Many of you are prison reform or prison abolition advocates, and I have a request for you today.

I ask that you sign a petition to the Ohio Parole Board advocating for the parole of inmate Willie Lagway. His parole hearing is in January 2023.

Willie Lagway has been imprisoned by the state of Ohio for 39 years. He committed and admitted to his crimes and was given an unusually long sentence. He has consistently expressed remorse for the crimes and used his time in prison to improve himself.

At San Francisco Airport I enjoy a filling lunch at the comfy United Club lounge. Relaxed, I then board a United Airlines nonstop direct flight for my 15th visit to Tahiti since the 1970s. I luckily have an entire aisle to myself and pass the time watching a recruiting poster masquerading as a movie called Top Gun: Maverick and the far better genre-bending Everything Everywhere All at Once. Upon arriving at Tahiti International Airport in Fa’a’ā, I am greeted by Tahiti Tourisme and Mana Tang and Vanessa Alvarez, co-owners of Tiurai Tours, and driven to my hotel in French Polynesia’s capital.

Many consider contemporary Tahiti to be a paradise lost. Candidly speaking, the urban/ suburban sprawl of this French colony, stretching roughly northeast from Papeete to Mahina and northwest to Punaauia, does have many of the ailments of “modern times.”

"The Whale" is the story of Charlie (Brendan Fraser), a reclusive English teacher, living with severe obesity who attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) for one last chance at redemption.

When we meet Charlie, he’s in a kind of literal and emotional limbo: physical because his size prevents him from moving very well; emotional because of the enormous roiling grief he has towards his dead partner, Alan. He's full of guilt over Alan’s passing, guilt over walking out on a life with his daughter, guilt over all the things that might have been.

Unable to forgive himself for his own role in Alan’s death and deeply guilty about his desertion of his young daughter and wife Mary (Samantha Morton), Charlie begins to self-destruct through compulsive binge-eating. Unprocessed grief is the ground floor of everything for Charlie. He’s suffering from congestive heart failure, but maybe he’s really dying of the grief he’s never reconciled.

Almost all visitors to Columbus comment with surprise about the city’s dirtiness, trash, broken streets and sidewalks, confusion about parking, and uncontrolled vehicular traffic including bicycles and especially electric scooters.

With no recognized identity or documented history, I dub Columbus, Ohio, the United States’ “plague city.” Knowledgeable residents may first think that I refer to the city’s nationally high rates of racially and economically-linked infant and maternal mortality, or police murders (with judicial and City impunity) of unarmed young Black men. Or the incomplete, unknowledgeable, and too brief responses to Covid and tardiness with the measles outbreak now.

But my identification pertains primarily to the city’s unsafe and unsanitary physical environment. We hear little to nothing from the “mayor” or our unrepresentative city councilors about this, despite its dramatic contradiction to their unusually poor and out-of-touch sloganeering. Of course, “contradiction” is not a concept with which they are familiar.

We are joined on GreeGree #120 by ANDREA MILLER of the Center for Common Ground and RAY MCCLENDON of the Georgia NAACP.
They are chief architects of the astounding grassroots victories in Georgia 2020-2 for the US Senate seat now held by RAPHAEL WARNOCK.
These electoral landmarks turned on turnouts organized without help from the Democratic Party, which spent some $50 million on media advertising.
Much of that money lines the pockets of party consultants who are highly paid and often make kick-backs on the ads they place.
Yet as we hear from SUE DORFMAN, on-the-ground campaigns were forced to beg even for simple yard signs and door hangers.