What goes around comes around. “The additional stress of caring for an elderly family member alone does not account for [elder] abuse,” according to “Violence Prevention News” (Fall). “Steinmetz (1978) found that ‘only one child out of 400 raised in a nonabusive home was abusive to his or her parent after reaching adulthood, while one of every two adults who were abused as children abused their elderly parents when they became adults.’”
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By the numbers. George Schmidt writes in the September-October issue of Substance that the amount offered in the Chicago Board of Education’s proposed contract (voted down by union members last month) for class-size reduction over five years was $1,000,000. The amount the board paid the law firm Franczek Sullivan P.C. between January 1, 2002, and September 24, 2003, for services not specified was $1,050,000.
Lest we forget. In the preautomobile era “Chicago had earned the title ‘Hobo Capital of America,’” writes Todd Depastino in Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America. Chicago’s “hobohemian” district centered on West Madison in the Loop and extended a half mile in every direction. “In 1908 one researcher estimated that between 40,000 and 60,000 men took shelter in the neighborhood’s 200 to 300 lodging houses and hotels….As the greatest single labor exchange in the country, if not the world, Chicago possessed thirty-nine different railroads radiating out to a periphery that included half the nation’s population. The tracks that carried grain, cattle, coal, iron, and other raw materials and finished commodities across the hinterlands also conveyed hundreds of thousands of workers who supplied seasonal labor to an area stretching west to Omaha, east to Pittsburgh, south to Nashville, and north to Minneapolis.”
