LETTERS Penny in my thoughts I've spent several springs around the Statehouse. It was there that I first met the lady from Decatur, state Sen. Penny Severns. It was a brief conversation, but she couldn't have been nicer or more gracious, especially considering, as I joked, "I don't even live in your district!" One article described her as greeting people "like they were a long-lost friend." Obviously, that's a good trait for a politician to have, but Penny seemed to really mean it. She also had an impressive set of credentials, and she began establishing them at an early age. In 1972, she was the youngest delegate ever to the Democratic National Convention, following that by being the youngest member ever of the Democratic National Committee. In 1980, she took on then-Congressman Edward Madigan, a Republican incumbent in a Republican district in what would prove to be a Republican year. She lost, but it got her noticed. After that came the Decatur City Council. Then in 1986 an upset win to the state Senate, and the start of a reputation that would win her the respect of people in both parties. She won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor in 1994, paired with Dawn dark Netsch. Unfortunately, during that campaign she learned she had breast cancer. She kept going as best she could, and her health didn't keep her from easily winning another Senate term. Then came the ill-fated bid for secretary of state. How Sen. Severns managed to cope simultaneously with her health, ballot signature challenges from opponent Tim McCarthy and her Senate duties, I'll never know. A week [after being removed from the ballot]. Penny was dead. Somehow I thought she'd beat this thing. There's something about death at a young age that's especially tragic. It's all about unfulfilled potential, of life never lived. This definitely seems true in Penny's case. As far as she'd come, who knows how much further she could have gone, how much more she could have done? Spending time around the Capitol has done a lot to remove most of whatever illusions I had about politics. It's a sad commentary on our times that the kind of idealism that motivated Penny Severns seems today outdated, even naive. The feeling that one person can make a difference, that government can work for people. In a time when we're all too familiar with politics at its worst, Penny was a shining example of politics at its best, of all the things it should be and rarely is. She was a true class act, hard enough to find in the world at large, even rarer in politics.
Farewell, Penny. Puzzling editing flaws in abortion story Your latest issue contains serious grammatical flaws by the repeated and unnecessary bracketing of the medical term partial- birth abortion in quotation marks (see March 1998, page 34). A partial-birth abortion is a medical term used to describe one of the most hideous deaths imaginable to a small, innocent baby less than five inches and five minutes from birth. Your repeated and unnecessary use of quotation marks is puzzling because the procedure is well-documented in the annals of medicine and, therefore, not subject to political interpretation. By using unnecessary quotation marks, Illinois Issues ignores the medical fact that partial-birth abortions are never medically necessary and are responsible for the killing of some 3,000 healthy preborn babies every year in America.
Robert Bland Correction The 55th and 56th House districts are both in Cook County, not DuPage County as was reported in the March issue. The 56th District also includes Arlington Heights, Mount Prospect and Prospect Heights, not Park Ridge. Illinois Issues regrets the errors. 36 / April 1998 Illinois Issues |
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