Dept. of overdeveloped ethics. “Growing food is one of those areas where, at present, our moral intentions are ahead of our practical abilities,” writes Jean Blackwood in the Animals’ Agenda (January/February). “When I’m poisoning squash bugs and harmless bystanders, blasting aphids with insecticidal soap, or stomping blister beetles by the hundreds, I don’t feel like a very authentic animal rights person…. There is no kind way to kill. There are no shelters for unwanted blister beetles.”
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“If [city planning commissioner Valerie] Jarrett is willing to be open, we’re on the brink of a wonderful new era,” Jackie Leavy of the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group tells David Moberg in The Neighborhood Works (April-May), commenting on the decision to divide the city into seven “neighborhood planning districts.” But “if they’re going to repeat the mistakes of the past and do it top-down rather than honor planning from the bottom up, I don’t expect it to go very far. There’s a philosophical issue: Is the city writing plans for the neighborhoods or is the city supporting the neighborhoods writing plans?”
“Would term limits return the citizen [politician] to the legislature?” Not likely, writes Sangamon State University political scientist David Everson in Illinois Issues (April). “The career of the average state legislator today is about 10 years….In a legislature with term limits professional politicians would continue to predominate, but they would be even more fixated on higher office because of their inability to plan a long career in the General Assembly. The only sure way to get back to a citizen legislature is to mandate a return to biennial sessions and reduce the incentives for full-time politicians by cutting legislative pay, benefits, and resources.”
