Op-Ed
There are few things more important than our homes. Alongside providing our shelter, homes are where we make memories with friends and family — where bonds are formed and strengthened.
Unfortunately, the right to a home in America is under threat. Rents have skyrocketed, homelessness is rising, and home ownership is increasingly unattainable for most Americans.
There are multiple causes, but one culprit stands out: classic Wall Street greed. Massive private equity corporations and hedge funds are buying up homes by the thousands — houses, apartment buildings, and mobile home parks alike — and then jacking up rents.
There are few things more important than our homes. Alongside providing our shelter, homes are where we make memories with friends and family — where bonds are formed and strengthened.
Unfortunately, the right to a home in America is under threat. Rents have skyrocketed, homelessness is rising, and home ownership is increasingly unattainable for most Americans.
There are multiple causes, but one culprit stands out: classic Wall Street greed. Massive private equity corporations and hedge funds are buying up homes by the thousands — houses, apartment buildings, and mobile home parks alike — and then jacking up rents.
Trump certainly harbors visions of himself sieg heiling from the supreme podium, as did Adolph Hitler in Berlin, 1936. But there are crucial differences.
Hitler’s hatreds of blacks, Jews and other untermenschen were horrifying. Likewise, Trump’s Reichmarshall, JD Vance, has already issued nasty warnings against visitors coming from “shit hole countries.” Even if they are certified competitors in the upcoming Games, Vance says, they’re here on shaky ground.
Why are so many Americans, especially young ones, depressed, bipolar, overweight, gender-stressed and "on the spectrum"?
Explanations range from endocrine disrupters, forever chemicals and plastics in the environment and food to electromagnetic fields from cell phones and microwaves to helicopter parents. That's before we get to Covid's forced 5-year social isolation and fetal and childhood exposure to prescription drugs. (For example, SSRI antidepressants contribute to bipolar diagnoses according to some research).
Myth #1: Infidel does not mean "Westerner" or a "non-Muslim". The term refers to disbelievers, people who do not believe in God. It is also mentioned in the Bible, and it means the same in Arabic. Muslims refers to Jews and Christians as the "people of the book." Muslim men are allowed to marry Christians and Jews but not disbelievers or "kafirs."
Myth #2: While Sec. Pete Hegseth has his body littered with tattoos, he has never been a gang member, and no one accused him of aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and murder. Reason? He's a white man and neither Latino nor Black!
Life goes on, right? I’m not as certain about that as I used to be – or maybe I no longer understand the term “goes on.”
I’ve been pondering past decisions I’ve made in this life of mine – decisions of enormous impact, decisions that created my future, essentially out of the blue. Forty-nine years ago, for instance, I moved from rural, southwest Michigan to . . . ta da . . . Chicago. I’d been a back-to-the-lander for the previous four years, having transformed with many of my fellow boomers from antiwar activist and hippie to planet-saving environmentalist. I was also married, but that marriage – numero uno – fell apart and I found myself, in my late 20s, with my entire future in my hands. I loved gardening. I’d been raising barred-rock chickens. Every spring we made maple syrup. On and on. Love the planet, man.
But I found myself looking beyond the moment and knew I had a future to create – ooh, serious responsibility here. I knew I wasn’t meant to remain a farmer. What I loved was writing. And it was something I was good at. I also could envision only one way to make an actual living as a writer: journalism.
Prostitution is not the “romanticized fantasy from the movie “Pretty Woman,” US Attorney Steven D. Weinhoeft recently said after a federal grand jury in East St. Louis indicted two with operating five prostitution-front massage operations in Illinois and Indiana. It exploits and coerces women “into degrading subjugation” and violates the “rights of vulnerable victims across southern Illinois.”
Jianhong Hu Allbright of Indiana and Yalong Cao of a Chicago suburb face money laundering charges related to prostitution and other counts.
The fate of sex workers in Chicago has been grisly. Thirty-nine were killed during the 1990’s before they could avail themselves of the protection from street predators that online “dates” could sometimes afford. Key word, sometimes.
Sex workers in Chicago’s marginal neighborhoods were terrorized by four different mass murderers: Gregory Clepper—alleged to have confessed to killing 40 prostitutes—Geoffrey Griffin aka the Roseland Killer, Hubert Geralds and Andrew Crawford. Thanks to pimps and addictions, few women could stop working despite the lethal risks.
Let’s call it the human guessing game. There comes a point in life when we find ourselves playing it whether we want to or not. Hallelujah for a sense of humor. It gives (temporary) relief from the unrelenting unknown . . . of dying.
Yeah, I said it, not abstractly or politically, but personally. It’s not simply that “people” are going to die, or “you” are going to die. I’m going to die. I don’t know when. I’m full of determination, just shy of age 79, to stay alive and functional, but doing so ain’t what it used to be. Ouch. Simply standing up now takes the sort of effort I once exerted walking a mile. Our Hero (as I call myself) is functionally ebbing.
Change is coming! The basic term for this change is “death.” – certainly one of the most avoided words in the language, at least when the discussion is personal. Some people fortify their reaction to that word by embracing a certainty – religious or secular – about what happens next. Others, myself included, essentially embrace “wait and see,” but nonetheless grasp for fragments of possibility that occasionally spurt out of the unknown.