Letters to the Editor

“Fighting the Odds” provided insight into the problems of many urban men but included little about their lack of job skills. “There aren’t any jobs out there. … If that’s what we got to resort to, I’ll sell some drugs out there,” said one. No jobs? Allstate and Sprint turned down new locations in Chicago and Cook County, offering 1,500 new jobs, in part due to a lack of qualified workers. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants are being let in the United States to fill skilled jobs because people here can’t do the work. I live by 43rd and Cottage Grove, and all the guys on the corner “can’t get no job.”

I constantly correct my kids’ English since the public schools they attend won’t do it. “He be goin’ there” is good enough for the neighborhood, but it won’t get you hired to even answer the phone for a company that has to make a profit to pay you a decent wage. Let’s “resort” to learning to speak and write correctly and perform useful skills.

Troy Deckert
Oakland



Alden K. Loury's articles, "Fighting the Odds" and "Fatherhood, Ready or Not" (April 2000) were superb! The messages you put forth about becoming a father yourself, after having grown up without a father, combined with so many black men having grown up in one-parent families, were like links in a chain. And your statistics regarding the 60,000 black men booked at the Cook County Department of Corrections in 1998 representing about 10 percent of teh county's black male population were staggering.

My congratulations to your team members on an excellent journalistic endeavor. And Alden, cherish that precious little girl of yours--you are her hero, the man she will seek in all other men, and the father who should love her unconditionally, no matter what. What a responsibility, eh?

Joan Stockmal
Public Information Officer
Cook County Department of Corrections