Lao Tzu said that silence is a source of great strength. This principle was evident on September 12, when about 400 people of faith marched in silence from the First Congregational Church in downtown Columbus to the Ohio Statehouse.

It was a revival, on a much larger scale, of the Moral Monday rallies held at the Statehouse before the November election two years ago. Started by Rev. William Barber in North Carolina, the Moral Monday movement reclaims the moral narrative from the religious right, which in recent years has defined morality almost exclusively in terms of restricting reproductive rights and condemning LGBTQ people.

Rev. Susan Smith modeled the silent march on an event from the height of the civil rights movement. “An attorney’s house was bombed,” she said. “They marched from the University of Tennessee to city hall. All you could hear was the shuffling of people’s feet on the pavement. When you’re marching and you’re silent, people don’t know what to do, except listen. The power comes in the very silence.”

As a film historian I was a sucker for Drama Queens from Hell, playwright Peter Lefcourt’s homage/rip-off/mash-up of movie maestro Billy Wilder’s 1950 immortal masterpiece Sunset Boulevard. To be fair, Lefcourt’s two-acter also contains an original story that imaginatively, wittily riffs on Wilder and co-writer Charles Brackett’s saga about a young screenwriter’s (William Holden as Joe Gillis) relationship with an aging silent screen diva (Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond) dreaming of a comeback and her butler/chauffeur and former director (Erich von Stroheim as Max von Mayerling) in her decaying mansion, located at that eponymous boulevard of broken dreams. All three thespians were Oscar-nommed, as was the film for Best Picture, while Wilder and Brackett scored a screenwriting Academy Award.

Dear Ohio Activists and Concerned Residents,

Many of us have been watching the events unfolding on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. The Native Americans who live on the Standing Rock Reservation are not willing to simply stand by and watch a destructive pipeline project ruin their water and desecrate their sacred land. The company behind the project is Energy Transfer Partners/Enbridge.  The U.S. government is willing to break treaties with the Native Americans in order to allow the pipeline to be built, putting corporate profits and greed above the rights of the people and nature on the reservation. We fully support and applaud the efforts of all the residents at Standing Rock

The following letter is being delivered to the leaders of every nation on Earth at their UN Permanent Missions in New York before the upcoming U.N. General Assembly, which begins on September 13th.

This year’s UN General Assembly comes at a critical moment for humanity – 3 minutes to midnight on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock. Recognizing our country’s primary role in this crisis, 11,644 Americans and 46 U.S.-based organizations have thus far signed this "Appeal from the United States to the World: Help Us Resist U.S. Crimes," which we are submitting to all the world’s governments. Please work with your colleagues at the General Assembly to respond to this appeal.