Wednesday, August 20, 6-8pm
Seventh Son Brewing Co., 1101 N. Fourth St.

Mark your calendars for August 20 from 6pm to 8pm for “August Green Drinks” at Seventh Son Brewing Co. At this “Green Drinks,” speakers from SWACO and Circular Thrift will discuss their new textile recycling pilot program. Attendees are encouraged to bring end-of-life clothing to this event to recycle. Please use this link to check what clothing items qualify as end of life. Hope to see you all there.

Hosted by Green Columbus.

Facebook Event

On Sunbury Road, where the city begins to thin and green again, the Agler Freedom House sits modestly behind a line of trees. Its windows are plain, the white clapboard siding unadorned. The casual passerby might miss it entirely. But the ground beneath it carries a memory older than the city of Columbus itself.

In the mid-19th century, this house stood on a quiet stretch of road that was far from quiet in its purpose. Runaway slaves – men, women, and children – moved through here at night, guided by whispered directions and the promise of safety. The Agler family, white abolitionists in a hostile state, took them in. Basements became bunkers, kitchens became waystations.

The people who stopped here weren’t simply “runaways” – they were fugitives under federal law, risking life and limb for the radical act of freedom. They were also freedom seekers, part of a network of the defiant and the determined that would come to be called the Underground Railroad.

More than 150 years later, another kind of traveler found his way to the same door.

[VILLA PARK, ILLINOIS] – “No one locks their doors in Villa Park,” says village board President Kevin Patrick.

This town of 22,000 could be the set for Andy of Mayberry, a Norman Rockwell painting of America.

Patrick sports a military haircut befitting his years in the Coast Guard and steel blue eyes that reflect military determination, compassion — and fear. Fear of what could happen to his town.

We filmed Patrick while he watched the videos of bodies floating face down in another small town, in Kerr County, Texas, where the death toll from a flood in July has reached 136 and counting.

Patrick was shaken. Because it’s a horror he knows all too well.

Twenty years ago this month, Coast Guardsman Patrick was one of the first responders sent in after Hurricane Katrina drowned Gulfport and New Orleans. He told me about recovering the bloated bodies of pregnant women — or pieces of pregnant women — out of the water. He tried to pull one corpse from the flood, but the “arm slid off like a chicken wing.”

Some observers in the lead-up to last week’s meeting between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage Alaska hoped that a dialogue might be established where the broader issue of creating a new European security model that would reduce tensions and make it unlikely that a conflict like Russia-Ukraine would be repeated. Both Trump and Putin came away from the three-hour plus meeting with positive remarks though little of substance, at least in terms of what they were prepared to reveal. Trump did indicate that the idea of a ceasefire had been sidelined in favor of further discussions for a comprehensive peace plan to end the war at the next bilateral talks in Moscow, but it has been suggested by critics that he was speaking only for himself personally. If he has come around to the view that a ceasefire will not work in the current context, he is probably correct.