Going out the door every day entails some degree of risk, but we do so knowing that to live otherwise, crippled by caution, would be not to live at all. Evanston RoundTable, Oct. 14, 2020 Sometimes it seems the universe has it in for us, and I’m not talking the current state of civic affairs. I’m talking about the countless ways one can come to harm, “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” Probably way more. Space is completely unsafe, of course. We know this from all the cheesy sci-fi movies we watched as kids, in which asteroids and meteorites and Martian death rays rained down on luckless spacemen like driven snow. Today’s astronauts don the equivalent of hazmat unforms before they venture out to fix so much as an errant door knob. Even here on earth things can get dodgy. I became painfully aware of this recently when I cracked my skull and badly injured two toes—at the same time! I had been crouching over the bathroom floor, cleaning errant hairs and dust balls (how do they manage to congregate so abundantly?), and in true no-good-deed-goes-unpunished fashion, stood up and smashed my head against an open cabinet … Continue reading →

Are we in for a renaissance of art and commerce, a Great Reset in the 2020s? Maybe. Let’s hope so. Evanston RoundTable, Aug. 19, 2020 The bad news just keeps rolling in. Now it’s the post office in trouble. Mail is piling up in warehouses, households are going weeks without postal service, employee hours are being cut, there’s talk of privatization. What’s next: sell off the national parks? Ben Franklin, call your office! A report by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company in June said one-quarter to one-half of small businesses might have to close in the face of a continued retail slump. You can see it in the increasing number of “For Rent” signs posted on vacant shop windows. Many industries, such as airlines, hotels and restaurants, could take years to recover, according to the Sun-Times of Aug. 14. With ridership down and funding uncertain, public transit systems “teeter on a precipice,” said a scary headline in last Sunday’s New York Times. Kids and even college students are being deprived of needed social interaction with their peers. No one, not even the experts, seems confident of the best course for schools. Worse, the Centers for Disease Control reported that … Continue reading →

Evanston RoundTable, March 18, 2020 Hey Bunkie. Are you stuck in existential despair? Terrified the end times are at hand? Certain the latest outrage from Washington, Springfield, City Hall or your next-door neighbor will push you over the edge? Well, listen up, Bunkie, because I have a word of advice. Actually two: Look around! Yes, you can work your way out of many a slough of despond merely by picking your head up and taking note of the big, big world around you. Here’s how: Step 1: Turn off your device. Step 2: Go outside. Step 3: Look around. So simple. Yet many folks are incapable. You see them peeled to their phone, prisoners of their TV, half dead from inactivity and insipidity. Or they’re outside moping along, staring at their shoes, mired in pity, barely coping, riven with self-doubt and despair. Given the state of the world, it’s understandable. But hey—the world has always been in a state! Take the last thousand years: we’ve had war (some 2,300, according to the Wikipedia site “List of Wars”), famine, plague, massive death. Just in the last five generations we’ve endured two world wars, the Great Depression, the Korean War, Vietnam War … Continue reading →

Evanston RoundTable, July 16, 2020 With its excellent bike lanes and trails, Evanston is an eminently bikeable city, through which I have been riding some 10 miles almost every morning in a kind of loop around town that takes in some of our most beautiful and historic sites. The ride starts at the Ecology Center (built in 1974 to provide environmental education to Evanston schoolchildren and families), and heads east on the Ladd Arboretum trail that parallels the North Shore Channel. At Green Bay Road, near the giant “Silver Wings” sculpture by Ferdinand Rebechini, I swing over the Channel and loop west to Twiggs Park (with Harbert Park, Traffic Guy’s favorite), named after­ William H. Twiggs. According to the Shorefront Legacy Center, Mr. Twiggs came to Evanston in 1884 from Iowa, attended Garrett Seminary and for many years operated his own printing press in downtown Evanston. He also was a City clerk and held important roles at Ebenezer A.M.E. Church. The park, which has its own bike repair station consisting of tire pump and various sized wrenches, ends at one of the community gardens located on either side of McCormick Boulevard and Bridge Street. Across the street is the Dar-us-Sunnah … Continue reading →