Illinois is third among states in pesticide use, applying 54 million pounds per year of herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, defoliants, growth regulators, and soil fumigants (after California with 152 million and Florida with 55 million), reports the National Center for Food and Agriculture Policy (Pesticides and You, Spring).
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Identities R Us. “Race and class intersect in different ways for young people than they do for their parents,” says Mike Perez of Oakland, California, quoted in the Chicago-based The Neighborhood Works (June/July). “You have white kids coming in saying they are just as much a ‘nigga’ as any black kid since they come from the same ‘hood.’ You have Asian kids dressing hip-hop and talking [African-American dialect]. Other black kids talk and act ‘white’ in the eyes of their friends. Identities are very fluid, but it’s what being young is about now.”
“Part of the point of using the word queer in the first place was the wrenching sense of recontextualization it gave,” write Lauren Berlant of the U. of C. and Michael Warner of Rutgers in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (Volume 110, Number 3).
Baaa! Lena Woltering on the biblical image of Jesus as a shepherd, in Call to Action News, quoted in Salt of the Earth (July/August): “A shepherd is needed only when there are no fences. He is someone who stays with his sheep at all cost, guiding, protecting, and walking with them through the fields. He’s not just a person who raises sheep. Though our bishops consider themselves ‘tenders of the flock,’ most are nothing more than mutton farmers. They build fence after fence after fence, keeping the flock within sight so they don’t have to dirty their feet plodding through the open fields.”
