generosity, the respective hallmarks of the religious and secular sides of the holiday.

The story is such a perfect complement to the season that anyone who performs it competently is likely to meet with success. That is, unless they give in to the temptation to put their own spin on it. Then, all bets are off.

This year, a local theater production and a nationwide movie decided to get creative with the classic tale. In each case, they would have been better off letting Dickens be Dickens.

The troupe is Shadowbox Live, which in the past has given us Scrooge, a movie-to-stage adaptation that musicalized the tale but left its inspiring message intact. This year, Shadowbox remade the wheel with Cratchit, an original production that sets the action in modern America and focuses on Scrooge’s underpaid employee rather than the skinflint himself.

Daniel Ellsberg’s new book is The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. I’ve known the author for years, I’m prouder than ever to say. We have done speaking events and media interviews together. We’ve been arrested together protesting wars. We’ve publicly debated electoral politics. We’ve privately debated the justness of World War II. (Dan approves of U.S. entry into World War II, and it seems into the war on Korea as well, though he has nothing but condemnation for the bombing of civilians that made up so much of what the U.S. did in those wars.) I’ve valued his opinion and he has rather inexplicably asked for mine on all sorts of questions. But this book has just taught me a great deal I had not known about Daniel Ellsberg and about the world.

Because Gov. John Kasich is playing politics, Tom Noe is rotting in jail. Noe, one of 50,000 inmates in Ohio prisons, holds a unique distinction. He is a political prisoner, kept behind bars to please both political parties. Other prisoners of lesser means and influence remain behind bars, too, also victims of the governor's political motives.

We read about political prisoners all the time in third world, totalitarian and less civilized countries than the United States. Such individuals are put behind bars for a long time on phony or exaggerated charges in a foreign land because they posed a political threat or at least failed to please other countries' political elite.

When we read about political prisoners abroad, we in the United States say "not here." Yet we have political prisoners in Ohio. Tom Noe has been incarcerated for 11 years and is currently locked up in the Marion, Ohio, Correctional Institution after several years in the Hocking Correctional Institute in Nelsonville, Ohio.

Noe, 63 years old, is a senior citizen and at the rate things are going, he will be pushing 70 before he is released.

The Open Shelter of Columbus has had a year full of changes, and despite the organization’s stormy weather, the shelter will ring in the holidays in style with their annual holiday event “Ho Ho Hope For The Holidays.”

According to a statement from the Shelter’s Development Coordinator, Harry Yeprem Jr., “The event exists to provide Holiday Cheer and Help to those who may not normally able to experience it.” The event, Yeprem added, was “was very near and dear to the heart of Mary (Beittel, the shelter’s late co-founder and Executive Director).”

Approximately 400 men, women and children are expected to attend this year's event at Broad Street United Methodist Church. The event will be held on December 19, the Tuesday before Christmas at the Church, located in the Discovery District at 501 E. Broad Street.