Friday, November 3, 2023, 12:00 PM
Join AFSC staff every Friday at to hear updates from Gaza. Then, take action with us as we contact our elected officials and call for an immediate cease-fire and humanitarian access to Gaza. Our elected officials need to keep hearing from us. Register here

November 9, 2023, 5:00 PM
The 2023 Free Press Annual Awards Dinner is free - all are welcome.  

Featuring peace activist David Swanson on "War Abolition and the Ukraine Problem."  

Honoring local community activists:  
2023 Free Press "Libby" Award for lifetime achievement in Community Activism - Cynthia Brown of the Ohio Coalition to End Qualified Immunity
2023 Free Press Activist Artist Award - Alicia Jean Vanderelli of the Vanderelli Room.

RSVP: colfreepress@gmail.com.  

Facebook Event  

Sitting safely at my desk, looking at photos of bombed buildings and knowing that missing children are buried under the rubble, imagining (unavoidably) what this must feel like . . . oh my God, empathy gives way to horror. Move on, I tell myself. Write about something else. All wars are like this.

But the big question won’t go away: Why?

Beyond all the reasons and excuses for the continuing carnage of Gaza, beyond the U.S. justifications for its complicity: Why?

Every war foments this question, but only if you care about the victims. If you don’t — if you embrace one side’s justification — the dehumanization process kicks in and, if you’re sitting at home reading about it on the Internet or watching it on TV, it starts morphing into a video game. Crash, boom, hooray! This is war and we’ve got no choice but to win, no matter the cost . . .and no matter that a victory carved out of corpses in the rubble only means that further war and further hell (for everyone) are inevitable.

Why?

Emmanuel Remy was appointed to Columbus City Council in 2018, like all of his colleagues on Council, not elected. On the very first day he took office, Remy voted to approve the City’s “district” system that some consider fake, and even racist. Remy faced off against community activist Adrienne Hood at the polls yesterday and won with 60 percent of the vote. Hood’s campaign, however, made a strong showing for an activist candidate not endorsed by the local Dem machine by earning nearly 60,000 votes, 40 percent of the vote.

Eastside activist Jonathan Beard, who has kept a close eye on how the “fake” Council districts came to be, remembers that City Council meeting in January of 2018 as if it were last night.

“On the very first day new member Remy took office, Shannon Hardin passed legislation to put his ‘fake districts’ proposal on (a local) ballot,” said Beard. “Shannon needed Remy’s vote because he did not have the votes to pass it, due – in part – to Councilmember Tyson’s unwillingness to disregard the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s concerns about the potential illegality of Shannon’s fake district proposal.”