Editorial: Seed money
House Judiciary Committee that receives his report concerning the president. Clinton may be guilty of lying under oath or obstruction of justice. But as the Jones case demonstrates, given the...
...Recently, 125 workers started harvesting tomatoes at a new industrial greenhouse in Buffalo, built on the site of a former steel mill...
...New technologies have been developed that have effectively lowered cleanup costs...
...Most are located in urban areas...
...Fat chance...
...But as the Jones case demonstrates, given the inherently political nature of anything touching on the presidency, it is as naive to presume a president's guilt as it is to believe his every protestation...
...They are not contaminated enough to merit detoxification under the stringent criteria of the nation's Superfund...
...According to HUD, the $50 million it plans to spend this year on Brownfields will leverage an additional $200 million in loans and loan grants, generating 28,000 jobs...
...Yet they are not "clean" enough to allay the fears of local government and potential investors over the costs of cleaning them up to meet present-day environmental standards, preclude potential future law suits, or overcome public skepticism about even setting foot on them again...
...Should we (despite Jesus' Commonweal 7 April24, 1998...
...And aren't these kids sick, not demonic...
...SEED MONEY The U.S...
...Jobs mean housing and family stability: a greener future all round...
...Finally, the independent prosecutor law must be rethought or allowed to expire...
...When that changed, owners sometimes chained the gates and fled...
...Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently went for the green...
...The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded more than 120 grants to municipalities to rehabilitate Brownfields...
...And aren't we looking at a kind of counter-God, and isn't that un-Christian, dualistic...
...It is almost always caricatured: little red guys with tails and horns and pitchforks, do we believe in that...
...Eminently...
...horror like the shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas, makes us sharply aware of how little we understand ourselves or what it means to be human...
...And state legislatures have written new statutes that, while enforcing adequate environmental principles, protect the public and shield investors from unexpected future costs, if the cleanup has followed rigid state-approved plans...
...After decades of neglect, however, something new is in the air...
...Among the other ideas that enter our tradition from non-Jewish sources is the Last Judgment...
...These parcels thrived in an era when industrial pollution was an accepted part of American life...
...Still, is it a good idea for HUD to get involved...
...The meaninglessness of it, the stupidity, the thought that this could happen to any of our children at any minute all of it terrifies--and our search for an explanation is a kind of nervous gabbing...
...Our ideas of good and evil are challenged when good and evil move out of the places we expect to find them, and we look for explanations: the ready availability of guns, television violence, abusive homes (though at this writing it isn't clear that either of the boys in custody came from such homes...
...millions of kids watch television and are consequently desensitized, but not that much...
...Seed money of this sort attracts other money needed to revive the languishing tracts, which in turn creates new industries and businesses where they are most needed: in poor urban centers...
...This idea--that there is such a thing as something that endangers us spiritually to the point of seeking our destruction, that the demonic is more than a metaphor for what we don't like--is extremely unpopular these days...
...Of course the availability of guns has something to do with it, but thousands of boys in the Midwest and the South hunt and never use guns violently...
...To reclaim and redevelop the nation's estimated 450,000 polluted "Brownfields," in February HUD proposed doubling the agency's current funding from $25 million to $50 million...
...Brownfields are mildly to moderately polluted forfner industrial sites that sit idle across the American landscape...
...They include old rail yards, steel mills, corner gas-station lots, and dry-cleaning shops...
...We look for the specific thing that might make one or more of these factors unite to light a fuse, and we talk about prevention...
...Didn't the idea of demons enter our tradition from the Zoroastrians and other Eastern, nonJewish sources anyway...
...Environmental groups that once blocked recertification have gotten practical and agreed to a sliding scale on the "degree of purity" needed to relicense such sites...
...and i know survivors of abusive homes who aren't about to start killing...
...No president, Democrat or Republican, can do the job he or she is elected to do if made the object of an open-ended criminal investigation that itself is virtually unaccountable to any other branch of government...
...Businesses, government--local, state, and federal-community organizations, and environmentalists have decided to look again at these badlands and reclaim them for use...
...Today, Brownfields are eyesores and no man's lands...
...There is something that does not love humanity, that seeks to destroy us, and it will use whatever it can, flow through whatever little channel we allow...
Vol. 125 • April 1998 • No. 8
