Lost, somewhere east of Lake Calumet, in the summer of 1914: a one-quarter-inch-tall bluish-green plant, Thismia americana, member of a mostly tropical family of plants. According to Linda Wetstein of the Morton Arboretum, writing in Conscious Choice (Summer), “Local botanists are organizing to conduct a disciplined search for Thismia americana on August 10, 1991.” No one has seen a live specimen in 77 years.
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“Where do Catholics get their principle that workers are entitled to form unions?” asks Initiatives (March), newsletter of the National Center for the Laity, headquartered on East Superior. “The right to a union is not, as some might think, derived directly from Jesus’ teaching: ‘Laborers are worth their hire.’ Instead it comes from a natural right. Workers have the right to associate for collective bargaining because the human person, social by nature, arrives at a proper end in solidarity with others. The right to organize a union protects a person’s claim to normal physical and moral growth….[But] many Catholic leaders preach the right to unions, but don’t practice it…. Initiatives once quoted a Catholic hospital memo which called a union an ‘outside third party.’ The hospital administrators seemed oblivious that the same label applied to their out-of-town, union-busting consulting firm.”
“Nationalism–black, Jewish, ‘queer,’ or whatever–is a highly corrosive ideology that results in yet more nationalism, causing groups to break up into subgroups and sub-subgroups in an endless process of conflict, disintegration, and decay,” laments Daniel Lazare in the Village Voice (May 7). “We see it in the gathering antagonism between blacks and Koreans; in the split between blacks and Jews (which is really a rift between black nationalists concerned about community control and Third World struggles, and Zionists whose first concern is Israel); in the tensions over race and gender in the gay community….Anti-racism has given way to a pseudo-leftist chauvinism of the oppressed that teaches that racism is not racism when directed at the dominant group. Amazingly, Marxism has come to be identified with every silly form of nationalism to come down the pike, when in fact Marxism’s record is clearly the opposite. Marx and Engels taught that the workers have no country, while Rosa Luxemburg renounced nationalism so thoroughly that she refused even to support Polish independence.”
Vacation American style. Illinois Aviation (May/June) records this as one of 1990’s “Ten Most Memorable Record Flights”: “Under the call sign ‘Hello America!’ Dr. Hypolite Landry and copilot Clifford Rice visited all the ‘lower 48’ state capitals and the District of Columbia. The two departed in a Cessna 172 from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on August 6 and completed this ‘fastest time’ record of 13 days, 7 hours, and 42 minutes in Jackson, Mississippi.”
