Bylaw number one: This union will enthusiastically support the immediate firing of all members who hide or burn mail. “Of course, lighting a load of mail on fire is hardly the best solution to the problem,” opines David Futrelle in In These Times (April 18). “What we need is not sabotage, but stronger and more creative unions.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Not so scattered. Number of scattered-site housing units built in majority-Latino census tracts since 1987: 357, with another 652 planned. In majority-white census tracts: 89, with another 24 planned (Scott Burnham in the April Chicago Reporter).
“Developing open space is exactly what many members of the sustainability movement are looking to do,” complains Kim Nauer in the Chicago-based The Neighborhood Works (April/May). “A number of the movement’s leading thinkers are promoting communities that must be built from scratch–ignoring the possibilities that sit, unused, in the inner city. This is unfortunate, considering that many city neighborhoods have an infrastructure that is a sustainable planner’s dream. Life’s necessities are within walking distance, or reachable with easy access to public transportation. Mixed-use zoning is prevalent, providing job opportunities, shopping and social activity within a neighborhood’s boundaries. Housing is high density, but human scale. And the existing buildings are frequently solid, architecturally interesting and even historically significant.”
“No one I heard or read suggested that maybe killing himself was a sensible act,” writes James Krohe Jr. in Illinois Times (April 14-20), “that by shooting himself in the head [Kurt] Cobain might have resembled those stout heroes who show up at hospitals having sawn their own mangled arms free of grain augers with penknives to save themselves from bleeding to death….There is no obvious reason why we should assume that a depressed person does not see the truth of his or her situation clearly. Indeed, one of the reasons so many depressives are also creative is that they see more than the rest of us, not less. That is why they are important to us, why we expect them to bear that burden of seeing for us and why we mourn them when they are gone.”
