Kids–try this at home! According to the Wilmette-based Dolores Kohl Education Foundation, Roy Coleman–Morgan Park High School physics teacher and recipient of a 1994 Kohl International Teaching Award–has a favorite experiment for bringing physics out of the classroom and into the home: “the toilet flush, [which] requires students, with help from their parents, to observe the results of flushing their toilet at home once a minute for an hour.”
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“Sometimes derided as showing the futility of social reform, urban renewal was never anything of the sort,” writes historian Arnold Hirsch in the new book Urban Policy in Twentieth-Century America. “The basic provisions of the federal Housing Act of 1954…copied those enacted in the Illinois Urban Community Conservation Act of 1953. Largely the product of the University of Chicago and its institutional allies, …[it] aimed to staunch the flow of blacks into the university’s Hyde Park community…. [Therefore] the charges so often leveled at the federal effort–that it neglected the poor population, that it was actually antipoor because of its demolition of low-rent housing and inadequate relocation procedures, that it simply subsidized those who needed aid least, and that it was transformed into a program of ‘Negro removal’–were hardly evidence of a plan gone awry. These were neither ‘perversions’ of the enabling legislation nor the inevitable, if unforeseen, consequences of bumbling ‘do-gooders.’ The results were fully intended and the law did exactly what it was designed to do….Poor people reaped only the benefit of rhetorical preambles and a whirlwind of bulldozers.”
“The more tightly the lens focuses on personal attitudes, the more nearly identical Farrakhan seems to notorious white bigots,” writes Northwestern political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. in the Progressive (April). “But if we are talking about political significance, things are much more complicated. David Duke has been elected to a seat in the Louisiana state legislature….The New York Times editorially linked Farrakhan to Ross Barnett and George Wallace. But Barnett was a governor of Mississippi and has a state park named in his honor, and Wallace was four times governor of Alabama. Farrakhan has no power or influence in our official institutions. He can neither make nor enforce any law or public policy. He has no constituency outside his own small, esoteric organization….Two wrongs, to descend to the level of the Times’s pieties, certainly do not make a right. But in this case only one of them has the potential to lead to genocide. And we can see from the current crime bill, punitive welfare reform, wanton police terror unrestrained by legal redress, etc., which one it is.”
