This week I’m discussing transportation with my Roosevelt University students in my online SUST 210 Sustainable Future class. Today I used three modes of transportation by 8:30am here in my hometown of Joliet, IL.
First, I drove my daughter Esmé and her school chum Claudia to kindergarten at our neighborhood elementary school, which is 1.1 miles from our house. But because it wasn’t raining, we parked a few blocks away and walked up to the door, so we could get a little exercise and some fresh air. Amazingly, the girls skipped along the sidewalk, even though it was a cold and blustery Friday and they had to wear their winter coats. Kid energy at 7:45am — it’s truly impressive.
After walking back to my car, I considered my options: drive henceforth to my favorite coffee shop in downtown Joliet, about two miles east? Or zip home first and ride my bike? I chose the latter, because my 45-year-old body desperately needs exercise, any exercise, and it would take me only a couple more minutes to get to my destination. (I’m way too cheap to get a health club membership, so I get my sporadic workouts away way I can.)
So I pumped up the tires on my 1972 Schwinn Varsity and rode down the long hill to the Des Plaines River, crossed the Ruby Street bridge and waved to the I & M Canal as I did so, locked up my bike in front of Jitters, and fired up the laptop, a steaming mug of excellent java close at hand.
It is a particular privilege of an academic like myself to perform this series of tasks and call it “work.” Plus, I can take pleasure in supporting the local economy, and anticipate additional (free) exercise on my strenuous uphill ride back home later this morning.
After my sandwich break today while telecommuting from the Joliet Public Library’s Black Road Branch location, I took a postprandial stroll through the marsh at the Rock Run Forest Preserve, which is just to the west of the library.
Song Sparrow (Cornell Lab of Ornithology)
Heard one of my favorite sounds of spring: the three-part call of the song sparrow, one of the most eloquent of North America’s songbirds. He might have an understated appearance, this little brown songster — but what a voice! Here’s some info on this aptly-named species, Melospiza melodia, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, where you can hear the song yourself and learn more about its biology.
Better yet, get outside where some woods meets a lake, a river, or a clearing, and you’ll probably spot a song sparrow perched on a shrub or a small tree. Or, like me, hear it first.
Today’s the last day of winter here in 2013. Not a bad opportunity to go outside and look around, if I can carve out some time in between helping the kids with homework after school, running errands, grading papers, and making dinner. But it’s worth trying!
Here’s a short essay, my second contribution to the City Creatures blog project, that riffs on the value of kids, urban nature, and everyday encounters with the wild in our yards, alleys, and neighborhoods. I like the ending the best, for it features a poem by my 5th-grade daughter, Lily.
When we entered Azteca de Oro banquet and dance hall, though, I sensed instantly that it would be a memorable evening. Friendly greeters directed us to a comfortable table right next to the dance floor, which thrilled my two girls. A boisterous Mariachi band was in full voice from the stage at one end of the hall, while at the other end happy folks mingled and laughed at a well-stocked bar.
And the food! Long buffet tables full of stewed chicken, sautéed beef and vegetables, rice, refried beans, tortillas, salads, and sweet treats beckoned, and I’ll admit we weren’t shy about asking for seconds.
But the best part of the evening was the music and dancing, of which there was a glorious abundance. Musical acts of all stripes and colors entertained the swelling crowd, including the inspiring gospel of the Mt. Zion Tabernacle Choir, the witty folk/pop/rock stylings of singer-guitarist Dan Droogan, and the hot salsa of the Sangre Latina dance band.
This joyous music from musicians black, white, and brown filled the hall as dozens of children took to the dance floor to run, skip, chase each other, play hide and seek, and make new friends. Soon the hall’s lights came on in their full resplendence, and the adults joined the kids in what became one of the most festive scenes I’ve witnessed in a long time.
The shuttered Joliet Correctional Center, July 2011. State Sen. A.J. Wilhelmi led a tour to revive interest in the facility (Photo: Matthew Grotto, Chicago Sun-Times)
But the spoken word, both Spanish and English, was part of the program, too. Local politicians, including Will County Board members Reed Bible of Plainfield and Denise Winfrey of Joliet, and community organizers took the stage to decry the prospect of an immigrant prison here in Joliet. As I contemplated their message of critique and concern, I reflected on the irony of our location. Just a stone’s throw from us on Collins Street was Illinois’ ultimate penal icon: the Old Joliet Prison, decommissioned and deteriorating since 2002.
Yes, Joliet might someday make some money from its undeniably long prison legacy, though that civic identity has always been problematic for us. But not, I hope, through the construction of a for-profit immigrant “detention center” that is dedicated to the pocketbooks of its potential owners (in this case, Corrections Corporation of America) rather than the welfare of its detainees — most of whom will be our Hispanic brothers and sisters.
No, folks — we don’t need another prison here. Certainly not one focused on pieces of silver rather than social justice. Joliet’s ongoing flirtation with such a prospect should be closely monitored and vociferously protested by all people of conscience.
A shorter version of this article on Sunday, 18 march 2013. Also see this 20 March 2013 op-ed piece, “Make Joliet a City of Jobs, Not Jails,” by Mark Meinster of Warehouse Workers of America.
Midwest Generation’s Joliet 29 Power Station (photo: Matthew Grotto, Chicago Sun-Times)
After all, you’ve owned the coal-burning Joliet and Romeoville power stations since 1999, which practically feels like yesterday. That’s hardly time enough to implement industry standard pollution-control upgrades as dictated by the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and other annoying environmental laws written by people overly fixated on sulfur dioxide emissions or airborne particulate matter.
Burning coal generates electricity for us, which we love, and quite a bit of money for you, which you need. Hey, power company executives gotta eat, too, don’t they? After all, electricity production isn’t a charity endeavor — that would be (gasp!) socialism.
Midwest Generation officials testify to the IL Pollution Control Board, 29 Jan 2013, at Joliet Junior College (photo: Matthew Grotto, Chicago Sun-Times)
But making a profit in your business is tough these days, what with your outdated and inefficient power plants in Will County spewing so many pollutants that require “scrubbing” and various “mitigations.” Some of your chief critics — like Citizens Against Ruining the Environment, the Sierra Club, and the Illinois Attorney General’s office — don’t get that. They just keep whining that your coal plants are old and dirty and unhealthy.
C’mon, already. A little dirt never hurt anyone, except maybe a few finicky armchair environmentalists. You don’t hear the tens of thousands of working class and minority citizens living downwind of your coal plants complaining, do you? And is it really such a big a deal that you haven’t figured out what to do with those toxic coal ash waste piles you’re adding to on a daily basis?
I would remind people that you did a pretty nice thing last year when you closed those two legitimately old coal-fired power plants on Chicago’s Southwest Side — the Fisk (built in 1903) and Crawford (1924) stations. For most of thirteen years after you bought them, you studiously ignored longstanding protests by neighborhood environmental watchdogs, ultra-liberal aldermen, and grandstanding green organizations. But once you finally determined that those old-timer plants weren’t going to turn a profit anymore if you installed their required upgrades, you quickly and decisively shut them down.
As for eventually complying with these new environmental regulations on sulfur dioxide? I’m grateful for your promise to get to it some year.
So shame on those ladies from CARE and those Sierra Club treehuggers and Pollution Board pencil pushers for badgering you with complaints, lawsuits, op-ed articles, scientific studies, mortality statistics, medical expense projections, probing questions, and other distractions. I wish they’d give a chronic and habitual polluter like you some credit for trying to reform itself. It’s obvious you’re trying, really trying.
Heck, by 2025 or so I’m sure you’ll have our Joliet smokestacks clean as a whistle.
I live in Joliet, about three miles as the smoke drifts from the Joliet 29 Generating Station on Route 6 operated by Midwest Generation since 1999. This is a revised version of my monthly op-ed column for the Joliet Herald-News. Check the Illinois Pollution Control Board’s website to learn how the regulatory process works and for information on Midwest Generation’s appeal for more compliance time as well as other pending issues.
In addition to my academic writing as an RU professor of humanities and sustainability studies, I also regularly write blog essays, newspaper columns, and magazine articles for a general audience. This helps to keep me out of trouble (as deadlines always roll around more quickly than I expect) and inspires me to keep my eyes peeled for interesting tidbits as well as think about the issues of the day, such as they are.
Here in my hometown of Joliet, Illinois, I’ve written a monthly column on environmental, political, and cultural topics for the Opinions page of the Joliet Herald-News, the local daily paper, since 2006. You can read my collected columns for 2010, 2011, and 2012 (as pdf documents) and check out the Joliet section of this blog for expanded versions of these columns since February 2011. For blog essays on a variety of other topics, see the Categories index at right.
Photo from Slickguns.com (“Best deals on guns and ammo posted by users”)
The trouble is, this Wild West-inspired idea isn’t very creative or original. And it’s bound to be expensive, what with paying for the security guards’ salaries, insurance, training, equipment, medical treatment (after in-school gun battles gone awry), and the occasional funeral.
Alternatively, we might consider other slaughter-reduction strategies that don’t involve turning our schools into quasi-military installations. Something like this one, which I just thought up. I call it A Kindergartner in Every Gun Shop.
One of the 51,438 gun retailers in the United States, as of December 2012. By comparison, there are 36,536 grocery stores in America. (Source: ABC News)
My plan’s a little different from the NRA’s approach in that its ultimate goal is fewer guns in circulation rather than more. Better yet, as a voluntary community service program staffed by five- and six-year-olds, it’s free.
Here’s how it would work. Every kindergarten class in America would be assigned to a gun shop, ammo dealer, firing range, or firearms expo somewhere in the community. Parents and teachers would develop a schedule for the students to monitor each gun-related location — with one kid at a time working a morning, afternoon, or evening shift — during business hours. Yes, each child would miss a little school every month, but the public-service experience would be mighty educational.
Customers would be required to do a fifteen-minute “kindergartner check” before buying guns or ammunition. This would involve looking into the eyes of the child, who then asks the adult a series of standard questions, such as “Do you know how many people in Illinois die each year from gun violence?” and “Do you really need yet another assault rifle for your collection?”
Assuming the customer still desired to make a purchase, the kindergartner would then run though some basic guidelines on gun safety, including “Don’t bring your gun to school and shoot at teachers”; “Never let your surly teenage son mess with your semi-automatic rifle after playing excessively violent video games“; and “Don’t point your pistol at your face to demonstrate the safety mechanism, because it might fail and you’ll blow your head off.”
Skeptics might quibble that elementary schoolchildren aren’t truly qualified to lecture adults on gun ownership and safety, since most of them are still learning their letters and numbers. (The kids, I mean.)
A gun show at Houston’s Convention Center
True, but kindergartners are really good at talking, not to mention the educational technique of “show and tell.” Some of them, particularly in crime-plagued cities like Chicago and Joliet, could offer real-life lessons in how their older relatives died in gun battles, or shot themselves accidentally, or got thrown in jail from blasting someone else. Such anecdotes can really liven up an otherwise dry lecture on firearm safety.
I see one drawback to my plan, though. Assume that the many thousands of gun dealers in our country are each open for 50-60 hours per week. Even with little Sally and Bobby pulling double shifts at their local bazooka retailer, those are a lot of business hours to cover.
I’m a little worried that at the rate that children are getting mowed down these days in our schools, we won’t have enough kindergartners to go around.
You’d think that Jessie Jackson Jr.’s stunning fall from political grace last week would have opponents of the Great Imaginary Airport in Peotone doing cartwheels of joy out in the cold autumnal winds of eastern Will County.
Jesse Jackson Jr., former US Rep (IL-2nd)
After all, the last significant public appearance by Jackson was way back on April 21st, when as a progressive-minded environmentalist he promoted Earth Day by sanctimoniously spading up soil in a Peotone-area cornfield while surrounded by media and bussed-in supporters from his 2nd Congressional District. His purported “people’s groundbreaking” was for what Jackson insisted on calling the Abraham Lincoln National Airport.
That grandiose name is telling, for it expresses Jr.’s once-vaulting political ambition even as it inappropriately cloaks a misguided boondoggle of an airport project in the image of one of America’s most revered presidents. It also signifies the longstanding logjam between Jackson’s Cook County-based Abraham Lincoln National Airport Commission (ALNAC) and the various governmental bodies of Will County, which understandably want to retain control over the airport’s construction and administration.
That’s why the folks of S.T.A.N.D. (Shut This Airport Nightmare Down) and other grassroots opponents of the Great Imaginary Airport should mourn rather than celebrate Jackson’s departure and ALNAC’s inevitable dissolution. Without the gridlock-producing squabbles over the airport’s construction funding, name, or design that Jackson’s commission helped create, airport proponents now have before them a slightly less congested path toward the project’s FAA approval — which hinges upon, among many other things, a unified governing authority for the airport.
STAND members hold up a sign at Rob Ogalla’s farm near Peotone, April 2012 (M. Bryson)
Note that I said “slightly.” That’s because building a functional political alliance in Illinois these days is about as likely as finding a Republican candidate with a chance to win Jackson’s empty seat in the forthcoming special election his resignation necessitates. Consequently, the fate of the Great Imaginary Airport will continue to be determined by a long war of retrenchment among various factions, some high profile and others little known.
On one side are Governor Pat Quinn and his army of IDOT technocrats, who have spent $29.8 million of taxpayer money thus far buying up 2,317 acres of land in the as-yet-unapproved airport’s footprint, and are now expanding their holdings through eminent domain proceedings against unwilling sellers.
Aligned with Quinn are various Will County leaders eager for a big fat construction project to provide local jobs, no matter how temporary those might be or whether the long-term prospects of the airport are viable.
On the other side are Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who strenuously opposes the project as antithetical to an expanded O’Hare; and United CEO Jeff Smisek, who is on record opposing a third airport for the Chicago region (a view shared by other major airline execs, as well).
Bult Field near Monee, IL (photo: FlightAware)
Joining their ranks are the politically weak but morally righteous grassroots opponents in eastern Will County, who correctly view the airport as a naked land grab by the state; and a guy named Jim Bult, who in a supreme example of irony already owns and runs a small private airport within the footprint of the GIA (Bult Field) and who to my knowledge has no desire to shut down his operation or take his neighbors’ land.
Sure, we’ll miss you, Junior, and all the free theater you provided us over the years. But as for the Great Imaginary Airport controversy in Peotone, the war grinds on.
It’s not terribly hard to get elected to political office these days. All you need are lots of money, well-heeled connections (preferably of the family variety), a dash of luck, and some clever campaign tactics to bring the vote home. Given this short and simple list, it’s a wonder more of us aren’t running.
First, you’ve got to have money. Lots and lots of it. The higher your office aspirations, the more you need. To get this money, you must make connections with people who have money.
Yes, you could work like a dog to earn money and cultivate your connections. But sheer luck is quicker and much less exhausting. Being born into a rich and/or politically connected family is a marvelously effective conduit to money and its siblings, power and influence.
If you’re considering families to be born into, check out the Romney, Kennedy, or Bush clans if you plan to compete for state or national office. In Chicago, I recommend having Daley, Jackson, or Madigan as your last name. Here in Will County, a good way to an Illinois General Assembly job is to be born a Walsh or McGuire.
Next, you need to figure out what you stand for on the great issues of the day. But don’t get bogged down by complicated stuff like foreign policy or pension reform. Given Americans’ long-established preference for style over substance, I recommend utilizing some generic yet appealing phrases such as freedom, opportunity, lower taxes, and the middle class. These are patriotic, battle-tested, and delightfully vague non-positions that appeal to folks across the political spectrum.
Finally, don’t forget to use tactics: practical campaign strategies carefully engineered to cultivate votes. Two wonderful examples of tactical mastery are currently on display right here in Will County.
Larry Walsh, Jr., IL State Rep. (D-86)
State Representative Larry Walsh, Jr. (D-86th District) definitely knows how to get his name out there. Appointed by a special Democratic committee last spring to replace Jack McGuire (who conveniently retired right after his election when he suddenly realized he just wasn’t up for the job anymore), Walsh is a relative newcomer to state politics with a high profile name. His dad, Larry Walsh, is the longstanding Chief Executive Office of Will County, a former state senator, and one of the area’s most recognizable politicians.
Larry Walsh, Sr., Will County Executive and former IL State Senator (D)
Wisely, Rep. Walsh, Jr. has designed his campaign signs to highlight his name in big bold letters — LARRY WALSH — while including the “Jr.” as a teeny-tiny afterthought that you can barely see without a magnifying glass. Even though most voters don’t know beans about Walsh, Jr. himself, they sure recognize his name. You can’t buy publicity like that — though you can be born into it (see above).
Reportedly suffering from mental and gastrointestinal illness, and politically buffeted by two different ethics-related inquiries, Jackson realizes that saying and doing nothing at all as the entrenched incumbent is the most expedient route to re-election while facing two overmatched and unknown challengers, Republican Brian Woodworth and Independent Marcus Lewis.
Sometimes in politics, small is beautiful. And silence can be golden.
A version of this essay was published as my regular op-ed column in the 28 Oct. 2012 edition of the Joliet Herald-News as “Illinois One Big, Happy, Political Family.”
The recent Chicago Teacher’s Union strike has exposed a long list of contentious issues in our K-12 educational system. The most troubling of these is the glaring inequity among our region’s public schools.
Nowhere is this more evident that in Chicago’s District 299, where a small percentage of children enjoy a world-class education at one of the District’s vaunted selective enrollment schools, while most students languish in understaffed and overwhelmed neighborhood schools surrounded by violence and economic stagnation. It also applies to our state as a whole, which is ranked among the worst in the nation by the Education Law Center in their recent report cards on public school funding equity.
This long-entrenched divide between the educational haves and have-nots not only mirrors the gulf between rich and poor in American society, it also replicates and reinforces these socioeconomic inequities. You don’t need a PhD to know that students from disadvantaged schools are less likely to graduate, go to college, and get good jobs, and (not incidentally) stay out of prison.
The source of this inequity is equally obvious. Since local property taxes provide the lion’s share of funding for America’s school districts, the resources (and therefore the quality) of the schools are directly proportional to the wealth of their community.
Schools in big-money districts have all the bells and whistles: small class sizes, good facilities, broad offerings in languages and the fine arts, and gifted learning programs. Meanwhile, impoverished districts limp along with overcrowded classrooms, out-of-date technology, bare-bones curricula, and overstretched faculty. (The metal detectors are state-of-the-art, though.)
This is not right. It’s not acceptable for a kid’s educational future to be determined simply by where she was born. And it darn well needs to change.
That’s because the fates of our economy and educational system are inextricably linked. When the economy tanks, we unwisely respond by slashing public education funding — cutting programs, firing teachers, closing schools. State and federal support for K-12 education has steadily deteriorated. But this misguided strategy merely guarantees more economic problems down the line, as we end up with poorly-educated citizens who are not college-ready and cannot compete for good entry-level jobs, let alone start businesses and become “job creators” themselves.
Here’s an alternative plan. Let’s invest in two critical pillars of K-12 educational excellence that every high-achieving school district in America takes for granted: small class sizes and rich curricular offerings. We do it by (1) hiring tens of thousands of teachers for overpopulated schools, and (2) building additional classroom space where needed. This initiative would put people to work by creating superior learning environments for our kids.
Instead of just emphasizing crowd control in classrooms of 30 children (the standard class size in Joliet’s District 86), teachers could do meaningful work with groups of 18-22, thus giving kids exponentially more time and quality instruction. Every school, not just the richest 1%, would have foreign language from kindergarten onward, full-time art and music teachers, a school garden linked to the science and health curriculum, and gifted education for students who need greater challenge.
Let’s get our professional educators and our tradespeople back to work building a better, more equitable educational system. There is no more important investment in our future that we can make.
So I pumped up the tires on my 1972 Schwinn Varsity and rode down the long hill to the Des Plaines River, crossed the Ruby Street bridge and waved to the I & M Canal as I did so, locked up my bike in front of Jitters, and fired up the laptop, a steaming mug of excellent java close at hand.
