We welcome letters. Please include your full name,
address, and telephone number. We edit all letters. Send them to Letters, Illinois Times, P.O. Box 5256,
Springfield, IL 62705; fax 217-753-3958; e-mail editor@illinoistimes.com.
JACKSON POEMS, GENTLE AND AWARE
I wanted to send a note in admiration of the poems by
Jackie Jackson. I received a 2007 Liberty
Takes a Break [collection of Jackson poems
published by Illinois Times] from her daughter.
What a wonderful collection! The poems seem to
address all my issues — our issues? —death, destruction, and
moment-to-moment joys. And more than that, they sound gentle and aware;
caring for the planet, child, self, and family; passionate.
I constantly wonder how to balance art, internal life
and external life, earth’s beauty and power, and the anger of war and
destruction.
I’m touched. Jackie seems to honor the inner
and outer realms with grace, humor, and clarity.
Thank you for printing these and for inviting these
poems into being.
Carolyn Mecklosky
Waterville, Vt.
BIG OIL TOOK $610 FROM YOU
In the last year, oil companies have taken about $610
in extra profits from every American driver, hurting working families and
draining our economy. Now the oil companies are using their record profits
to launch multimillion-dollar ad campaigns to push for more drilling, while
neglecting to mention that opening our beaches to drilling won’t
lower gas prices.
The Energy Information Administration reported that
drilling has increased 75 percent since Bush took office, but gas prices
have shot up over 250 percent during that same time. This pattern
will not change. The bottom line is that drilling only benefits Big
Oil, Bush, and their allies in Congress, not the American people.
The only way to provide relief to consumers from high
gas prices is to provide them with choices other than Exxon or Shell. We
need to embrace American ingenuity and innovative technologies such as
plug-in electric hybrids that will create jobs, drive the economy, and
break our addiction to oil once and for all.
Saroni M. Lasker
Aurora
THE BAD LIFE INSIDE TAMMS
Imagine being alone for 23 hours a day, seven days a
week. Imagine no telephone calls to family. Imagine eating alone, praying
alone, and communicating to others by yelling through a door. Imagine the
near constant loud sounds of the mentally ill men, also suffering this
fate. Imagine being in this condition and not even knowing how long you
will stay or what you can do to end your confinement. This place is not
myth. For about 260 people, this is their reality. This is what life is
like inside the Tamms C-MAX super-maximum security prison in southern
Illinois.
It opened in 1998 and was originally built as a one
year “shock treatment” for short-term incarceration, for men
who commit certain disciplinary infractions while in other state prisons.
No one at Tamms is sent there for their original crime. However, over half
of the men at Tamms are there under the vague criteria of
“administrative segregation;” decisions to send prisoners to
Tamms are not open to review.
Although meant for short-term incarceration, over one
third of the men have been at Tamms for a decade, at huge costs. Taxpayers
spend approximately $90,000 a year to incarcerate one man at the Tamms
C-Max prison. Prolonged isolation is considered to be a form of
psychological torture by the United Nations and many human rights groups.
The strain of long-term isolation makes many men break down.
Self-mutilation, suicide attempts and mental illnesses are common at Tamms.
The lack of phone communication and lack of public transportation to the
prison shatters many family relationships.
It is vital that incarceration is, at least, humane
if not fully rehabilitative, as most men from Tamms return to our
communities. The conditions of solitary confinement have and will
continue to irreparably disable people who survive it. We must agree that
violating public decency and prolonged isolation are poor public policy, as
it foregoes the possibility of returning prepared, productive citizens back
to society.
To this end, Illinois House Bill 6651 will provide
strict criteria for transfer eligibility. Prisoners will be told why they
are being sent to Tamms and given a hearing. HB 6651 will prohibit
prisoners with mental illness from being sent to Tamms and ensure careful
and necessary review so that the original one-year limit would apply to
prisoners with no further infractions. Call your state representative and
show your support for HB 6651 and fundamental human rights of all Illinois
citizens.
Bonnie Fortune
Tamms Year Ten
Campaign
Urbana
STATE PAYS 24 CENTS A MILE
By legislation per-mile medical transportation
reimbursement by the state was reduced to 24 cents in 2002 and has remained
that ever since! The federal reimbursement rate is now 50.5 cents! This
means that if the present administration wasn’t trying to balance the
books on the backs of the poor then personal transport providers could have
risen out of debt and many commercial providers would not have gone out of
business. The National Family Caregivers have old statistics that Illinois
alone gets $11 billion in free healthcare from family members.
I have written to the governor and legislature about
this since 2002 but have never heard a word back. Gas has been predicted to
rise to $5 per gallon which means that we will be selling our houses just
to get our loved ones to medical treatment needed to preserve their
lives.
Patrick Jordan
Rankin, IL
CHRISTMAS IN AUGUST
In any religious or national movement, over time
there develops a consensus as to what is to be believed, of what is
“always” true, of what the children are to be taught. But in
time even the best of such conventional wisdoms is no longer effective or
up to the new knowledge and needs of a new time. Our culture shows signs of
seeking to resurrect from such conventional ways of seeing reality, urged
by religiously influenced people and by patriotic Americans. But we have
ages of tradition and convention that need to be respectfully approached
and questioned.
Like Herod, the Roman-appointed king of the Hebrews
in the Christmas story (Matthew 2:1-12), we have a lot invested into who we
see ourselves to be. The story depicts Herod as wanting to kill all Hebrew
babies for their perceived threat to his power. It is outdated parts of our
“conventional wisdom” we are so protective of. Some of us are
very determined, regardless of new knowledge and needs, for ways and
beliefs to stay as they have been for many generations. To such a mindset
the idea that the sacred has arrived, and is saying there needs to change
in some of our strongly held interpretations of life, is a frightening
thing, but historically that has been the role of healthy religious
influence.
The danger of sacred stories’ being so often
rehearsed is that we no longer see to what a radical viewpoint they
actually challenge us. Many use the Christmas story as a comforting support
of long-held traditions. It was hardly so originally. For example the
“wise men” who brought gifts were strangers, foreigners,
unwelcome pagans. For the Jewish author of Matthew, the birth of Jesus was
the opposite of kosher. The story of “wise men” as
uncircumcised priests of impure origin being depicted as the most welcomed
guests of the child Messiah would have been first heard as startling
unclean sacrilege. Matthew’s author right up front presents the
arrival of Jesus as a scandal against accepted religious tradition. We can
realize that, in such story form, the sacred is saying we need to accept
and value people that we have been taught to reject.
There are people or “other” groups, no
matter our religious or cultural upbringing, whom we feel a need to have
nothing to do with. The story says that now these are ones who actually
have “treasures” we need to humbly accept. Divorced and
single-parent families in today’s culture may have experience and
skills that “all together” families do not have. People of
different colors and ethnicities are obviously making contributions to the
arts and politics and life that our comfortable Caucasian communities never
thought possible. Gay persons may have something to teach about love to
straight couples struggling with high divorce rates and personal
unhappiness. People of other nationalities know more about how to get along
in the world than perhaps we Americans do right now. The
“other” who may have been the enemy of old is now the one, the
sacred story says, we need to not just tolerate but fully honor, embrace
and include.
So such a familiar sacred story as Christmas can
still live today and strike a new chord in the individual and collective
human heart. It still has the power to bring forth its more original
intent, to expand our boundaries of acceptance and inclusion of all humans.
And it challenges us to take off remaining crowns of superiority,
discrimination, and aloofness toward any who are different from the
majority.
Jim Hibbett
Riverton
This article appears in Aug 14-20, 2008.
