On the one hand, the decision is bad news for Grove City. It closes a longtime attraction, with employees and visitors who support local businesses.   But there is an upside.  The move leaves Grove City with a wealth of opportunities for growth. What should replace the racetrack you ask? Let’s consider at a few options.

How About A Park?

First up: a park.  Not just any park, but a multi-component park complete with paved walking paths, basketball and tennis courts, a dog-park, and playgrounds of swing-sets. Such area would benefit the community as it could be a central recreational zone in an otherwise unwelcoming area of commercial warehouses.

Yet, Grove City already has excellent recreation options such as the Big Splash waterpark  and the flower and herb gardens at Gantz Park.  So a new park might just be redundant.

A Mall?

Second idea: a mall.  Grove City residents now have to  drive to Easton, Tuttle, or Eastland malls for holiday shopping and Sbarro Pizza.  Building a mall on the Beulah Park site to a mall would provide more shopping options to the city’s residents, as well as give individuals in Morrow and Pickaway counties a closer shopping destination.

Yet, a downside to this plan is location. For a mall to succeed, it needs to be really close to a major highway. Beulah Park is a least five to 10 minutes from I-71 and the 270-loop.  Not nearly convenient enough for mall shoppers, or mall developers.
A New Grove City Downtown

A third possibility is to resurrect  the old Lumberyard Project  with its plan to build condominiums, restaurants, and shops in the heart of Grove City.  While the Stringtown Road has become the shopping hub for southern Columbus, development in the Grove City’s older, west-side remains largely stagnant.

Grove City should maximize the potential of its historic downtown area.

It already has several restaurants, a bakery, live theater, as well as a farmers market, a wine festival, and a summer concert series. Adding condos would attract young adults looking for a small town feel with large town job prospects.  And adding a few more  locally-owned restaurants and shops would appeal to people wanting to avoid the Applebees on Stringtown.  We’ve seen similar success with areas such as Westerville and Gahanna; why not also count Grove City in the mix?

These ideas are only the beginning.   Regardless of whether you think a park is useful or condos are over-rated, it is clear that gambling isn’t leaving Grove City; instead, city officials are throwing the dice to see what development program sticks.  And I, for one, am chomping at the bit to see what happens next.

As in life, there are no pads in rugby, and few moments to rest. Broken bones and black eyes are par for the course. That alone makes most people think we’re all a bit nuts to play this sport, and maybe we are.

In the best-case scenario we’re thought of as men’s men. And in more ways than one we may be that too.

Until a couple months ago I hadn’t played rugby for several years now. Part of why I stopped playing was that I didn’t feel the sort of camaraderie with my old team that I do now.

That was mostly because many of my old teammates, like so many teammates on so many different sports teams in my past, felt comfortable making the same tired old jokes about being gay or denigrating women.

And sadly, instead of telling them to stop, that I was offended, I quit.

But now, the rugby team I play for is part of the IGRAB league, the International Gay Rugby Association and Board.

And if I were gay that would seem obvious, however I’m a hetero man, playing in a gay rugby league because, even though it is defined in part by sexual orientation, it is somehow less filled with sexual politics than a straight league.

So what is it that in this day and age, where you would be hard pressed to find a sports league based on race, you still have sports leagues based on sexual orientation?

Most of my teammates have some experience playing on mostly straight sports teams. They said in that environment they usually felt they couldn’t be honest, and needed to test the waters before coming out. That coming out process is hard enough as it is, so to do it simply for a recreational sports team can be a tough decision to make.

Of course I can imagine what some of you are saying, well don’t ask and don’t tell.

But when you’re first getting to know someone, particularly in a social setting, like adult sport leagues, after talking about the weather, how long does it take before the conversation strays into the realm of work and more to the point, family.

And that’s the subtle, or maybe not so subtle, difference between the leagues. Joining a straight rec league generally means people will make the assumption that you’re straight.

With gay rec leagues there just doesn’t seem to be an assumption, whoever you love is all right.

So can we finally stop with sexual orientation being used as a political football, and instead just get back to playing some football?

The one conceit I’ll give is that for all of my talk about peace and love, it’s never alright to love the other team, especially not in rugby.

The U.S. constitution’s guarantee of Free Speech provides that government may not restrict Mr. Guillen’s opinions. However, that right does not extend to public reaction. After all, Mr. Guillen is the manager of the Miami Marlins, the home team in the de-facto capital of Cuban-Americans everywhere. So, in the immortal words of Desi Arnaz, Mr. Guillen “has some ‘splaining to do.” In fact, he may lose his job because of careless comments.

This curious episode might appear surprising to those who do not follow Cuban-American life closely. So let me explain. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 expressed the hopes and dreams of a people after decades of undeveloped democracy, dictatorships, corruption and graft.

Faced with significant income disparity between urban and rural citizens, progressive constituencies – students, intellectuals, and many professionals – supported change. Much of the population, including members of my own family, took part in the armed struggle fully believing the rhetoric that it was a democratic, progressive revolution.

These hopes were dashed after victory. The promise of a popular movement disintegrated into a totally unanticipated carnival of nationalization. Cuban and foreign property was confiscated. The new regime introduced Soviet-bloc cultural symbols, outlawed of religion, and incarcerated real or perceived enemies of the Revolution. Many of those who challenged the established order were executed by firing squad.

This radical and unexpected re-routing of the Revolution left many Cubans disillusioned. They felt those who held political and military power had betrayed the Revolution. What developed was not the vision of progressive democracy they yearned for and deserved. Because of all this, Cuban society, even some families split along deeply divided ideologies.. More than a million Cubans have left the country since the Revolution and most of them have ended up in the U.S. When Cuban-Americans refer to the now-retired president of Cuba it is never “Castro,” it is always “Fidel.” It is all very personal.

Thus Cuban-American discourse in Miami is the result of seething resentment nurtured during those same 50 plus years. Cuban-American Miami tolerates no departure from the abhorrence of anything Castro. There is little flexibility.

Only recently have some within the community begun to question the logic – and even the ethics – of these long-held values. Without perpetuating the debate of who is to blame for Cuba’s curious history, some Cuban-Americans are growing tired of this terribly long conflict. They, and I among them, yearn for reconciliation.

On a recent trip to Cuba, I saw thousands of people attend a Papal Mass carrying signs and wearing T-shirts emblazoned with pleas for Cuban reconciliation. My own beliefs forbid me to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to those pleas. I find it nearly impossible to maintain the practiced rancor of my brothers and sisters in Miami and elsewhere. I, too, hope for change.

But, until change happens, Ozzie Guillen will have to deal with the reality of life in Miami. No business can ignore its customers’ opinions whatever those may be, and professional baseball is most certainly a business.

The Miami Marlins were poised to celebrate a promising season, but the reality remains that the team needs to fill the seats in their new Marlins Park stadium, which ironically is on the edge of the neighborhood known as “Little Havana.”

At this point, Ozzie Guillen may be unable to overcome the threatened boycott of Marlins games.

Kasich arrived in Washington as a congressman soon after the Gipper entered the White House and enthusiastically joined the crusade to cut taxes and chop federal spending. Thirty years later, Reagan’s gone but Kasich’s still at it.

These days, however, Kasich’s fate seems tied more closely to that of an unlikely partner, Democratic President Barack Obama. That’s not just because Kasich and Obama played golf together last June and then hooped it up at the NCAA tournament in Dayton during March Madness along with British Prime Minister David Cameron.

If results from a recent Quinnipiac University poll hold up, Kasich and Obama could join two other odd couples whose political successes tell a lot about the independence of Ohio voters and the three top issues in any high stakes elections – jobs, jobs and jobs.

Reagan himself was part of one unlikely pair, matched with Democratic Gov. Dick Celeste. Democratic President Bill Clinton and Republican Gov. George Voinovich formed the other odd couple.

Reagan captured Ohio and zoomed to re-election in 1984 while Celeste was leading the Democratic Party through nearly a decade of political dominance.

Democrats bracketed Reagan’s re-election by capturing all statewide executive offices in 1982 and 1986.

Reagan won re-election after Ohio’s unemployment rate had dropped to 9 percent, high by historical standards, but down from a high of nearly 14 percent during the recession of the early 1980s.

Then in 1996, genuine boom times boosted Clinton. When Ohioans went to the polls that November, the jobless rate was at a nearly invisible 5 percent for a sixth straight month.  Clinton won Ohio for the second time and earned four more years in the White House. The Democrat’s victory came just two years after Voinovich won re-election by a whopping 72 percent, a modern record.

It’s too soon to know for sure if voters will treat Kasich and Obama the same way, but last month’s poll results for Ohio show movement in that direction.

In a trial run for the November election, Obama defeated Mitt Romney, the likely GOP nominee, 47-41 percent .

Kasich doesn’t face re-election until 2014 but good news from the poll should help him with his ambitious legislative agenda, including higher taxes on shale drilling and a personal income tax reduction.

On Kasich’s job performance, voters split, with 42 percent approving and 42 percent turning disapproving. That’s not so hot unless you compare it to a year ago, when just 30 percent approved.

Ohio’s jobs-jobs-jobs situation has come a long way since then. Unemployment has dipped from nearly 9 percent to 7 and a half percent.

On top of that, the federal government reports  Ohio gained more jobs in February than any other state.

Kasich so far hasn’t endorsed anybody for president but he’ll undoubtedly hit the campaign trail for the Republican candidate. The governor, however, also will be rooting for more economic good news, even if it keeps Obama in the White House.

You might be like me – a hardheaded dude that waits for a health issue to get out of hand… and then you run to the closest Urgent Care.

Well, that was the “old” me.

The new me turned 50 and decided to actually start getting some of those medical tests that are recommended at the half-century mark.

A few months back I went to see our family doctor for a physical… got a blood work up done and my very first prostate (sigh) DRE, digital rectal exam… or as I used to call it, the “finger in the exit” test.

Getting your prostate checked is something that guys usually don’t talk about. If we do it’s probably connected to a joke… of the locker room humor variety.

Trust me on this, it’s no joke to be a 50 year-old guy and be told that you have prostate cancer. Especially when I didn’t have any symptoms at all. Still don’t.

Here’s the deal, you don’t actually just go in and get a digital rectal exam and before you have a chance to pull your pants up your doctor blurts out, “Here’s something interesting, you sir, have cancer.” No, the journey to finding out that you have this stuff is a process that starts with a couple of tests.

Actually in my case, the DRE didn’t raise a red flag at all. My blood work did the heavy lifting. My blood was tested for my PSA level… PSA stands for “Prostate Specific Antigen” something that gets elevated in your blood if your prostate is acting wacky… wacky as in, an infection, it’s enlarged, or, as in my case, cancer.

To really check the ole prostate a man needs to get a digital rectal exam AND a PSA test… you see, neither test is 100% reliable on it’s own but as a combo these tests can save your life.

Recently the PSA tests effectiveness has been questioned by the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force… let me see, since PSA testing has been in use deaths from prostate cancer have decreased between 35 and 40%, according to what study you choose to believe. I don’t know what the Preventative Services Task Force is but my elevated PSA was the only hint that I had something going on. That “hint” led to a biopsy that identified that I have cancer raging in my prostate and that the cancer is more than likely only a few months from escaping the gland and landing in my lymphatic system or bones… radically worsening my odds of survival.

Most prostate cancers are slow growing… that fact that my prostate is pretty much saturated with cancer means that I’ve probably been carrying this disease around for years. So, while I’m not a doctor, please consider my recommendation to not wait until you turn 50 to get tested. Start at 45… better yet, asks your doctor to test you at 40. Your doctor will probably tell you that only one man in one hundred between the ages of 40 and 50 gets prostate cancer.
If you are that one in a hundred with prostate cancer it’s much better that you find out sooner than later.

About 1 in 6 U.S. men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their life. In the U.S., about 217,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer each year, and 32,000 die.

Early detection is the key. Statistically speaking, the sooner you catch cancer and treat it, the better yours odds of survival are…

My family doctor told me something about the world of health statistics that I’d like to pass on to you. You are your own statistic.

- And, you need to take care of you… eat right, exercise, drink plenty of water, get plenty of sleep, don’t smoke, don’t stress, and please guys go see your doctor and get that prostate checked out.

Michael Ivey is a WOSU Commentator, writer and filmmaker from Westerville.  He is in the last week of his treatments.

The protest coincided with other national demonstrations, focused on the rising trend of privatizing public universities and the rising cost of tuition.  To the first point, protestors chanted slogans such as “O-H-I-O corporate greed has got to go!”  The OSU protesters denounced some of the university’s proposal to priviatize parts of the college community, such as campus parking.

On this issue,  the students’ anger is well placed; privatizing pubic institutions such as OSU ultimately hurt student interests.  The issue is not that universities are becoming more like businesses; they have always operated like a business – exchanging  tuition money for classes.   But the more OSU bows to private investors, the less input students, faculty, and staff hold over their school’s operation.  And students have a right to be upset when corporate interests influence how their tuition is  spent.

However, the students’ second complaint about increasing tuition costs is not as strong.  When chanting the slogan “education is a right”, students argued that the as a right, education should be affordable.  Yet they confuse the issue of right versus choice. Protestors correctly argue that the more tuition costs, the less likely students are to afford the choice of college. This is a valid concern.

But saying education is a “right” misplaces the students’ responsibility to make choices.  For whatever reasons, the protestors made the choice to attend OSU; and by making that choice, they accepted both the benefits as well as the financial burden of being a student.

There have always been financial differences across universities. Some schools are more expensive than others. And if OSU wants to increase tuition, that’s its choice.  True, as the largest state school, OSU should keep tuition rates affordable, since higher tuition could drive away students.  But that simply is a matter of bad business . . . not student rights.

In the end, the financial aspects of education continue to remain a treacherous battleground. Students will always call for lower tuition; administrators will always argue for more money.

The bigger issue to keep in mind in this financial climate is not so much the cost of education, but where educational dollars are going.  Tuition at OSU is high, but that money does more than pay faculty salaries.  It supports recreation facilities, concerts, campus movies, student clubs, and much more.   All of this extra stuff does little to promote the actual purpose of higher education – to learn.

Perhaps in the future, the protestors slogan shouldn’t be “education is a right,” but instead “education is an education – ditch all this other stuff!”

The way things are going, we’ll probably have green daffodils by St. Patrick’s Day. The flowers and buds aren’t the only early arrivals. Presidential candidates, especially Republicans, have started popping up, too. They don’t usually start camping out in Ohio until the leaves are falling and the Buckeye Battle Cry is blasting out of Ohio Stadium.

That’s because every four years Ohio is the nation’s biggest general election prize. No Republican has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio. In the 20th century just two Democrats – FDR in 1944 and JFK in 1960 – made it without Ohio.

We usually leave the winnowing out process of primaries and caucuses to states like Iowa and New Hampshire. They don’t really count for much in the general election.

This year it’s different. Republicans all want to give President Obama the boot but they can’t settle on who’s best suited to do the kicking.

Super Tuesday’s is just a few days away and Ohio’s the biggest prize of the 10 primaries and caucuses. The winner will get a bump in delegates, earning bragging rights for capturing a state that reflects the nation as a whole.

Ohio’s the nation’s general election battleground because we’ve got everything– big cities, small towns, farms, unions, union-busters, Republicans, Democrats and, of course, lots of independent voters.

Ohio Republicans come in all varieties, too. We’ve got social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, Tea Parties and even members of that vanishing Republican tribe, the moderates.

Republican leaders across the state are sending mixed signals. Sen. Rob Portman and former Sen. George Voinovich both back Mitt Romney.

Attorney General Mike DeWine actually has endorsed three candidates- first DeWine picked Tim Pawlenty, who dropped out. Next DeWine signed on with Romney. The attorney general didn’t like the message Romney was sending so now he’s backing Rick Santorum. Stay tuned.

Gov. John Kasich said nice things about Haley Barbour but Barbour decided not to run. Kasich’s not endorsing anybody.

The other two candidates in the race, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, also have Ohio backers. It might not help Gingrich, however, that his second ex-wife is from Ohio.

Republicans don’t like to take advice from Democrats but all the candidates probably are learning what John F. Kennedy famously learned when he won the presidency but lost Ohio to Republican Richard M. Nixon in 1960.

Huge crowds had turned out across the state, including in Columbus, for Kennedy. “Ohio did that to me—they did it there,” Kennedy said on election night as he held up his inflamed right hand, bare to the elbow, calloused and red from greeting voters.

Callouses aside, there’s only one thing certain about the Republican primaries. Whoever wins the presidential nomination will be back in Ohio, along with President Obama, when the leaves are falling and the footballs are flying.

Every city is a unique construct that is a reflection of the people who made it. But some cities are much more than that – they are symbols as well of something more than the people who live here.

Columbus is one of those cities as well.

Columbus is a created city. There was no city on the “High Banks opposite Franklinton at the Forks of the Scioto” until the Ohio General Assembly brought it into being two hundred years ago. The original capital of Ohio had been at Chillicothe and then at Zanesville and then back to Chillicothe all within the first decade of the state’s history. Yielding to pressure to locate the capital in the central part of the state, many potential towns had been examined. But in the end the Ohio General Assembly decided to do something rather bold and daring.

In this new state on the edge of the frontier – in a place where only a few years earlier Native Americans had lived for generations – Ohio decided to build an entirely new town to be its symbolic center of state power and authority.

For more than two centuries it has been just that. From modest beginnings with a two story brick statehouse the State of Ohio has become a place where historic things happen with a rather surprising regularity. And Columbus has been in the center of it all.

When the state decided it needed a new statehouse in the 1830’s, it did not build a common building. In the middle of a state with few roads of any kind, Ohio began to construct a building that was second only to the US capitol in size and grandeur. When the National Road came to Ohio, it passed through Columbus. When Ohio built a canal system and a rail system and a highway system, Columbus was linked to all of them.

The state built massive institutions to care for people in need – the blind, the deaf and the mentally ill and put them her in Columbus. It built one of the most progressive penitentiaries in America and put it “near” Columbus – “way out in the country” at Spring Street and Neil Avenue. And it built a one of the world’s great learning communities – The Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College – now The Ohio State University – and placed it in Columbus as well.

One might think that all of these great institutions as well as libraries, cultural institutions and a fabric of truly livable neighborhoods might produce some memorable people. And they have.

The list of truly remarkable people who have called Columbus home for a little while or for a lifetime is a rather long one. But as much as a city shapes its people with its streets and its structures and its sights and its sounds, the city is also a reflection of the people who have made it their own for more than two hundred years.

As we look back on this rather special birthday, we can see how the dreams we have had have defined who we have been. And they still are. That is the magic of Columbus and Ohio and America. We are and always have been a people reinventing, rediscovering and renewing ourselves. We are a restless people who have done many wonderful things. And we are about to do many more.

Columbus, Ohio, on its two hundredth birthday continues to be a radiant symbol in the center of a great state of the people who call it home.

Eleven earthquakes over the past year – that’s what’s going on.

While fracking may sound like ringing cash registers to the ears of gas executives, it sounds more like Carol King to the rest of us – “I feel the earth, move, under my feet…”
Shale gas drilling, as President Obama referred to it during his State of the Union speech, is in boom times right now. And like most politicians he wants to capitalize on it. Of course it’s possible that boom is coming from someone’s house blowing up.

According to endless YouTube videos of homeowners lighting their tap water on fire, but more importantly, according to several Duke University researchers, who completed a peer reviewed study in 2011, fracking has been linked to water pollution, and other researchers say the disposal wells, like those near Youngstown, have been linked to earthquakes and exploding homes due to methane build-up.

Perhaps rebranding it as shale gas drilling will make the flammable tap water taste better, especially since the drilling isn’t the problem, it’s the use of water to pressurize the ground below us and force natural gas out of the earth for collection – not to mention the then storage of that polluted water.

The move for greater domestic fuel production, spurred on by turmoil in the Middle East, has consequences. For politicians and industry leaders those consequences include increasing already astronomically high profits and using a small portion of them to, ahem, support candidates.

However for the rest of us those consequences hit more than just our wallets.
Those consequences include disasters – like the gulf coast oil spill, too many dead West Virginia coal miners, the Japanese nuclear plant meltdown, and, those eleven Ohio earthquakes.

But maybe you’re thinking, aw, he’s just a crazy environmentalist picking on Big Oil.
I’ll admit, even renewable energy has repercussions. Wind and water turbines kill birds and alter fish migration patterns, solar arrays take up a significant amount of space, and those potato-powered-clocks just aren’t going to solve all our energy needs.

Maybe those consequences aren’t quite the same as creating oceanic dead zones or turning soil radioactive – but they’re still consequences.

So why not power everything with renewable energy? Why not forget about oil, nuclear and especially fracking? Because our ability to produce enough renewable energy doesn’t exist yet.

But it will if we choose to change the status quo.

I believe the answer is to focus on lowering energy consumption through a combination of carrot and stick methods, rewarding low consumption and penalizing higher consumption. Until industry and individuals learn to control their energy appetite we’ll never satisfy our needs, and those hazards of fossil fuel production won’t go away, they’ll just creep closer and closer into our own back yards.