And when we run out of landfill space here on Earth, this may be your new home. In Adler Planetarium’s new “Space Transporters” exhibit, the visitor is “transported” to another planet, sees a three-dimensional view of its surface, and learns about its atmosphere and how much he or she would weigh there. The exhibit is funded by Waste Management, Inc.–whose vice chairman says, “It’s a great way to demonstrate that Waste Management, Inc. is concerned not only with the environment here on Earth, but on other planets as well.”
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“The city of Chicago can’t plead that they’ve lacked money. In truth they don’t have concerned public officials or specific plans that they can carry out” to deal with AIDS, Randy (And the Band Played On) Shilts tells the Chicago Reporter’s Jennifer Juarez Robles (March 1988). Until mid-1987 the city’s AIDS office had only one staffer; it still has no permanent full-time director. More than $250,000 in state, city, and federal funds has been returned unspent, while community groups contracted to do education and prevention work have had to seek bank loans because city payments were so slow. Chicago is not close to having a strategic plan for combating AIDS, although health commissioner Lonnie Edwards called for one as long ago as May 1986. Ironically, these failures will hurt minorities most. “The ascendancy of black, political power in Chicago came at the same time of this disease,” adds Shilts, “but that same establishment is going to send thousands of black people to early graves.”
Message from Montgomery. “Of all America’s cities, the best is not San Francisco, for obvious wacko reasons; nor New Orleans, where everyone feels the necessity to strike a pose for tourists; nor hustling Atlanta nor New York City, which a friend at the New York Times describes as a Yuppie Calcutta. The best of the bunch,” says an editorial in Alabama’s Montgomery Independent (December 10, 1987), “is grimy, gritty Chicago. . . . It is a point of pride, then, that the new mayor of Chicago . . . an Alabama-born black named Eugene Sawyer . . . holds the highest elective office achieved by any other Alabama black. . . . Sawyer was not the typical Black Belt youngster whose mama took in washing and whose daddy followed a plow. His father was an undertaker and an interior decorator. In the South, if Sawyer’s Chicago charges don’t know it, the two vocations that automatically confer autocratic standing are burying and preaching.”
Maybe it won’t snow next winter. According to U.S. Representative Charles Hayes, a report of the Northeast-Midwest Institute concludes: “In fiscal 1980, federal low income energy assistance covered 40 percent of the total heating needs of the poor and elderly. Last year’s deep cut in the program means that only 16 percent of such costs will be covered this year.” Hayes adds that the Reagan administration has proposed further cuts for next year, which would slice Illinois’ share by $20 million and reduce that percentage to 13.
