City Council must have been in a generous mood earlier this week during its Monday meeting at City Hall when it handed out two 10 year 75% tax abatements worth $680,710 to Hubbard Park Place LLC and Brunner Building LLC for two separate building projects in the Short North with a total investment cost of approximately $46 million. Both projects will create eight full-time permanent jobs in the economically depressed area of the Short North.

Then came Ball Metal Food Containers turn. According to the Department of Development, Ball Corp along with its subsidiaries is “the world’s leading supplier of metal packaging to the beverage, food, personal care and household industries, aerospace and other technology industries servicing both the commercial and government sectors.” Council members felt justified in handing out another 75% 10 year tax abatement totaling $1,684,430 for Ball Corp’s $15 million investment into their existing facility on the West side of Columbus and the promise of 50 new jobs.

On May 19 demonstrators gathered at the Ohio Statehouse and the North Market to raise awareness of the forms of violence experienced by black women, girls, and transgender women. They called for an end to criminalization of black victims of sexual violence, gender discriminatory legislation, and narrow social standards of black womanhood and femininity.

“We’re here today to join a national day of action lifting up the names of black women, girls, and femmes who have been killed in the past two years,” said Rev. Lane Campbell, minister of religious education at the First Unitarian Universalist Church. “These are just the cases that we know about. There are many other names that we don’t know.”

The protesters unfurled a large scroll of names and read them aloud, chanting “Say Her Name” after each victim’s name.

In so many ways, Dr. Damon Tweedy was fortunate. He grew up in an intact home with loving, strict, and steeped-in-the-church parents who were gainfully employed and taught him to aim high. Tweedy’s parents did not even finish high school. His father worked all his life as a butcher in a grocery store; Tweedy’s mother spent forty years working for the federal government. Tweedy also had a great example in his older brother who graduated from college. He had done well in high school and college, but he arrived at Duke University School of Medicine full of apprehension and doubt. Could he cut it? He was from a working class family, attended a middling, state-supported public university, and would be one of a few black scholarship students, recruited in part to diversify the student body, in his classes. His classmates would primarily be middle- and upper-class white students who had attended prominent universities and could afford to be at Duke. Tweedy studied his tail off that first half of the semester. When he received his midterm grades, he was in the top half of all of his classes, and his doubts began to recede.

Remember when coups and assassinations were secretive, when presidents were obliged to go to Congress and tell lies and ask permission for wars, when torture, spying, and lawless imprisonment were illicit, when re-writing laws with signing statements and shutting down legal cases by yelling "state secrets!" was abusive, and when the idea of a president going through a list of men, women, and children on Tuesdays to pick whom to have murdered would have been deemed an outrage?