Lead sentences we never got past, from Earth Day ’90 Chicago: “Environmental journalists, in an act of upping the anti on scientific literacy, have the unique position of bonding the widest variety of subjects…”
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“Young black males make up only 5 percent of the city’s population but are the victims in 34 percent of the murders,” reports Barnaby Dinges in the Chicago Reporter (February 1990). “The yearly murder rate for young black males was 152 for every 100,000 people (between the ages of 14 and 29) between 1987 and 1989. Hispanic males were slain at the rate of 102 per 100,000, six times the 17 per 100,000 rate of whites that age.” Dinges quotes an unsurprised Police Superintendent LeRoy Martin: “Society, not the police department, has been remiss in not addressing the needs and problems of this exploding population group with limited job skills…. Police can only control killings on public ways, and most murders occur in peoples’ homes among friends and family. The root causes of these killings are poverty and drugs.”
Don’t you feel a lot less safe as soon as you get to New Buffalo? “March 1 is known as ‘Abolition Day,’” reports Lifelines (January-February 1990), newsletter of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. “Around the country, demonstrations, pickets, educational events and a breaking of the fast will mark the 143rd anniversary of the date in 1847 when the state of Michigan became the first English-speaking jurisdiction in the world to abolish capital punishment.”
Extreme caution, from the Institute of Certified Financial Planners: “As we enter a new decade full of economic and financial uncertainties, only one thing is absolutely certain: we survived the 1980s.”
