Hard to imagine a more insensitive gesture than Mayor Andy Ginther’s choice of the Police Academy for his second State of the City address. Shockingly, Ginther chose the occasion to announce that the notorious, overly white police unit known as the “jump-out boys” would be unleashed year-round to torment black, minority and poor youth. Everybody knows that if Henry Green was a young white man in Upper Arlington, legally open-carrying, and was shot by two plainclothes black officers, those officers would be in jail right now.

Also, the State Highway Patrol confirmed that Trump supporters hired private security who guarded the perimeters at their latest Ohio Statehouse rally dressed in military fatigues and carrying AR-15 assault rifles. The police allowed them open-carry on state property. Andy, where were the jump-out boys then?

So maybe this is how the U.S. demilitarizes, or the American public at least returns to the consciousness of the late ’60s, when protests rocked the streets and people demanded an end to the savagery in Vietnam:

Donald Trump, the Fool in the Tarot deck, the harbinger of change, removes the political correctness and public relations sensitivity from U.S. foreign policy and goes naked about conquering the world. Suddenly the U.S. president is Julius Caesar (or maybe Caligula) with orange hair, hugging fellow tyrants, ramping up the military budget, decapitating social spending, bombing Fourth World civilians without restriction and making America great in the only way he can imagine: “fighting to win.”

1. Chemical weapons are worse than other weapons.

This is not the case. Death and dismemberment are horrific regardless of the weapon. No weapon is being used legally, morally, humanely, or practically in Syria or Iraq. U.S. bombs are no less indiscriminate, no less immoral, and no less illegal than chemical weapons -- or for that matter than the depleted uranium weapons with which the United States has been poisoning the area. The fact that a weapon has not been banned does not create a legal right to go into a country and kill people with it.

2. Chemical weapons use justifies the escalated use of other weapons.

Does shoplifting justify looting? If a Hatfield poisoned a McCoy, would another McCoy be justified in shooting a bunch of Hatfields? What barbarism is this? A crime does not sanction another crime. That's a quick trip to hell.

3. Important people we should trust know who used chemical weapons.

No, they do not. At least they do not know that the Syrian government did it. If they knew this, they would offer evidence. As on every past occasion, they have not done so.

4. The enemy is pure evil and will answer only to force.

Saturday, April 8, 6:30-11pm
1021 E. Broad St., east side door
Join progressive friends for food, drink, and great music. Jordan Flaherty will be guest speaker at this Free Press Second Saturday Salon. He comes from a New Orleans-based journalist and actionist background and broke into his journalism profession by covering the 2000 OSU-CWA strike; he continues to cover “front line” news. In his new book, No More Heroes, Flaherty calls on social movements to organize within the reality that there are no heroes except for the ones who do the organizing. 
Free, no RSVP needed.
614-253-2571
colsfreepress@gmail.com

Last week I saw a little African-American girl who looked to be about five years old walking with, I assume her mother. I then saw other young African-American girls entering an elementary school. They appeared to be between five and eight years old.

They were normal little girls. Running, laughing and looking happy to be going to school. They were of different hues of color, some short and some tall for their ages. They wore normal clothing for children their age. Most of them had something else in common. They were wearing fake hair. Hair that was long and almost for some, touching their backside. Hair that they had to brush out of their eyes as they ran to enter the school doors. Hair in styles that made them look like little women. Hair that clearly wasn’t their own.