This Illinois state senator offers words of wisdom with implications he has not realized, I’d say.
“You can put all the laws on the books, but you can’t ever prevent anyone from committing crimes,”
said Emil Jones III, referring to cemetery regulations imposed in the wake (no pun intended) of the Burr Oak burial fiasco.
But what he says is applicable to gun laws and marijuana prohibition, among many other currently criminalized instances. He’s an incipient libertarian?
Two thoughts 2/3 through the Sacred Triduum:
1. Foot-washing on Holy Thursday is a liturgical loser. Liturgy is theatre. You have to see it or hear it or smell it or touch it or taste it, none of which 99% of pew-sitters can do with foot-washing, which is hidden from their view in any church I have been in. You can do it yourself, of course . . . if you’re into that sort of thing.
2. Ditto venerating the cross on Good Friday. It really calls for more talent as liturgy (theatre) than most parishes can muster, and what do the hoi polloi do while waiting to do this medieval thing, besides listen to “Were you there when they crucified my lord?” or “Amazing Grace,” which are 19th-century sentimentalism run riot?
Let’s hear it for low mass on Sunday and a nice, calm thoughtful sermon.
This fellow is now at an Arlington Hts (IL) parish but spent his first 17 years as a priest on the Spanish-speaking Southwest Side:
“What I learned at Epiphany and St. Mark’s is, you meet people in the streets. I did my most effective ministry at 11:30 at night talking with gang bangers, or in Mt. Sinai Hospital’s ER — not on Sunday morning. The people who come to Mass on Sunday, to a certain extent, are going to be OK. They’re staying close to the fold. They need to be nourished and challenged, of course.
“‘Mission’ is meeting people where they’re at and presenting Jesus in a way they can understand. Creating an atmosphere where people feel safe enough to be honest with themselves and God. Let’s just get to know the Lord in the best way – in the sacraments.”
He has an older priest as mentor (“ spiritual director”), which would be very important.
Shooting baskets, doing homework, taking classes and playing pool, Ping-Pong and video games are among the activities offered to at-risk youth from the Austin neighborhood at the Peace Corner, 5022 W. Madison.
Now they can do it in a new $1.6 million facility April 9. The 75,000-square-foot building, still smelling of paint and new construction, has a basketball court, offices, a lounge area, a computer lab and a large dividable classroom. The project was funded through private donations.
Not to mention the newsworthiness of catching a white guy in Oak Park.
OPRF High School people are well-advised to give proposed lunch-time campus lockdown some careful thought. Major, major changes are involved.
Much of the issue with a closed campus is related to space. The campus has been open since 1971 and the cafeterias and other areas might not be equipped to handle the extra students who typically leave, officials said. Likewise, [Principal Nathaniel] Rouse said there is also the possibility, but not a guarantee, that more students interacting might cause more discipline problems.
“Because you have more individuals inside the building, that means the infractions are going to increase,” Rouse said. “Infractions not just necessarily related to violating lunch privileges, but infractions in general. When you put everyone back in the building, and you have the wonderful demographics that we do, the different cultures, the different ways our students interact, you are going to have more, for lack of a better word, friction.”
In any case, what’s on the table is looking like Prohibition of the ’20s, whose enforcement leads to more problems than it solves.
Rich people’s money is for giving away, especially in taxes, says this fellow, a syndicated columnist — “The American ruling class is failing us — and itself” — without even a nod to the power his ilk has about what happens.
Whole column is a paean to rich people’s altruism — he fails to mention Carnegie and the libraries — as if editors and columnists of a certain stripe were not at least equally the whip-crackers. Not to mention rich people who own newspapers etc.
Also as if capital invested in money-making (i.e. job-producing, economy-enrichment) schemes weren’t our (economic) salvation.
The column is a rumination but manages to slip this in while discussing shrinking tax rates for the rich: “And you wonder where the deficit came from.”
I wonder where the chutzpah comes from.
(Eat the Rich is PJ O’Rourke’s book, FYI.)
From Rochester, with good riddance:
When Rochester City Schools Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard departs to take charge of Chicago’s public school system, he’ll leave behind a largely broken school district with dismal test scores, shaky finances and a fractured relationship with teachers.
This Haitian fellow has a history?
This Obama is not the one we elected:
The Barack Obama we’ve been seeing lately is a different personality than the one that made a miracle run to the White House in 2008.
Obama.2008 was engaging, patient, open, optimistic and a self-identified conciliator.
Obama.2011 has been something else — testy, petulant, impatient, arrogant and increasingly a divider.
Look, annoy Cocky Locky and you get his dander up. Lese majeste and all that. It goes with the autocratic territory.
Blithe Spirit 