Opinion

Come on, you grumps of Springfield — it’s time to quit complaining and get seeds in the ground. There’s a movement afoot to make this a better place, one yard at a time. The idea is that every seed plants hope, every plant adds life and beauty, and every planter becomes part of the civic […]

When my friend Debora heard that I was moving to Illinois, she took me aside to offer me advice about Midwesterners. “You can’t expect them to act as friendly as Southerners,” she said, “but when they are nice, you’ll know they mean it.” At the time, her counsel mystified me. I never thought of Debora […]

One of the worst aspects of the global corporate culture is that it routinely pits one group of workers against another in the corporate pursuit of dirt-cheap labor. This has come to an ugly head in recent years with the mass offshoring of U.S. call-center jobs. These workers answer questions that American consumers have about […]

I now have to travel the 30-or-so miles to Girard to take flowers to my friend Elizabeth Brown, who’s living at the Pleasant Hill Village nursing home. She was organist at our church for many years, and though she likes the care she’s getting and the facility in which she lives, she always talks about […]

Well, well. George W. Bush is getting a political comeuppance — and it’s coming from conservatives. At issue is his enthusiasm for the liberty-busting USA Patriot Act, a little shop of autocratic horrors that the Bush administration rammed through Congress under cover of the 9/11 terrorist attack. Several of its most intrusive, anti-democratic provisions expire […]