Wednesday, April 17, 2024, 7:00 PM
Author, filmmaker, and activist, John de Graaf established his reputation decades ago with his now classic films Affluenza and Escape from Affluenza. His groundbreaking documentaries like Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America and What's the Economy For, Anyway? Why It's Time to Stop Chasing Growth and Start Pursuing Happiness continue to inspire. 

If you plan to attend on Wed Apr 17, email Chuck@simplyliving.org to receive more info on the film.

Happy 420!!! There is much to celebrate this year. Full legal adult use in Ohio! Home grow! Possible rescheduling, better still descheduling! Reproductive rights! Ohio accomplished much in 2023 that we can crow about in 2024.

But we didn’t do it alone. They say many hands make light work. It takes a village. In truth, to arrive where we are today required thousands of our fellow citizens coming together over a span of 50+ years. What we did last year, began in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and so forth.

And, we climbed proverbial mountains to get there. The tears. The fears. The heartbreaks. The impediments. The injustices. Yet, here we are, still standing, better than we ever were before.

Despite countless obstacles, we should still show gratitude for what we have and what we gained. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to us, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to our advancement, we should include all things in our gratitude.”

In 1927 Sergei Eisenstein – the wunderkind of Soviet cinema, whose 1925 Potemkin swept the globe – was reportedly pressured to cut Leon Trotsky out of October, aka Ten Days that Shook the World, the film he was commissioned to make celebrating the tenth anniversary of the 1917 Revolution, by Joseph Stalin, who was then engaged in a faction fight with Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Almost 20 years later, after Stalin had butchered Lenin’s Central Committee, Eisenstein directed Ivan the Terrible to great acclaim, winning the State Prize of the Soviet Union – Stalinskaya Premia. However, Eisenstein’s sequel, Ivan the Terrible, Part II, was banned – the betrayer of the Russian Revolution realized that Eisenstein intended Ivan to be a not-so-subtle veiled reference to Stalin. Eisenstein never lived to see the release of his masterpiece in the late 1950s after Stalin’s death and Khruschev’s “thaw” opened the USSR up, because, it’s believed, that the Kremlin put so much pressure on the filmmaker that the 50-year-old suffered a heart attack and died in 1948.