Politics

Isolated in Detention

Written by Joan Flanagan

If you squint at the center of the horizon in the photo on the right, you will see the Tri-County Detention Center in Ullin, Illinois.  It is 354 miles from Chicago and 156 miles from St. Louis.  It is number ten of the ten most isolated detention centers such as the Hardin County Law Enforcement Center in Eldora, Iowa, 212 miles to the nearest city, or Chippewa County Jail in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, 346 miles from a major city.

There are an estimated 32,000 women and men detained every night by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), most in detention centers like this one that are extremely remote from families, friends, clergy, and… Read more

Politics

Revisiting Freedom of Religion

Written by Joan Flanagan

The very first clause of the very first amendment to the United States Constitution is about the Freedom of Religion.  It reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”

The men who made this idea the law in 1791 came from families that had fled from England and Europe because of many generations of religious intolerance.  It was not at all an abstract idea for the Founding Fathers.  They could name members of their families who had been sent to the gallows or the guillotine for supporting a religion different than the monarch’s religion.

American leaders have worked hard to uphold Freedom of Religion because… Read more

Politics

Mockingbirds, Truth and Justice

Written by Joan Flanagan

My favorite novel is Harper Lee’s brilliant To Kill A Mockingbird, set in small town Alabama in the 1930’s.  The narrator recalls the events that happened when she, Jean Louise Finch (nicknamed Scout) was seven and her lawyer father Atticus defended a black man falsely accused of raping a white girl.  Columnist Carla Carlisle is the same age as I am, so we were both the age of Scout when the U. S. Supreme Court passed Brown v Board of Education.  Carla now lives in rural Suffolk County in East Anglia in England, but she grew up in rural Pike County on the southern end of Mississippi.  Here is how Carla… Read more

Immigration

“I am an American”

Written by Joan Flanagan

When Amanda Standerfer was the Library Director at the Helen Matthes Public Library in Effingham in downstate Illinois she was disturbed by the snarky comments of some library patrons who were offended by kids in the children’s area speaking Spanish.  She got remarks like “Who are they?”  “Why aren’t they speaking English?”  And her favorite: “Why are THOSE kids using OUR library?”  So Amanda won a grant to launch a program in 2007 to help people learn about their own neighbors called “I am an American.”

Effingham is a town of 12,384 people.  In the 2000 census those people were 98% white, 1 % Hispanic, and the remainder a mix of Asian, African-American, Native… Read more

Culture

Fourth of July Then and Now

Written by Joan Flanagan

When I was growing up in a small town in Illinois during the Eisenhower administration, Fourth of July was pure and simple: the children decorated our bikes and tricycles with red, white, and blue crepe paper to ride around the flagpole in the center of town.  A Republican politician would remind us to be grateful that we lived in America so we could see these beautiful children on their bicycles, because if we lived in Red Russia we would see tanks rolling down our streets!

We revered Abraham Lincoln, who saved the Union and freed the slaves and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had saved Europe from Fascism and was fighting a Cold War… Read more

Immigration

Immigrants and Fundraising

Written by Joan Flanagan

Una Okonkwo Osili has been an immigrant twice. She is the daughter of an American mother and a Nigerian father who met as students at Cornell University. When she was six months old, the family moved from New York to Enugu, Nigeria, where she grew up among thousands of other immigrants looking for jobs in the Nigerian Oil Boom in the 1970s. When she was 15 she came back to America, where she got her BA at Harvard, and then got her Masters and PhD in economics from Northwestern University. Again she rode a wave of immigration as America’s foreign born population increased 57 percent, to 31.1 million.

Today Dr. Osili is the Director… Read more

Immigration

Knowing Your Neighbors Can Affect Social Change

Written by Joan Flanagan

Last week I came home to discover little fliers stuck into the doors of three apartments on my floor, indicating a visit from the U. S. Census Taker. Now I know which people in my building are too lazy to answer ten questions. My neighbors in Chicago are part of the 28 percent of Americans who never filled out the 2010 census form they got in the mail, so the paid Census Takers are trying to track them down. I admire these Census Workers who are willing to learn, literally, “Who is my neighbor?”

In 1892, a young woman named Florence Kelley moved to Chicago from Philadelphia to begin a new chapter in her… Read more

Politics

Politics Mixes with Everything!

Written by Joan Flanagan

South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu delivered the keynote for the International Conference of the Association of Fundraising Professionals on April 13, 2010. As he addressed 3,000 professional fundraisers from dozens of countries, I wondered how his remarks would be received. The 79 year old slightly stooped priest was the only major speaker who did not use props, gimmicks, or PowerPoint. He just gripped the podium and preached to the crowd. You could have heard a pin drop.

As any good speaker he began with a joke, and then praised the audience. He reminded the audience of the importance of the organizing by college students in America and England in the 1980’s. They pressured… Read more

Culture

The Names Will be Changed

Written by Joan Flanagan

When my very Norwegian mother was selling ads for the Chicago Daily News in the 1930’s, the company assigned her the name “Miss Kelly.” This was so that irate or flirtatious customers could not track her to her home address. How different from today when people will tell 350 million total strangers every bit of their so-called private lives on their Facebook pages!

Obviously there are sound commercial reasons for changing a name. Would you flaunt a polo shirt from Lifshitz? Fraydl and Frank Lifshitz were immigrants from Belarus and named their son Ralph Ruben Lifshitz. But he changed his name to Ralph Lauren to sell his wildly successful ultra-preppie clothing line emblazoned with… Read more

Politics

Just a Chip Off the Old Block

Written by Joan Flanagan

Last week Fox News commentator Glenn Beck went on a rant against Barack Obama simply because his mother and father chose to name their baby after his father. He has been named Barack for 49 years, and managed to do very well in school, work, and civic affairs. But media buffoon Beck thinks that he can determine how “American” someone is just by the sound of his name.

Glenn Beck said of President Obama: “He chose to use his name, Barack, for a reason. To identify, not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe,… Read more