“It’s easy to be cynical about these periodic effusions of concern about crime,” writes Salim Muwakkil in In These Times (March 3), recalling the deaths of Dantrell Davis (in 1992) and Robert “Yummy” Sandifer (1994). “But there is something decidedly different about these Girl X protesters. The community-building message of the Million Man March seems to have penetrated deeply into the community. Already, members of two church congregations, the Fernwood United Methodist Church and the Miracle Temple, have formed a security force of volunteers who will patrol varied high-crime areas. [Wallace ‘Gator’] Bradley’s group, United in Peace, has joined forces with WordSong, an organization created to combat sexual abuse. The two groups plan to sponsor a series of workshops for ‘street organizations’ to raise their awareness of sexual abuse and educate them about its damaging consequences.”
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From the suburban remodeler’s file. Ann Wilson in Decorating Ideas (April), a glossy magazine based in suburban Western Springs: “Regardless of leaking ceilings (there’s nothing quite as terrifying as watching a lit ceiling fixture fill with water at 10 o’clock at night) and workmen showing up at the crack of dawn (I suggest sleeping in a sweat suit for the duration of construction), the building process was an exhilarating adventure.”
Everybody out of Illinois–no pushing, no shoving. Mark Monmonier, whose new book, Cartographies of Danger, will soon be published by the University of Chicago Press, lists “ten typical risky places–areas to which I would be reluctant to move.” Place number ten is “the neighborhoods of nuclear plants,” where he finds terrorism a more worrisome danger than mere poor design and mismanagement. “Over four million people live within the ten-mile emergency planning zones (EPZs) around America’s atomic power plants, and Chernobyl indicated clearly that radiological accidents can have a lethal reach much longer than ten miles.” (More at www.press.uchicago.edu /Misc/Chicago/534189.html.)
