As Brookfield trustees prepare themselves to vote to amend the village's zoning code to prohibit all types of "assembly" in the Eight Corners business district, they might want to give a hard look at what's now being proposed by the Rev. Karl Sokol for the 3400 block of Grand Blvd. and maybe take a breath.

It's been a rough couple of weeks for North Riverside Park Mall. On Dec. 29, hundreds of kids descended on the mall, causing so much of a ruckus that officials had to shut it down early for the night.

The beginning of a new year is like a clean slate, right? Actually, there's no such thing as a clean slate. It simply gets edited, updated and squeezed with new things that continually crop up.

The swirling uncertainty casting a pall over the national scene seems to pervade everything, almost magnifying things that go wrong locally or cause controversy. We're quick to outrage these days.