Friday, June 7 @ 3pm, Columbus Arts Festival “Word Is Art” Stage, Bicentennial Park

West African griots are storytellers, memory-keepers, and historians of families, communities, and societies. On June 7, Cleveland’s Papa Assane M’baye, founder of TamTam Magic, will sample this oral tradition, with drummers, before a live audience at the Columbus Arts Festival. This event is co-hosted by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance and Columbus Free Press.

Contributors to the Ohio Migration Anthology will read from their work, and the Columbus Free Press and Ohio Immigrant Alliance will invite the audience to additional community storytelling opportunities. 

Leah is joined by ANDREA MILLER of the Center for Common Ground, RAY MCCLENDON of Communities United, MAYA VAN ROSSUM of the Green Amendments campaign, and HOLLY MOSHER of Why Do You Vote, who shows us a wonderful video of folks explain to us why, in fact, they vote.

KENNY BRUNO chimes in with cogent questions about the impacts of Gaza and other key issues in the upcoming election.

DENNIS BERNSTEIN, renowned host of KPFA/Pacifica’s Flashpoints, tells us about the great LARRY BENSKY. Emmy-winning DAVID SALTMAN adds to the eulogy, as does KPFK Chair Tatanka Bricca, who also underscores the need to become a voting member of the Pacifica Radio Network.

VINNIE DE STEFANO updates us on the Julian Assange case.

WENDI LEDERMAN urges us to think about Gaza and how it might affect the upcoming election.

RICK GOODWELL urges us to make sure we and our neighbors are, in fact, registered to vote.

RAY LUTZ updates us on the crisis in our voting machines.

PAUL NEWMAN, MIKE HERSCH and MYLA RESON get into the struggle of a southern high school and statue-defenders intent on being named for Confederate traitors.

That’s right! And it turns out that it’s the Canadian Pension Plan who owns 98 percent of Encino Acquisition Partners who were awarded the rights to frack Valley Run Wildlife Area and Zepernick Wildlife Area in Ohio! Now, Canadians are nice people, but we must say - “Stop destroying our environment!”

If we can end, let us say . . . slavery — the legal “ownership” of other human beings — can’t we also end other great social wrongs? Can’t we also end war?

As I ask this question, I am suddenly bludgeoned by an unexpected irony, since the United States ended slavery through a brutal war, with a death toll of perhaps three quarters of a million people.

But it was worth it, right?

Well, that’s what history tells us. It has essentially “made peace” with the war and now celebrates the moral objectives of the winning side, with all its carnage forever reduced to a statistical abstraction.

The topic of this column is the abolition of war — the urgent necessity of doing so — so, how odd it feels to begin by referencing a “good” war, which ended an enormous wrong . . . or at least forced the wrong to morph into a different, less legally blatant form of racism known as Jim Crow. (And when Jim Crow was defeated by the nonviolent civil rights movement a hundred years later, the nation’s racism morphed into such things as the “war on drugs” and an expanding prison-industrial complex.)