Friday, September 1, 6:30pm
Goodale Park Gazebo, 120 W. Goodale
At 10am today, footage of the state-sanctioned murder of Ta'Kiya Young wss released to the public. This event will give space for you to express your frustrations while demanding accountability.

Sponsored by People's Justice Project

#JusticeforTaKiya

Staff at the Pickerington Public Library are organizing to form a union. If successful, they would become the third library system in Central Ohio to unionize through the Ohio Federation of Teachers (OFT). In 2021 and 2022, library workers at Worthington Libraries and Grandview Heights Public Library formed unions in affiliation with OFT. Fairfield County Library workers are also organized through the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

On August 10, the Pickerington Public Library staff formally asked the library’s Director and Board of Trustees to voluntarily recognize their union. Signed union cards were presented to the State Employee Relations Board (SERB) as well, the office which will count the vote. At least 73 percent of staff in the library system, spanning two locations, had signed cards indicating their support for the unionization effort.

Columbus activists held a banner at 161 and High Street in Worthington last Saturday, August 26 to demand freedom for Julian Assange. Amnesty International says: "The US government’s unrelenting pursuit of Julian Assange for having published disclosed documents that included possible war crimes committed by the US military is nothing short of a full-scale assault on the right to freedom of expression."

Julian Assange is currently being held at Belmarsh, a high security prison in the UK, on the basis of a US extradition request on charges that stem directly from the publication of disclosed documents as part of his work with Wikileaks.

The time left to save freedom of the press is short. The UK has agreed to extradite Assange to the US. If he is tried and convicted in an American court, all publishers will be open to prosecution with the possibility of a life sentence in prison for printing information that the US govt doesn't like.

What publisher would risk that? Assange's "crime" was publishing truths that the government wanted concealed from the public -- a heroic act.

As I trek toward the Great Unknown, as life’s struggles seem to intensify, some odd questions keep recurring.

Art — what is it again? Why does it matter? How does it matter? What does it mean to be “good” at it?

That last question, in particular, can cut like barbed wire — especially if you’ve been swimming all your life in a sense of mediocrity, having learned that the Temple of Art is the home of the blessed elite. There’s Mona Lisa, then there are scribbles and doodles: baby stuff. End of discussion. Your grade is C-minus. Welcome to consumer culture.

So why do I care about art? Indeed, why now? As I grow older (by which I mean “old”), I refuse, refuse, refuse to retire: to quit writing, to quit believing I’m doing something that matters . . . to quit believing that humanity is collective and, at the deepest levels of our being, we all participate in this collective. This is what I call art, even though I don’t know what I mean by that. Or at least I don’t mean something that’s simple and certain, or even particularly serious — at least not in an academic sense. Serious can be fun.