Jonesboro, Arkansas
Garvey, John
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...
...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...
...She had come as a child with her parents and was educated at the University of Southern Illinois...
...and the approximately five hundred people who, without any public call, showed up to donate blood...this is a sign of something deeper and finally more true about humanity...
...Fat chance...
...Recently, 125 workers started harvesting tomatoes at a new industrial greenhouse in Buffalo, built on the site of a former steel mill...
...Jesus was also unpopular on the idea of the demonic: "Deliver us from evil" is a reference not to some abstract evil but, most scholars seem to agree, "the evil one...
...After decades of neglect, however, something new is in the air...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Although more than half have experienced discrimination, a larger majority said that the United States was the best country in which to live...
...It is almost always caricatured: little red guys with tails and horns and pitchforks, do we believe in that...
...And something more is part of our tradition, and it has to do with something deeper than choice, something instinctive and holy: the teacher, Shannon Wright, who, hearing the shots, threw herself between the shots and the chiIdren and died to save them...
...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...
...That is not what he needed to hear, and his mother's need for revenge, probably hidden to her, nearly destroyed her son...
...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...
...Among the other ideas that enter our tradition from non-Jewish sources is the Last Judgment...
...Clearly they fill a need in a country whose population swells as age advances...
...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...
...The study serves to assure us that the country is enriched by the latest immigrant wave...
...The range of evil and its way of working with us goes from this tragic domestic level to Hitler...
...his mother, who hated his dead father, told him instead--deliberately withholding the word love--that his father had been proud of him...
...And the evil one will use anything he (or she---we must be inclusive) can, including confused and unhappy little boys, or--at a more banal level than the Jonesboro murders--unhappy wives, husbands, sons, and daughters...
...Something is out to destroy us, and until quite recently most of Christian and Jewish tradition understood this...
...Our freedom makes us capable of choosing anything, and our fallenness makes us likely to make mistakes based on what will shore up our own egos, and a series of bad choices can lead us into a corner in which we might find ourselves making the choice to wound or kill someone we see as an enemy...
...There is no proof that God is real, or that anything in life makes any ultimate sense...
...s with any surge in immigration, the current one-the second largest in this century--seems alarming to some experts...
...There was Freh, born in Ethiopia, fine-featured as most Ethiopians are, and a registered nurse...
...The study shows that the 13.7 million children of immigrants have higher grades and sharply lower dropout rates than other American children...
...and i know survivors of abusive homes who aren't about to start killing...
...Finally, the independent prosecutor law must be rethought or allowed to expire...
...He wanted to be reassured that his dead father loved him...
...These parcels thrived in an era when industrial pollution was an accepted part of American life...
...The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded more than 120 grants to municipalities to rehabilitate Brownfields...
...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...
...help my unbelief...
...To believe that meaning can be found anywhere here is an act of faith, like the faith of the father who, after Jesus told him that all things are possible for the one who believes, cried "Lord, I believe...
...Eminently...
...It may not seem so big a deal to you, but it was for him...
...I know a man who spent years recovering from a single sentence...
...The wonder is that God can use even this doubting faith (the only kind most of us will ever know) to work miracles and heal...
...New technologies have been developed that have effectively lowered cleanup costs...
...We are made in God's image, and it shows itself in places like this...
...There is nothing clear here, only clues which can be seen as pointing in different directions...
...Most are located in urban areas...
...They are not contaminated enough to merit detoxification under the stringent criteria of the nation's Superfund...
...And aren't these kids sick, not demonic...
...They throng the field of health professionals-most still on the lowest rung of the career ladder, but a majority working toward fuller degrees...
...A very interesting, recently published four-year study by sociologists Ruben Rumbaut of Michigan State University and Alejandro Portest of Princeton University indicates that, despite the doubts of some newcomers themselves, the future of these immigrants' children is bright...
...They include old rail yards, steel mills, corner gas-station lots, and dry-cleaning shops...
...horror like the shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas, makes us sharply aware of how little we understand ourselves or what it means to be human...
...SEED MONEY The U.S...
...That is also part of the tradition...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...And aren't we looking at a kind of counter-God, and isn't that un-Christian, d u a l i s t i c ? D i d n ' t the idea of demons enter our tradition from the Zoroastrians and other Eastern, nonJewish sources anyway...
...I don't think this comes into our lives accidentally, like a draft of cold air through a door that blows open...
...Brownfields are mildly to moderately polluted forfner industrial sites that sit idle across the American landscape...
...When that changed, owners sometimes chained the gates and fled...
...The deeper truths of what happened in Jonesboro are not to be found in the sad, stupid acts of adolescents who acted in an evil way, but in the noble--all the more noble and moving for not even having been thought about--reaction of Shannon Wright, and the kindness of people who wanted to donate blood...
...There were a veritable corps of licensed nursing assistants--soft-voiced and smiling Rhadika and Bilhibai from south Commonweal 8 April24, 1998...
...The real mystery is not Hitler's sickness (if he was sick at all) but the fact that so many were willing, and some even happy, to follow him...
...Jobs mean housing and family stability: a greener future all round...
...What countries did they leave...
...All we can do is to pray that we have the discernment to live by "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (Hebrews 11: 1...
...Evil has been defeated, but doesn't know it...
...Today, Brownfields are eyesores and no man's lands...
...We have to pray for the boys who allowed this to happen, for their families, for the families who will never again know the presence on earth of the people they loved...
...Who are these immigrants...
...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...
...From our point of view, the father's wavering faith isn't much to work with...
...Without exception, those I came to know were an achieving and hard-working lot...
...Overwhelmingly they prefer English to the native languages of their parents...
...We don't like to think of this as a continuum, because it is important to our self-esteem--always an illusion-to think that we are radically different, or different in some way, from those who are capable of serious evil...
...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...
...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...
...Still, is it a good idea for HUD to get involved...
...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...
...the miracle is that the most dramatic evil is finally defeated by humble and un-selfconscious acts of love...
...I gave little thought to that until I was thrown into intimate contact with many--first in the hospital, then in a rehabilitation center...
...millions of kids watch television and are consequently desensitized, but not that much...
...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...
...They fear that the children of these immigrants will develop into an underclass, cut off from the mainstream by academic failure and an inability to speak English...
...Should we (despite Jesus' Commonweal 7 April24, 1998 reliance on the idea) scrap it...
...Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently went for the green...
...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...
Vol. 125 • April 1998 • No. 8
