Suburban Heroin Use Continues

By Catie Talarski – Today’s Sun-Times has an article on the upswing of heroin use in the suburbs of Chicago.  A new study released by Roosevelt University’s Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy:

More people in Chicago and its suburbs are admitted to hospital emergency rooms for heroin use than in any other major city, and heroin is now the most common illegal substance for which people in Illinois enter drug treatment, a new study shows.

In addition, heroin-related deaths have risen sharply in the collar counties, as use of the drug continues to expand among young, white suburbanites.

We covered this controversial topic about a year ago with Rick Green from the Hartford Courant.  During the program we talked to a mother who lost her son to a heroin addiction and a former suburban addict who uses his experience to help others.

Suit Filed Over Cape Wind Project

by John Dankosky – As sometimes happens, our timing is juuuust about right.   This week, we revisited a conversation about wind power, and the controversial Cape Wind project in Nantucket sound, which got the federal go-ahead in May.  Critics say it ruins the view, and might just be a give-away to a powerful developer.   As usual, it got people on our website talking.  This, from Mary:

The late Senator Kennedy’s point was not just about the view – it was about who owns wind, private developers, the same old oil and gas companines or the public? Note that the energy from the wind farm approved off of Block Island will neither be “owned” by Block Island residents, nor ensure that BI becomes energy independent. This is the problem – wind energy ought be the first step in a distributed energy network where communities can develop sustainable energy budgets. Note also that the fact that wind is pegged to the ever changing price of a barrel of oil, rather than the fixed long-term cost of wind farm construction reveals that the oil and gas industry is still managing our energy future.

Today, word that the first lawsuit challenging that federal approval has been filed. Boston.com has the story:

Six groups and three individuals, from California to Cape Cod, argued in federal district court in Washington that the controversial project will “exact a terrible toll” on federally protected migratory birds and possibly whales. The 30-page lawsuit says federal officials failed to collect data on the project’s impact on bird migration and whales and refused to adopt protective measures for the rare roseate tern and piping plover.

updates! updates!

by Catie Talarski

As you may have noticed, we’ve been neglecting the good ole blog.  Partly because we’re short-staffed, also because Dankosky went on stay-cation, and because we’ve been focusing our energies on building up our new website YourPublicMedia.org.  Check YPM daily for the latest news from WNPR as well as from our partners at the Connecticut Mirror and the New Haven Independent.

In show-update-news:

Enfield schools will be graduating tomorrow – not in a mega-church, but on their school grounds.  We covered the debate after a federal suit was filed in May alleging the public schools were violating the U.S. Constitution by endorsing a religion.  As education reporter Diane Orson reported in early June:

…a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction halting Enfield’s plans to hold graduation ceremonies at First Cathedral Church in Bloomfield.  She found that the plan would unconstitutionally endorse religion and would be coercive to students and families.

The suit has received national attention.  From today’s Wall Street Journal:

The court hasn’t yet ruled whether a church setting does in fact violate the Constitution, and legal experts said there is no clear legal precedent governing whether public schools can use religious facilities for graduation. Courts likely will consider a school’s motives for choosing a religious facility, according to Michael Dorf, a constitutional-law professor at Cornell University Law School.

“If it is a matter of the only large enough auditorium in a town happens to be located in a church that will argue in favor of permitting the church,” he said.

But even if a school has nonreligious motives, it still could still run into legal trouble if it chooses a church heavily adorned with religious symbols. In such a case, Mr Dorf said, a judge could find a Constitutional violation on the grounds that a “reasonable observer” would perceive that a school had endorsed religion by holding graduation in such a setting.

According to the article, Connecticut isn’t the only place having the Church v State graduation conversation:

Last month, Exeter Union High School in California faced criticism from some liberal advocacy groups over a plan, since abandoned, to allow a school vote over whether a student speaker could pray at its June graduation. In Indiana, a federal judge blocked Greenwood High School from allowing a student-led prayer at its May graduation… Some schools have moved to pre-empt complaints. Barrington High School in suburban Chicago removed religious symbols, including Bibles, from the church auditorium where it held its graduation this month, said Jeffrey Arnett, a spokesman for the Barrington 220 School District.

Veterans, Homeless In The News

Mark Herbort, photo by Chion Wolf

by John Dankosky – On Monday’s Where We Live, we’ll revisit a conversation about the problem of homeless veterans in Connecticut and nationwide.   The federal government has made it a priority to find homes for all vets, but homelessness isn’t the only problem they face.  Mental illness, substance abuse, and the stigma that come with them can make it hard for veterans of any age to seek and find help.

I recommend Jamie Tarabay’s story from NPR’s Morning Edition about a rise in suicides among troops – it includes this shocking fact:

Nearly as many American troops at home and abroad have committed suicide this year as have been killed in combat in Afghanistan. Alarmed at the growing rate of soldiers taking their own lives, the Army has begun investigating its mental health and suicide prevention programs.

Meanwhile, some mildly good news from HUD about the overall numbers of homeless in America.  Monica Polanco reports in the Courant:

The number of homeless people across the country declined by 5 percent in 2009, while the number of homeless families rose by 7 percent, according to a new report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The better numbers are attributed to an increase in permanent supportive housing.

State of the Union (the Marriage Union, That Is)

by Jonathan McNicol

Of all the famous, long-married, seemingly happy couples I called trying to get someone to separate and make some news for us to peg our big marriage show to, the Gores were not the ones I expected to assent. But I suppose stranger things have happened. And I couldn’t thank Al and Tipper more for considering Where We Live‘s needs at this difficult time.

charlietphoto, flickr creative commons

Okay, it didn’t go quite like that, I admit it. But we did start putting the show together well before the Gores made their announcement and started a new national discussion about this whole life-long commitment concept that we seem so hell-bent on hanging onto (a conversation that has continued on WNPR, with today’s Colin McEnroe Show, as well).

The original impetus for our show today was a fascinating new book by The New York Times‘s Tara Parker-Pope, For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage. It’s nothing if not a breath of fresh air in a culture where Al and Peg Bundy, Marge and Homer Simpson, Elizabeth and John Edwards, and now (shock of shocks) Al and Tipper Gore are held up as examples of the typical American marriage in the twenty-first century.

Think of the things that you know for sure about marriage. Half of them are doomed to end in divorce, right? Nope, not really, says For Better (for couples married in the 1980s, the overall divorce rate is actually less than 40%—for the ’90s and ’00s it’s even less than that).

And the worst thing you can do to your sex life is get married, right? Well, no. (The average married couple actually has sex 66 times a year; singles average about 58 times.)

But these married couples today—and the husbands especially—none of them stay faithful, do they? Well, yes, they do. (In a given year, 90—read that again: ninety—percent of married couples are entirely faithful. And the single strongest predictor of infidelity? Not gender, not age, not socioeconomic or cultural background. Nope. Opportunity. All it takes to be in the 10% is opportunity. Which explains celebrities and politicians, I might add.)

We had a great time chatting with Tara Parker-Pope on today’s show, and the hour is filled with wonderful nuggets like:

Having a partner in life, we literally outsource our cognitive burden, and there’s a lot of people who have evolutionary explanations for why we do partner up. Life is just easier when you have another person to help you, and we all know this. If you’re trying to drive through town and look for an address, it’s so much easier if you have someone in the passenger seat, helping you find that place. And, in some sense, that’s what marriage is—it’s having someone in the passenger seat helping you along. And the little things that we do in our marriages—holding a partner’s hand, giving a pat on the back, saying ‘sweetheart,’ ‘honey,’ these terms of endearment—all of these things help us. It helps us daily through life; it benefits our health. I think there are just a lot of reasons why we want to be married, and why we want to partner up with another person.

But there’s so much that we didn’t get to. Things like the new Pew study, released just last week, of divorce in long-duration marriages. Or little P. californicus, the 100% monogamous California mouse species. Or the transformative effect of Playboy and TV dinners on the American male (and, thus, the American male’s marriages) in the 1970s (you’ll just have to read For Better for that one).  Also, you can listen to On Point from earlier in the week: “The Gores and ‘Gray Divorce‘”, about graying Boomers, long-term marrieds, getting divorced – and what that means.

It’s certainly a lot of information to process, but the takeaway here—Al & Peg and Al & Tipper notwithstanding—is that the data, and the outlook, is probably more hopeful than you thought it was. (If you’re still feeling uneasy, Tara’s Assess Your Relationship Risk quiz is probably a good place to start answering the questions you’re left with.)

Womens’ Letter To Pope Reignites Controversy Over Marriage And Priests

by John Dankosky - When Sylvia Poggoli speaks, NPR listeners want to listen.  Especially when she’s saying stuff like this:

In an unprecedented move, a group of Italian women who have had relationships with priests wrote an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI, saying that priests need to love and be loved.

Poggoli’s story on NPR’s Morning Edition gets to the heart of a conversation that’s been going on in the Catholic Church for centuries about celibacy and the priesthood.  It’s also central to the story told on Where We Live by former priest Christopher Meade. His book, Icons and Iconoclasts, prescribes changes for the church, which he calls, “a diseased patient in need of a cure.”

He told me about his surprise – as a young priest – that others in his job kept women “friends” as intimate companions.  He admits that he later left the priesthood in part because of the hypocrisy he saw – but also because of a woman.

Poggoli tells the story of women coming forward to talk about their relationships with priests – an increasingly common occurrence in Italy.

Enfield Update: School District Won’t Appeal

by John Dankosky – The school board vote was 5-4 against filing an appeal, after a judge’s ruling that Enfield’s plan to hold its high school graduations at a Bloomfield mega-church was unconstitutional. You can read more in today’s Hartford Courant, and get reaction this afternoon from WNPR’s Diane Orson.