Vote Yes on April 9

    I just read a few articles by researchers who have studied at-large vs. ward-based elections across the country, and who have published their findings in scholarly journals of political science. Those research results in favor of ward-based voting mean a lot to me. If the research showed that at-large voting systems produced better results than ward-based, I would not be advocating a change to ward-based.
    I don’t think many other voters here in Jacksonville will be influenced by those articles. That’s not enough for me, either. What matters even more is what has happened and is happening in District 117.
    Jacksonville has had a long history of neighborhood schools. Many of the school buildings were noteworthy for their architecture. Three of them have been abandoned by the School Board over the past few years. Because of at-large voting, there was nobody on the School Board from those parts of our community.
    Those buildings stand in sections of town that have suffered from historical neglect. The historical problems of neighborhoods near the center of Jacksonville are not the School Board’s fault. But now our city government and we taxpayers have spent millions of dollars to revive the downtown. Meanwhile
the School Board has offered no plans for these shells, which could soon become eyesores.
    Our schools are underfunded. The state is cutting educational funds and will keep cutting them. If we want good schools, we will need to spend more of our own money. The School Board failed to raise that money with a 1% sales tax last year, in a vote they lost nearly 2 to 1. Their public relations were unsuccessful, perhaps because their plans were vague and unconvincing. The people of Morgan County are not against education, but the School Board failed to convince voters that it could spend that money wisely.
    District 117 has a vacuum in leadership. We have had 4 different superintendents or interim superintendents in less than 2 years. The School Board has failed to find a strong leader for the most important position in District 117.
    One of the parts of our community not represented on the School Board is also not present in the schools: while 17% of our students are non-white, the teaching staff in District 117 is 99.2% white. There is one black member of the teaching staff out of 238. This information comes from the School District’s own Report Card on its website. But I have heard no plans to do anything about that.
    The School Board has not helped to get the population of Jacksonville engaged in education. That engagement is the responsibility of all adults in the community, not only parents of school children. The School Board has not found a way to deal with the problem of underengagement in our schools. Its discouragement of discussion at public meetings is an obstacle to community involvement.
    Gary Scott, who has spoken at two events I have attended, praised the enthusiasm that is suddenly apparent in Jacksonville; at the rally to oppose ward-based voting, he said, “It’s the first time we’ve talked about education in this town for years.” Former superintendent Bob Crowe said the bond of trust between community and School Board has been broken. And Scott and Crowe are supporters of keeping voting for the School Board just as it is.
    The message from the proponents of at-large voting, at all the forums I have attended, is that the School Board has failed, but let’s do nothing. Let’s not change the voting system. And let’s not talk about anything else. From the opponents of change all we hear is to maintain the status quo.
    But we can do better. To do that we need a better School Board, one which has a positive plan for our neighborhood schools, one which inspires parental and community involvement, one which figures out how to put a diverse group of teachers in front of our diverse students, one which offers good reasons to spend more of our money on education and good plans for how they will create better results for our students.
    How do we get a better School Board? Those articles I read all agreed that ward-based voting provides better representation of minority voters, which eventually leads to a more diverse teaching staff, which leads to better academic performance by students.
    The majority of the School Board has failed to engage with our local discussions about how to vote. Instead they have put obstacles in the way of public discussion: the Board refused to put this topic on its agenda.
    That’s not the way to help this community make an important decision. It’s the way to block change, to dampen enthusiasm, to stay in office, and to keep doing the same things which have brought us here.
    A vote to maintain the at-large system is a vote to accept these failures.
    Vote Yes in April, and then keep voting with your feet and bodies and checkbooks for a better education for Jacksonville’s kids.

Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, March 26, 2013

I Need Police Protection

I bother some people. A lot. I know this from reading the comments about me that appear everywhere these columns are read. It has been made clear to me more than once that some people with wealth and power in this town don’t like that I publish my opinions every week. There are people who would very much like me to dissociate my writings from Illinois College, where I work.

People with less personal connection with me have much harsher ideas in mind. They say I shouldn’t be a teacher, that I shouldn’t be allowed to write for a newspaper, that I am an evil person. They want to shut me up entirely.

What if they were in charge? What if our political system, at any level, were dominated by the people who want to get rid of me? That’s not such a far-fetched possibility.

When a police car drives by my house now, I have nothing more to fear than my neighbors do. That is a privilege enjoyed by few people on this earth. We Americans talk a lot about our rights. It is easy to forget that our ability to express our opinions without worry that the cops will show up at our door tomorrow is rare in the world, and has often been violated here at home. We must always be vigilant in protection of our sweet liberty.

That’s why I pay close attention to what political leaders do and say, especially those who most loudly disagree with me. Here is what I see.

Proponents of gun ownership in communities across the nation have proposed that every household in their towns be required to own a gun. Such an ordinance was passed unanimously by the city council in rural Nelson, GA: “every head of household residing in the city limits is required to maintain a firearm, together with ammunition therefore”. Kennesaw, GA, has had such a municipal ordinance since 1982. Towns in Idaho and Utah are also considering such laws. The city council in Byron, ME, passed a mandatory gun ownership law. That caused outrage among the town’s citizens, nearly half of whom packed a town meeting to nearly unanimously reject that idea.

Laws about “concealed carry” sometimes restrict the rights of private entities to control what happens on their property. Concealed carry laws have been proposed in Iowa and Ohio which would prevent private educational institutions from banning guns on their campuses. Some participants in the current discussion in Illinois about concealed carry wish to forbid private entities from banning guns on their property. What if those people were in charge?

What if the police showed up in my classroom, because I refused to teach while some students were carrying guns? What if they were required to enforce a law that mandated that my household possess a gun? Suppose they heard from reliable sources that I did not own a gun. Would they have the right to search my home?

The makers of these laws always say that they will allow exceptions. The Kennesaw GA law reads: “Exempt from the effect of this section are those heads of households who suffer a physical or mental disability which would prohibit them from using such a firearm. . . . who are paupers or who conscientiously oppose maintaining firearms as a result of beliefs or religious doctrine, or persons convicted of a felony.”

What if I said publically that I refuse to own a gun? Would they test me for mental disability? If I wanted to plead poverty, would I have to show them my tax forms? Who would decide whether my beliefs are conscientious or what religion I have?

I don’t think these things will happen where I live. But there are politicians I worry about. Hispanic citizens of East Haven, CT, have been subjected to police terror for years. In January 2012, the FBI arrested four police officers, including the president of the local police union, on charges that they “assaulted individuals while they were handcuffed, unlawfully searched Latino businesses, and harassed and intimidated individuals”.

In parts of the US, doctors and nurses cannot safely practice medicine, if that involves the legal procedure called abortion. The kind of social practices that used to be called riots when they were protesting discrimination or the Vietnam War are now commonplace around abortion clinics in some states. Dr. George Tiller’s clinic was the scene of many instances of violence before he was murdered in 2009. He had been described by Bill O’Reilly on national television as “Dr. Killer” and “Tiller the baby killer”, and he was pursued by a prosecutor in the Kansas Attorney General’s office.

What if those people were in charge?

Extreme conservatives talk a lot about liberty. But their definition of liberty doesn’t always include my liberty. I want my police force to protect me from all kinds of threat, including those of the far right.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, March 19, 2013

Clothes Can Demean the Woman

People used to say, “Clothes make the man.” That was true. Before the French Revolution, commoners were prohibited by law from dressing like nobles, so a person’s class was recognizable from their clothes. Clothing was a sign of status, wealth and power.

Today celebrities wear jeans, and commoners can buy designer knock-offs, so it’s hard to tell who’s who from the way they look. Only male politicians seem to wear status uniforms all the time – dark suits, solid ties, flag lapel pins, and boring shoes.

Even if they no longer identify class, our clothes still make an impression on others, and are designed to do just that. Wearers, designers, and manufacturers collaborate to create individual looks, which are always socially influenced and sometimes socially prescribed. In the American world I see in my small hometown and everywhere else, the look prescribed for women is sexy. And I think it’s a mistake for women to capitulate to that fashion in their everyday dress.

High heels stretch the calves, making them (apparently) more attractive. Very high heels, not even as high as the 5 or 6 inches of many well-promoted shoes, lead to increased incidence of bunions, heel spurs, plantar fasciitis, and knee and back pain. A recent study shows that regular high-heel-wearers alter their natural gait, even when barefoot. Dr. Judith Smith, an orthopedic surgeon in Springfield, MO, compares the social demand for high heels with Chinese foot-binding: “It is a fashion statement and a status symbol.”

Along with higher heels come short skirts, as tight as possible. It seems to me that skirts are shrinking and pants are getting tighter. It’s instructive to compare women’s and men’s jeans, or even women’s fashion jeans and the clothes of women who do physical work. Tight jeans are hard to put on, less comfortable all day, restrictive of free movement, and have no useful pockets. All form, no function, unless the function is just attracting attention to one’s body, defined by the curves of rear ends and long legs. In fact, for many women, pants have given way entirely to stretch tights.

I have to admit that I’m still surprised to see bare breasts on a daily basis. Women’s chests are more on display than any time I can remember. I can’t think of any reason to prefer tight, low cut tops for indoor wear other than for display.

In the 1970s I remember a powerful social trend among American women away from dressing for display to dressing for comfort, for convenience and for practicality. High heels shrank or disappeared in favor of ergonomic shoes, tight clothes loosened up, artificial restraints like girdles vanished, stockings were put back in the drawer. Because women were fighting to be taken seriously, as workers, as intellectuals, as minds, they rejected fashion conventions which stressed sex.

I believe that young women today have forgotten that lesson, and are returning to dressing for display. They risk being taken seriously only as sex objects.

I am not advocating that women cover up, the position taken by religious conservatives in many faiths. A woman should be able to walk around in the nude without having to worry about being assaulted, or even being touched, by strangers. But she cannot expect to be taken seriously for her intelligence, or even to have people look at her face.

Women can dress as they please. And then they take the consequences of their choices – to be regarded for their brains, their accomplishments, or their bodies.

The back of my box of Girl Scout cookies says “Oh, what a girl can do!” Whatever it is that girls, or women, might do, they won’t be able to do it as well in high heels and tight skirts, unless it is simply to attract everyone’s gaze away from their heads to their bodies.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, March 12, 2013

Is Health Care Too Expensive?

I recently spent 36 hours at Passavant Area Hospital. A bad stomach pain, which I first attributed to eating too much clam dip while watching the Super Bowl, got much worse, so I arrived at the emergency ward at 1:30 AM looking for help. A day and a half later, my stomach pain was gone. I had received professional care from warm, friendly people, who restored my health and revived my spirits. I also had a bill for $12,074.

That’s a lot of money. Median household income of Americans after taxes is less than $50,000. So my $12,000 bill for a common stomach bug would be a financial disaster for anyone without good health insurance.

I admit that I don’t know how to think about the cost of my brief hospital stay. Was that too much? Or a bargain?

Here’s what I got. In the emergency room, I saw an intake receptionist, two doctors and four nurses. Once I was transferred to a semi-private room, I saw three RN’s, two CNA’s, a nursing student, a dietician, an X-ray technician, a room cleaner, a chaplain, and my own family doctor. Also contributing to my successful stay were security personnel, food service workers, a billing department, and various administrators. The president of the hospital came into my room to ask that I fill out a survey, so they could find out what might be done better.

A portable X-ray machine was wheeled into my ER cubicle to see what was wrong. Later I had blood tests and a CAT scan, which were analyzed almost immediately, allowing the doctors to diagnose me quickly and correctly. Then I received an IV of antibiotics and fluids, which cured my bug and kept me functioning.

The technology was expensive. The CAT scan alone cost $5300, nearly half the total bill. The blood tests added another $1500. My room was billed at $1400 a day.

Hidden in those prices are the costs of all those people who cared for me. About 60% of total hospital costs nationwide are for people. I asked what everybody made at Passavant. The CNA’s make $10 to $15 an hour, which comes to $20,000 to $30,000 a year. RN’s make $50,000 or more. The ER doctors earn about $200,000 a year, family practice doctors up to $400,000, and surgeons (fortunately I didn’t have to see any of them) upwards of $600,000.

To most people, I would guess, doctors’ incomes seem enormous. Perhaps the huge gap between what doctors and nurses earn should be disturbing. In terms of caring for me, the whole patient, beyond my particular ailments, nurses tend to do much better than doctors.

But my doctors have been successful, so far, in keeping me healthy, and after my one serious injury as a teenaged touch football player, in keeping me alive. Who could say that surgeons make too much money, when professional athletes and stock brokers and bankers and corporate managers make many times more? Average compensation for CEOs at the 3000 companies in the Russell index was $5.8 million. Doctors’ compensation is not too high – nurses’ is too low, compared to the importance of their work.

Those are my subjective reactions to the financial side of our health care system. I’m glad that I have a good health insurance plan and that my employer pays part of that cost. I can’t say that any of the care I received was unnecessary or too expensive. I think every American deserves that same quality of care.

Most people have an opinion about our health care system and its costs, but most people don’t know any more than I do. In fact, wrong ideas about the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) are responsible for most of the opposition to it.

About 40% of Americans still believe in “death panels” of bureaucrats deciding whether patients get treatment, a nightmare invented by Republican politicians trying to defeat the ACA. More than half believe the law requires free treatment of illegal immigrants. More than one-third believe smokers will have to pay $1000 extra a year. These incorrect beliefs about unpopular ideas promote opposition.

On the other side, many people are sure that very popular provisions of the law are not in it: 20% don’t realize that children under 26 can be included under their parents’ insurance; nearly 30% don’t realize that insurance companies will have to cover people with preexisting conditions; and 40% don’t realize that insurance companies will be prevented from limiting the total amount paid for a person’s health care.

No wonder opposition to “Obamacare” hovers near 40%. Here’s what the researchers who conducted this survey said about the connection between correct knowledge and support: “If the public had perfect understanding of the elements that we examined, the proportion of Americans who favor the bill might increase from the current level of 32% to 70%”.

Politicians could help us have that perfect understanding, so we could make good decisions about what system we would prefer. They don’t, and they won’t until we demand that they do.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, February 26, 2013

Seeking True Representation

This may be the first time you hear about the latest news in Jacksonville’s electoral politics. It’s Sunday as I write this, and I haven’t seen any reports yet about the public meeting on Friday organized by our local citizens to promote ward-based voting for the Jacksonville School Board. I attended because I support this proposal enthusiastically.

The issue is simple. All members of the School Board are currently elected at large. Every winner must get a majority of votes coming from the whole city, including South Jacksonville and Murrayville. That means an expensive media campaign, rather than a door-to-door campaign. The result is that the northeastern part of Jacksonville has rarely been represented on the Board, because few people who live there could afford such a campaign. Board members, in the past and now, overwhelmingly come from the wealthier parts of town. When the Board voted to close the Franklin Elementary School, nobody represented the part of town served by that school. The Board recently decided to eliminate 5th grade band except in the Eisenhower Elementary School.

Ward-based elections for School Board members would insure that each part of the city is represented. Campaigns in single wards are much cheaper to run, and elections would be determined by candidates who know each ward. School Board decisions would benefit from the input of members who represent every part of the city, not just the better-off sections.

Make no mistake, this is a racial issue. Local leaders of the NAACP, whose activities rarely make the local news, have been supportive from the beginning of this campaign. The two African American women who gave enthusiastic, even inspiring keynotes, Doris Turner from Springfield and Jeanette Norman from Decatur, described how at-large systems disadvantage African Americans, other minorities, and anyone who is poor.

Turner, who serves on the Springfield city council, explained that no African Americans served on the city council until elections shifted from at-large to ward-based. Suddenly Springfield’s economic, ethnic and geographical diversity was better represented. More parents began to participate in the education of their children. a better voting system led to broader public engagement in the local schools.

Our federal elections show exactly how having bigger districts means lower minority representation. In the 112th Congress, which just ended, there were 2 Hispanic Senators, 2 Asian Senators, and no African American Senators, exactly 4%, elected at-large in every state. The House of Representatives, whose districts within a state are just like wards in a city, included 44 African Americans, 25 Hispanics, 7 Asians, and one Native American, 18% of the total.

Higher costs of running in larger districts mean that personal wealth is more important in at-large elections. There are only 33 Senators who claimed to be worth less than $1 million (one-third of the total), while 250 House members (58% of the total) managed to win election without being millionaires.

Here is something about this campaign that is unusual. It is the furthest thing from partisan. Friday’s meeting brought together your conservative and liberal neighbors, including political activists, because of the wide agreement that ward-based voting is the superior method for our town. I asked Richard Brahler, with whom I disagree on many issues, why he was supporting ward-based voting. He asked me, “Aren’t we all for the same thing? The best education for our children?” What is there to disagree about?

He was under no illusion that electing one School Committee member in each city ward, beginning in 2015, would revolutionize our schools. Emily Ralph, the political inspiration of this campaign, has always been clear that giving people better representation would not create excellent schools overnight. It is one step toward bringing the whole community into the schools and having the school system’s managers represent the whole community.

But it’s a big step. The campaign is already uniting disparate parts of Jacksonville behind the desire for fuller representation, for more fairness, for more community involvement in the schools. Let’s keep going.

Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, February 19, 2013

Looking for Reason in the Middle

In the never-ending debate between liberals and conservatives over political issues, both sides present their positions forcefully. But not always reasonably. The extreme versions of proposals get in the way of finding the middle ground which is necessary for actually creating good policy. Only compromise between reasonable positions will satisfy the majority of Americans, who find themselves in the middle of the political spectrum.

So let’s think about the Boy Scouts. After many years of insisting that boys who are gay could not be Scouts, the national organization is now reconsidering. Many troops are organized by churches who do not tolerate homosexuality among their members, so vocal opposition has arisen to any change in Scouting policy. I personally find any discrimination against homosexuals offensive, just as if church-led organizations said that they were not open to Jews, who commit a sin against their doctrines by not believing in the divinity of Jesus.

But it is unreasonable to demand that every Scouting organization be opened now to homosexual boys and leaders. If a church wishes to exclude homosexuals from membership or leadership positions at this time, I would accept that.

I also believe it is unreasonable to demand that no Boy Scout unit can accept homosexuals, which is the position advocated by many people today. That demand reflects the religious doctrine of some, but not all Christians. Thus it insists that the Boy Scouts officially retain a particular religious ideology of exclusion.

How can I call that position “unreasonable”? Who says what’s unreasonable?

In the 1940s, when I was born, the demand that homosexuals should be able to enjoy the same marriage rights and privileges as heterosexuals was thought by most people to be unreasonable. It certainly was unusual.

Reason has changed. We have learned a great deal about homosexuality in my lifetime. We have heard the revelations about Nazi persecution and mass murder of homosexuals, and we have read about the physical abuse and sometimes murder of homosexuals in America. We know more about how socially stigmatizing a group makes it easier to believe myths about them, and we understand more about the biological causes of homosexuality and other behaviors that were traditionally thought of as sinful. We recognize how much like heterosexuals homosexuals are and how they are different. We see that our celebrities and leaders, our heroes and heroines, our friends and our relatives are gay.

It is not any more reasonable to discriminate on the basis of sexuality, than it is to discriminate on the basis of gender. Just because there is a long tradition of considering females and gays to be inferior and sinful, just because some of those traditions are religious, does not make that discrimination reasonable.

Until World War II, nearly every Christian tradition considered Jews to be inferior and sinful, preached those values unendingly, and asserted that they came from the word of God. Seeing the genocidal results of those beliefs and learning more about what Jews really are like, nearly every Christian tradition has changed its definition of reasonable. In the Catholic church, the moment when the Pope publicly said that previous Popes were wrong was 50 years ago, in the encyclical “Nostra Aetate”, first written by Cardinal Augustin Bea for Pope John XXIII in 1961, considered by the Second Vatican Council in 1965, passed by the bishops of the world by a vote of 2,221 to 88, and then promulgated by Pope Paul VI.

What Catholics had considered reasonable, even mandatory to believe, had become unreasonable. There continued to be votes and voices against this change, but they were no longer persuasive.

Like the Constitution, the Bible also gets reinterpreted, as human society learns more about itself. Although Deuteronomy demands that a woman who is betrothed and then raped before marriage, and a woman who is not a virgin when she marries, both be stoned to death, now Christians criticize Islam for suggesting that women be stoned. What once was reasonable has become unacceptable.

So why don’t I demand that every barrier to homosexuals, within the Boy Scouts and everywhere else, be immediately dropped? Why is a slower path to equality reasonable?

This is not mainly about changing rules. If the goal is equality, that must be created through persuasion. Those who argue against equality of man and woman, against equality of Christian and Jew, against equality of black and white, have lost the argument and have become unreasonable. That happened by changing people’s minds. I believe this inequality of sexual identity will also succumb to reason. None of these changes have been easy or quick. Those of us who had to fight for our equality have suffered. But suffering won’t be diminished by fixing only on the goal and not on the process.

Allowing individual troops to make their own decisions about homosexual members and leaders will be a big change for the Boy Scouts. Many will leave in a huff, shouting about tradition and morality. They will become the unreasonable ones, because the best human society has not only reached reasonable moral positions, but also is reasonable in how it gets there.

Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, February 12, 2013

Putting Movies to the Test

We saw a nice movie the other day – “Silver Linings Playbook”. The people on the screen were attractive, sympathetic and believable. There were no devils or angels, but real people struggling with their past, making the same bad decisions again and again, yet learning from experience how to give and find love.

“Silver Linings Playbook” rivets our attention on Bradley Cooper as the crazy good guy, so thoughtful, so compassionate, despite his obsessive fantasy about why his marriage broke up, occasionally exploding out of his control. As in real life, crazy isn’t so easy to tell from the rest of us. Then crazy good guy meets crazy good girl and off we go on an exciting ride to Happyland. We smiled at the ending, the one designed to tug our heartstrings right into the theater. But that’s not always real life.

It’s not just the happy ending that makes this a fantasy. If you step out of the dark theater back into the real world and think about this film, and all the other films we can see, a big question pops up – where are the women? and what are they doing?

In 1985, one of the dykes in Alison Bechdel’s comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” explained to her friend how she rates movies: “I have this rule, see. I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it, who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man.”

This Bechdel test is not about feminism, or any political ideas, unless wondering where the women are is being political. It doesn’t matter what the women talk about or think about, as long as it’s not always about some man. Lesbian porn, if there’s any dialog, and alien invasions can both pass the test. Hundreds of great films fail the test and some terrible ones can pass it.

The Bechdel test is just a reality check. Does a film portray life as we know it, where even if women don’t have half the power, they are half of life itself? Or does the film present some imaginary world, where every scene, every action, every conversation, is mostly about men?

The Bechdel test sets a pretty low standard – one conversation, however brief, between any women, even if they are not named characters, gives a pass. One website that allows people to rate movies shows 91 of 155 films from 2012 passing the test. But if you just raise the bar to two different scenes with women talking to each other, many more films fail.

More interesting than finding out if one film passes or fails is to examine the film industry. So let’s look at the Oscar nominees. Of the 9 films nominated for best picture, 2 failed the test. Most of the 7 which passed, however, just barely passed. “Silver Linings Playbook” has one conversation between women. In “Les Miserables” only unnamed female characters conversed. “Lincoln”, “Argo”, and “Zero Dark Thirty” are dominated by male characters, passing the test by one or two brief conversations.

The 5 best actor nominees all starred in films in which they were the main characters. But men were also the main characters in 3 of the 5 of the films nominated for best actress. All the best director nominees were men; only one woman has ever won that Oscar.

Thinking about the Bechdel test, and other measurements of how men and women are portrayed in films, helps us think about Hollywood and which slice of life it shows us. For example, Hollywood often borrows from best sellers, and loves suspense, action, and murder. Murder mysteries still sell millions of copies and offer great, usually flawed protagonists of both sexes. Female sleuths sell as many books as male sleuths: on mysteryguild.com’s list of the top 50 best sellers, 23 have female leads. But when Hollywood chooses which detectives to make into movie heros, it’s nearly always the heros and not the heroines.

It’s fine that films are fantasies – going to the movies means a brief respite from the daily grind. But why must it also be a vacation from women, a male-dominated zone, where films which have women talking to each other are derisively labeled “chick flicks”?

At the end of the strip which defined “The Rule”, the two friends decide to skip the flicks, go home and make popcorn. If more us did that, perhaps Hollywood would get the message that men having fantasies about men is not the slice of life that we all crave.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, February 5, 2013