Early this week we wrote:

“More than 3,000 people have been shot in Chicago this year. The City Council just approved a new tax on water and sewer bills to pay for city workers’ pensions. That’s on top of last year’s hefty property tax increase. Chicago Public Schools began the school year with a $1 billion operating deficit, and the Chicago Teachers Union might be headed for a strike next month. You can’t blame taxpayers for seeing the city’s future — and their future in the city — as bleak.”

We asked readers to tell us what pushed them out of Chicago or why they’ve remained. Among the many responses:

I am a third-generation Chicagoan. I am completely disgusted with everything: taxes; lack of respect for teachers; crime; horrendous road conditions despite constant road construction; traffic, traffic, traffic; bike lanes that really do not belong on busy thoroughfares; restaurant seating in the streets; flowerpots in the middle of the street; speed cameras; and red-light cameras.

The never-ending narrative of violence in Chicago is punctuated by spikes like the one we’re experiencing now. The last was in 2012, when a decade of steady decline in the homicide rate was interrupted by a surge of killings in an unusually mild winter.

As police adjusted their tactics to target murderous gangs, this page appealed for intervention from clergy, neighborhood leaders, families and foundations — an all-hands approach not unlike the one Mayor Rahm Emanuel called for Thursday to combat this year’s carnage.

The great Chicago author and historian Studs Terkel once wrote this about work:

“It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

That quote looms large over a new multimedia exhibit at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago. The collection of photos of people with different types of jobs, accompanied by stories of what they do and why they do it, is called “Working in America,” and it does what artistic endeavors should do: It makes you think.

Taxpayers have paid thousands of dollars for annual mandatory audits of East St. Louis Township, none of which mention that Supervisor Oliver Hamilton and two others charged as much as $280,000 on taxpayer-supported American Express cards.

The charges — which ranged from trips, gasoline and car washes to thousands spent at big box hardware stores — were made without the knowledge or approval of the township board of trustees on credit cards capped at $1,000 a month. There was not one month when the spending came in under the cap, township financial records showed.

Even though taxpayers paid for the services, Dennis Ulrich, a spokesman for the auditing firm Scheffel Boyle in Belleville, said when it comes to an audit, he can speak only to “the client,” who in this case is Hamilton. Scheffel Boyle was paid $8,000 for the latest township audit for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2015.

Not much is going right in Illinois.