— Oct 2113 gathering of eagles, Julian Middle School, concluded —

A panel of students were given the floor as yet another quizzer of the legislators. The meeting became a middle-school version of show and tell. The first question, a good one if not something for which the legislature has direct responsibility (did the students know that?), was about the high cost of college.

The Oak Park senator punted: Legislators are aware of the problem and are working on it.

Sen. Lightford referred to MAP (Monetary Award Program) grants, the state’s financial aid program for “neediest” students attending Illinois colleges, according to a state site, but not explaining that, assuming her audience recognized the term.

Rep. Lilly offered a remarkable claim: “I passed legislation for grants for junior college,” adding an equally remarkable suggestion: “I’d like to put on the table, [we should] get parents involved. We need to…

In Matthew 8.23-27, Jesus wakes up in the boat to the cries for help of his disciples, chides them for their lack of faith, and then “rebuked” the wind and waves, who entered on a “profound calm.”

This is Jesus meek and humble of heart whom we prayed to as kids in the ’40s? Or is that Jesus the product of zealous preaching of one kind in reaction to another kind?

In either case, we have here Jesus as Matthew remembered him, speaking with authority, being anything but meek and humble in ordinary sense. He spoke and acted with authority, was a man of strength, a leader of men.

Personally, I’ve had enough of the meek and humble Jesus in my life as to make him inhuman and distant, which is why I find myself taken with him as, face it, an authority figure, which he was — someone I can…

Returning to the October 2013 gathering of eagles, at Oak Park’s Percy Julian Middle School . . .

A CLAIM mother asked about the funding of mandates, what the state requires and the district pays for.

“It depends on how you define mandate,” said Sen. Lightford. It had become “very popular” to refer to compulsory kindergarten as unfunded, for instance, she said..

(The Oregon School Boards Association and Confederation of Oregon School Administrators did so as recently as two and a half years earlier, favoring kindergarten but regretting it as unaffordable.)

She said she was “lukewarm” about the problem and preferred a “happy-medium” solution.

Wanting not to put the questioner “on the spot,” the Oak Park senator, our hero for this series, asked for examples of “significant” added costs of a mandate.

The questioner turned to ask the superintendent, who wasn’t there! It was an important gathering, he had said earlier…

The next gathering of legislative eagles was a solemn-high affair, an organized interrogation of legislators by parents at Oak Park’s Percy Julian middle school on Oct. 9, 2013.

The Oak Park schools superintendent cheerily greeted the assembled “citizenry” who had come for the “festivities,” which had been many months in the planning.

He welcomed the legislators — two senators and two representatives — who had come to be questioned by three schools-connected women, probably each a mother of a student.

He further noted “gridlock in Washington” as a problem, ignoring the recently concluded Springfield version, in which legislators were locked in combat about state pension reform. Indeed, they had only recently received their two months’ late pay checks, with interest, after a judge had ruled the governor out of order in cutting them off to get them to stop disagreeing with each other.

Additionally, the citizenry had not materialized as expected…

Galewood, September 2013, continued . . .

Questions and complaints continued — about illegal immigrants using scarce resources while not paying taxes, declining property values in their racially threatened neighborhood, lack of a public library “we can take our kids to,” a North Avenue pawn shop.

“Residents need a voice,” a woman said. “We are stuck. You have to listen.”

The airing of North Avenue problems prompted a call for comment from the alderman, Deborah Graham, who had sat quietly through it all in the audience.

Graham had been a state representative for Oak Park and Austin from 2002, when she defeated an Oak Park woman in a challenge election following her loss to by a coin toss — not kidding — to break a tie some months earlier.

After the second election, more than a hundred uncounted ballots were found in an Austin polling place, perhaps held in reserve…