Harold Pinter was a prolific playwright and screenwriter. I enjoyed the 1960s films he’d written the screenplays for, The Servant and Accident, which were directed by that refugee from the Hollywood Blacklist, Joseph Losey. After being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Pinter’s rather heroic, 2005 noble Nobel Lecture dared to challenge the prevailing pro-war propaganda, excoriating the Iraq War. Although he was too sick to travel to Scandinavia, the hospitalized 75-year-old British man of letters videotaped his 46-minute frontal assault on U.S. foreign policy that was screened at the Swedish Academy. (See: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2005/pinter/lecture/.) Pinter did the best thing one can do with status, using it as a platform to be a scourge of the status quo, an implacable enemy of social injustice.

Earlier this year, at a Kroger on the far Southside, a store manager was undercover. And a customer, a middle-aged white woman wearing a pant suit, a COVID mask and a floppy hat, was about to the leave the store.

Suddenly the undercover store manager yelled “Drop It!” The white woman, who looked more Dublin than Southside, scoffed at first. But then spilled her plastic grocery bags’ contents onto the floor. Out came organic juices, dog bones, and makeup. Caught red-handed. She was marched by the manager to the customer service desk.

There, a security guard made her raise her right hand and sign a document. She said she would never shop in that store again and walked out a free woman. A Free Press reporter witnessed all of this firsthand.

The Open Shelter still is in need of groups that can provide sack lunches for those we serve every month; homeless men, women, children, and families.

We are in definite need of sack lunches for 9/22 & 9/28.

Due to increased demand, we can use sack lunches for any weekday but need sack lunch groups for the 1st Tuesday, 4th Thursday, and 4th Friday of each month in addition to any 5th Tuesdays or 5th Fridays.

Feel free to give us a call at 614-222-2885 or email us back if you can help or have any questions.

Many groups that have helped say it is a fun and rewarding activity. YOUR support can help fill the bellies of the 250+ homeless and marginally housed men, women, and children we see each weekday. Thank you!

Ta’Kiya Young – an unarmed 21-year-old pregnant woman – was shot and killed by local law enforcement for allegedly shoplifting. What many may not be aware of is that Kroger corporate – averaging $30 billion in annual profit since 2020 – has forgone shoplifting charges for several years now, and if caught by store security, those caught are asked to leave and never come back.

Curbing increasing gun violence, police-involved shootings, and shoplifting, has no good solution no matter how hard the community tries. But one thing we have learned from relatives of those killed by local law enforcement is that police shootings give our young people this attitude – “If the police can do it, then I can do it.”

But there may be an answer to police-involved shootings, but the GOP-besieged state government won’t allow this potential solution be approved for a statewide vote and thus decided by citizens themselves.