Spiritual Depth of Martin Luther King

Posted on January 15, 2024 by admin

Holidays have a way of taming and diluting the real importance of the legacies and events they are meant to commemorate. This tendency is particularly true of today’s holiday celebrating the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These efforts reflect some discomfort with the true level of sacrifice and commitment involved in fighting for freedom. Resisting this tendency requires some real thinking and soul-searching.

Sometimes, a very good author helps us regain some needed perspective on what matters. Fortunately, a few months ago, Jonathan Eig issued a new, deeply researched biography of King that helps us understand better not only what King did in his short life, but why he did it and what forces made him who he was. Admirably, Eig does not shy away from any of the ugly difficulties that kept King in danger throughout a 13-year ministry that began in 1955 at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. The son of Martin Luther King, Sr., who was then the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, outgrew his father’s legacy but also benefited enormously from his father’s self-made path from the son of Georgia sharecroppers to a prominent leader in the Black churches of the South.

Over the past two weeks, I have been leading a discussion of this remarkable book—King: A Life—in the Adult Forum of Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park, in Chicago. The participation has been lively, and people have taken turns reading passages that I thought were especially illuminating. There is not room in one blog post to cover all that territory, so I highly recommend reading the book, but I will make what I think are some salient points about the King legacy.

First, I think it is hard for many people today, especially whites, to imagine the level of intimidation that racist thugs, including but hardly limited to the Ku Klux Klan, used in the post-Reconstruction South to suppress the Black vote, Black rights, Black dignity, and thus any semblance of true democracy. Eig relates one instance of family history in 1910, in which King’s ten-year-old father, then named Michael, was kicked by a white mill owner and sent home bleeding. His mother demanded to know who did that, then marched back to attack the mill owner with her own fists when he admitted doing this to her son. But her husband had to flee when a white mob arrived at their home. Black men who fought back, Eig notes, could pay with their lives.

The father remained bitter and became alcoholic even after returning home. King Sr., however, distilled the lesson that faith in God was the way out of that trap. He gained an education at Spelman College while working as a coal shoveler for a railroad company and became a preacher, ending up at Ebenezer. Later, in a 1934 visit to Germany, he was inspired by the legacy of Martin Luther to adopt that name in place of his birth name of Michael, and changed his son’s name, forever attaching the family to the legacy of the German religious reformer. Eig notes:

“He really related to Martin Luther,” said Isaac Newton Farris Jr., King’s grandson. “He had that same fighting spirit in him.”

His son would need that fighting spirit once he became the de facto and then real leader of the bus boycott that followed the arrest of Rosa Parks on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Just four days later, King, at the invitation of other Black leaders in the city, gave a powerful speech to an overflow rally at the Holt Street Baptist Church that ignited the spirit of the Black community. It led thousands to spend the following year walking to work instead of riding the bus.

All that made King a huge target for an increasingly angry white community, or at least that large part of the white community that was resistant to justice. The White Citizens’ Council, which included police commissioner Clyde Sellers, claimed it grew from 800 members to nearly 14,000 as a result of the boycott. King was arrested and thrown in jail following a trivial traffic stop when he picked up Black passengers as part of an effort to provide rides for Black workers at designated carpool locations. Mayor Tacky Gayle had instructed police to tail and harass Black motorists who provided such rides. On January 30, 1956, while Coretta Scott King was hosting a friend at their home, they heard footsteps on the front porch, after which a bomb exploded, damaging the front of the house. King gave a speech that is remarkable for self-restraint while nonetheless demanding justice, instructing the crowd that assembled to “love your enemies” but also noting that he did not ask to lead the movement, but “if I am stopped this movement will not stop. If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right, what we are doing is just. And God is with us.”

Reread those last five words, for I think they are key to what is often missing from people’s recollection of who King really was. How did he succeed in leading a successful nonviolent revolution for major social change in America? I think it is worth quoting a whole paragraph from Eig, in which he nails the point that is often missing from discussion of the King legacy, the fact that he was committed to a life of deep faith despite all his fears that his life could be cut short:

In years to come, journalists, historians, and biographers would speculate about what made King special, about what gave him the courage and vision to lead. Some observers have stressed the competitive nature of King’s relationship with his father. Other have focused on cultural factors, noting the guilt he felt about his middle-class upbringing and pointing out that he arrived in Montgomery when liberation battles were erupting in Africa and Asia and when radio and television made it possible for a brilliant young preacher to be seen and heard in millions of homes. But the Reverend James Lawson, one of King’s contemporaries, has argued that those interpretations miss an obvious and powerful explanation—that of King’s calling from God. “That was my case, that was King’s case,” Lawson said. “It’s not . . . boasting . . . it’s the deep-down-inside awareness that connects your life up with the life force of the universe, the God who created the heavens and the earth, to quote the Hebrew poets. So, anyone who has that kind of a calling, that’s something that profoundly alters their way of thinking and behavior.”

There is a great deal of depth and detail in Eig’s book. Last September, at the Harold Washington Public Library in Chicago, in a program co-sponsored by the Society of Midland Authors (Eig lives in Chicago), I had the pleasure of hearing Eig speak and relate how he got turned on to working on this biography. The very next day, I acquired the book at a local store. After a major surgery two weeks later, which I related in my January 1 blog post, I had ample recuperation time to tackle a long book. I immediately turned to this biography, plowing through it day after day in rapt fascination, thinking about how I would have faced the challenges in King’s life, which ultimately ended in his assassination at age 38 in Memphis in April of 1968, an event that triggered a wide range of reactions including, unfortunately, urban riots.

In those 13 years that followed his assignment, at age 25, as pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, he not only watched the world change, but helped change it. The bus boycott ended with an NAACP victory before the U.S. Supreme Court in Browder v. Gayle, which effectively outlawed segregation in intrastate transportation. Later, he would deliver the famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., watch as President Lyndon Johnson signed major civil rights and voting rights legislation, march in the face of insults and brickbats for fair housing in Chicago, and support the garbage workers strike in Memphis that ended with his assassination. Profoundly aware of his own fears, flaws, and shortcomings, his faith nonetheless bolstered his courage and helped him refashion American democracy in a way that still enriches us today, even when we face new domestic threats to its preservation.

It is critical that we get in touch with the roots of that courage, so that we do not squander all that was won at such a high cost. It is critical that we believe that God meant us to be so much better.

Jim Schwab

Heading Out on the Film Trail

Posted on August 21, 2023 by admin

The view from this week’s brief video blog is from Chicago’s 606 Trail, but David Taylor, our videographer for Planning to Turn the Tide, and I were actually headed out on a much longer trail for nearly two weeks. In a car containing his video equipment, we departed Chicago on Thursday, July 6, and drove across Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska to arrive two days later in Broomfield, Colorado, the site of the 2023 annual Natural Hazards Workshop. We returned to Chicago on Tuesday evening, July 18.

Click here to view this new video blog installment in our ongoing series.

Why such a long road trip for this documentary film of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division? We had long hoped that we could combine travel to Colorado and Iowa in a single trip. This project, dependent on grants and individual and corporate donations, does not thrive on an expensive news media budget. It is driven by a great deal of volunteer support from planners and supporters of the planning community across the country, and specifically by ad hoc groups organized in the locations where we have chosen to film segments that we think will be of the greatest educational and inspirational value in the final product. Part of the answer, therefore, lies in a diligent frugality with our donors’ money.

Flying is inevitable to some locations. In this case, however, an extensive network of grassroots contacts let us bring several elements of the production together in a short, concentrated time scale. First, we are extremely grateful to the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center, which welcomed our operation enthusiastically at its conference at the Omni Interlocken Hotel and Resort in Broomfield, which took place July 9-12. Their embrace allowed us to film interviews at the hotel throughout the conference.

At the same time, support from the Colorado Chapter of the American Planning Association, as well as other volunteers, made it possible to arrange meaningful visits to communities along the Front Range that have been affected over the past decade by drought, wildfire, and flooding, and to interview people who could share their knowledge and experience, which will be detailed in upcoming blog posts over the next few weeks. That filled out the first week.

Over the following weekend, we made our way back east again to Iowa, stopping in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids to discuss some meaningful Iowa planning innovations at both the state and local levels, dealing mostly with floods but also larger implications of climate change. I will note here that, while we stayed overnight in Lincoln on this return trip, we experienced what I had already seen in Chicago two weeks earlier: significant air pollution sweeping through Nebraska as a result of drifting smoke from raging wildfires in Canada.

Chad Nabity

Little more than a week earlier, on our way out to Colorado, we had stopped in Grand Island, Nebraska, to visit on a late Friday afternoon with Chad Nabity, AICP, the planning director for Hall County and Grand Island. Chad is the sort of remarkable professional who loves to give back to his profession. He currently serves the American Planning Association as Chair of the Divisions Council, of which HMDR is a member. In our chat at his office in City Hall, as well as at a nearby chocolate shop, he discussed Grand Island’s encounters with natural disasters, which included some flooding issues but also the Night of the Twisters in 1980, when seven tornadoes visited Grand Island in rapid succession, devastating parts of the community and triggering frantic emergency response efforts. Chad himself was entering high school that year in Grand Island. Although his parents’ house suffered little damage, he says, “not the same for close friends of mine.” Later, Chad went off to college, earned his planning degree, and eventually returned as a Grand Island native in the position he now holds. Not surprisingly, Chad is also a member of HMDR.

The evening became famous enough to draw Hollywood attention, resulting in the first Family Channel movie production, titled, you guessed it, Night of the Twisters. The movie itself drew from a 1984 young adult book of the same name by Ivy Ruckman. I guess we are not the first to think of making a movie about disasters, but I confess to viewing most such movies with a jaundiced eye because of their tendency to sensationalize such events.

We are producing an educational documentary because we are more interested in telling the story of how to prevent or mitigate such hazards, how to create resilient communities, and how to persist in the long road to recovery that inevitably follows. We want to build a community of interest for better planning for disaster resilience.

If you think that is a worthwhile enterprise, I will once again mention our need for financial support. Use the QR code below or this link to help us out. We will truly appreciate it.

Jim Schwab

Not Too Mulch to Ask

Posted on August 11, 2023 by admin

It was a simple ask. Our Chicago First Ward Alderman, Daniel La Spata, included a notice in his e-newsletter about a Saturday morning outing, organizing at his ward office on Milwaukee Avenue, for volunteers to join Openlands Chicago tree keepers to help place mulch around street trees nearby on Armitage and Milwaukee Avenues, and just, well, clean up a bit.

I admit to being an easy sell on urban trees. There is a beautiful century-old American elm in our backyard. Nearly fifteen years ago, I led an American Planning Association project, funded by the U.S. Forest Service, that resulted in a report called Planning the Urban Forest. It’s not that I believe the right trees in the right places improve the livability of our neighborhoods; I know it because of extensive research over many years that I have digested from numerous sources that prove it. I have written about it in published articles.

Volunteers in front of Ald. La Spata’s office, Saturday, July 29, 2023. All photos provided by Huan Song of Openlands.

So, once in a while, I try to put my muscle and time where my mouth is and just get out and do the real thing. All I had to do was register online so that Openlands knew how many people would participate. Besides, working to improve the survivability of real trees in a street-side environment is always an opportunity to learn something. Add my proclivity as a compulsive extrovert, loving the chance to meet and talk to new people, and I was sold. La Spata seemed pleasantly surprised when I showed up just before 9 a.m., but he shouldn’t have been. This is fun stuff for me.

But first, a word about Openlands, the organization with which he allied to provide this volunteer service opportunity. Openlands is now entering its seventh decade as a regional conservation organization, having been launched in 1963. They have consistently offered a regional vision for a landscape of land and water trails, urban forests, and public gardens, all with an eye to enhancing access for city residents. Together with the Morton Arboretum, based in Lisle, Illinois, they have provided a strong voice for the value of open space and trees in the metropolitan area that have kept people aware of the opportunities for a healthier and more biodiverse environment. While I have not been directly involved in Openlands, I have served for several years on an advisory board for Morton Arboretum’s Chicago Regional Trees Initiative, which has produced model ordinances and programs for communities throughout the region. I highly recommend visiting either or both websites and learning more about their programs in this time when climate change is threatening our urban quality of life.

But back to the scene of the volunteer work. More than a dozen volunteers, many of them certified Tree Keepers for Openlands, showed up. We initially were briefed on the day’s activities, including the areas where we would be working. We would not be planting trees—that is up to the city when it comes to street trees. Nor would we be pruning, which must be done by professional arborists. But we would be working with someone from the Chicago Streets and Sanitation Department, which provided a city truck to pick up any debris we picked up, or garbage, such as empty mulch bags, that the operation generated. Mostly, we used mulch to fill in boxes around street trees, not overloading the site but enough to protect the trees.

We also dug up and removed some burlap bags that contractors had left around some street trees, in order to allow them to grow and breathe better. That was not always easy because they become buried in the compacted soil, making them hard to extract and remove. Aside from personal fitness, I sometimes wondered what other benefits came from my twice-weekly strength and cardio workouts at a local gym. Now, I realized I was well trained to provide the powerful yank that some of these bags needed to pull them out of muddy soil for disposal. Fitness can serve practical purposes.

We were also fortunate that the weather was perfect for the occasion. The high temperature was in the low to mid 70s that day, so the only time I sweated a bit was when, on one occasion, I had to labor extra hard to remove one of those burlap bags. It was sunny but bearable. I had forgotten my sunglasses, but really did not need them.

Toward the end, as our crew had worked its way northwest on one side of Milwaukee Avenue and then back down the other toward the ward office, we were adding mulch in front of a relatively new nonprofit used bookstore, Open Books. If there is one diversion that can get my attention in addition to trees, it is browsing a bookstore, where some trees find a new but lasting use. I also needed to use the bathroom, so I asked the clerk at the checkout desk. On the way back, I mentioned that, on her birthday a few days earlier, my wife and I saw Oppenheimer at a movie theater before getting dinner nearby. Did the store have copies of American Prometheus, the Kai Bird book that inspired the movie? She looked, and they did, and I walked out with a used copy for a little over $13. Combining that with improving the neighborhood environment made for a successful morning, I felt.

But soon, as noon approached, we had a debriefing on what we had accomplished and any useful suggestions from volunteers. I suggested making wire cutters available because we had encountered chicken wire in some of the tree boxes, something much more problematic than burlap boxes, which eventually biodegrade. I don’t recall what else was mentioned, but our crew leader took notes.

Next to the aldermanic office was an outlet for Jersey Mike’s. I had joked that we should all walk in and tell them we had heard that they were planning to feed the volunteers. We laughed but obviously did no such thing. But the thought of a good sandwich burrowed into my brain, and with less than half a mile to walk home, I entered the store and ordered a turkey sandwich, Mike’s way, and took my prize home for lunch, accompanied by Cheetos and a chocolate chip cookie. The sandwich was the only likely source of nutrition, I suspect, but along with some lemonade from the refrigerator, it felt like an adequate reward for making a small difference in a big city.

Jim Schwab

Envisioning a More Resilient Future

Posted on June 21, 2023 by admin

One reason I have long loved being an urban planner is that, ultimately, planning is about imagining a better future. Or should be, anyway. Although I was in my early thirties before I returned to school for a pair of graduate degrees in Urban and Regional Planning and Journalism (a very unusual combination, I soon learned), I was intrigued with the creative process as early as high school. At the time, I applied it mostly to writing, but I learned in college that creativity was valuable for just about any endeavor. Much later, I was enthralled when I read University of Chicago psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s path-breaking 1990 book, Flow, a study of the creative process. By then, I was already in the throes of writing my own books and learning where my planning credentials could take me.

While most planners never write or publish books, we all are quite accustomed to producing plans, reports, and other documents for consumption by the public, public officials, and other decision makers. We learn how to present these materials and visualizations in public at meetings and hearings. Visual depictions, for example, of what a neighborhood not only is, but could become, are standard fare. Many of us learn to work with various kinds of visualization and design software that create renderings of future versions of boulevards and parks and other public spaces. What architects do for individual buildings, we try to do for entire neighborhoods and cities. In the process, we try to feed and amplify the public imagination for what could be, hoping to find options for improvement that will appeal to a public that may be looking for alternatives to an unsatisfactory or uninspiring status quo. Whole books and software programs, such as CommunityViz, have been devoted to sharing strategies with planners for accomplishing these visionary goals.

The written word and visualizations are two ways, often combined, for helping people see new possibilities or change the way they see the familiar. I have used them for decades, in evolving ways, to help people better understand my own planning specializations, hazard mitigation and disaster recovery. When a natural disaster such as a hurricane or earthquake has shaken a community’s assumptions about its own future, it can be time to think about rebuilding in a way that makes that community more resilient in the face of future events. I helped advance the idea of pre-disaster planning for post-disaster recovery, that is, thinking before a disaster even happens about what would expedite the recovery process and allow the community to emerge stronger and more prosperous than before. This has become known as finding the “silver lining” in the dark cloud of disaster recovery, building hope during a process that can take years or even decades in the most drastic situations.

Left to right, crew members Jim Schwab, David Taylor, and Kim Taylor Galway toast the film project at Royal Peacock, Sarasota, FL, June 18, 2023

Even when I left the American Planning Association (APA) at the end of May 2017, I largely envisioned a continuation of my hybrid journalistic and planning career in the form of books and teaching, for the most part, augmented by various consulting jobs. It was only after conversations with high school classmate David Taylor at the 50^th reunion of our Brecksville, Ohio, Class of 1968 in June 2018 that another idea took shape. David, a Purple Heart Vietnam Veteran, had taken a very different path in life after recovering from war wounds, by becoming first a photographer, and later a videographer. After retiring from a marketing position with the U.S. Postal Service, he opened his own studio and has done film and photography work for veterans and environmental groups, as well as traditional assignments like weddings.

Dave had followed my career for decades, starting with the publication of my first book, Raising Less Corn and More Hell (University of Illinois Press), in 1988. As I grew into my role as a leader in hazards planning, he became fascinated with what planners do in that realm, regarding them as “unsung heroes” of the recovery process. Further conversations led to a visit to his home in Sarasota, Florida, in February 2019, which included a presentation at a Florida Atlantic University symposium in West Palm Beach, and eventually that fall into the idea of producing a video documentary about the role of planning in helping communities address threats from natural disasters and climate change. As chair-elect at the time of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division (HMDR), I took that idea to the executive committee, and they chose to sponsor the project.

Devastation from Hurricane Michael, October 2018. Photo by David Taylor

Thus began, for me, a new way of thinking about how to engage the public on these issues. I had no experience with film as a vehicle for this process, except as a viewer, but the idea captured my imagination. What can one do with film that would be different from the written word? As the script writer, how would I think about the narrative differently? Moving out of my comfort zone forced me to think even more creatively than usual, but I welcomed the experience because I sensed that it might give us a new way to capture people’s emotions and imagination around an idea whose time was overdue. The United States, and the world, were suffering ever more massive losses from natural disasters, in part as a result of climate change, and needed new ways to approach the problem. Maybe the kinetic visual impact of a film could help affect that, if crafted with the right forward-looking perspectives in mind.

It would not be easy, and I readily understood that. Moreover, the first question was how to pay for the project. Movies are inherently more expensive to produce than books, and involve at least as much work in most ways. But if we could pull this off . . . .

Fortunately, incoming chair-elect Stacy Wright was able to arrange a $5,000 donation from Atkins, a consulting firm, to start the ball rolling in the fall of 2019. I became chair of HMDR on January 1, 2020, but the COVID pandemic intervened within weeks and by March 2020, we had to shut the project down and wait for the best. It was the fall of 2021 before we were again able to move forward. We created a Video Project Advisory Committee to provide guidance on the project. It consists of leading voices in the hazards planning subfield. We also began to assemble teams of regional volunteers who could assist us with logistics and recommend leading planners for interviews and advice.

We chose to name the film Planning to Turn the Tide because of the metaphorical implications of seeking to reverse the growing tide of losses of life and property from natural and other disasters. Well aware of the impacts and trends of climate change, we know that the number and costs of America’s billion-dollar disasters has risen rapidly in recent decades. We also know that planning can make a difference.

Outdoor interview with Julie Dennis, owner of OVID Solutions (also a member of Video Project Advisory Committee) in Blountstown, Florida, July 2022. Holding camera is Kim Taylor Galway; to her left is videographer David Taylor.

In the meantime, we raised additional donations from other consulting firms* and won two small grants from the APA Divisions Council to help us get started. We announced our project in May 2022 at the APA National Planning Conference in San Diego and recorded interviews with leading hazards professionals at the Association of State Floodplain Managers annual conference two weeks later in Orlando. By mid-July, we had recorded 14 more interviews in the Florida Panhandle, mostly in Panama City, following the area’s recovery four years after Hurricane Michael struck as the first Category 5 storm to reach the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. In that visit, we had extensive support from both City Hall in Panama City and the Bay County Chamber of Commerce, which provided its board room for a recording studio for an entire day.

Local entrepreneur Allan Branch explains his restoration efforts at History Class Brewing in downtown Panama City, July 2022

By then, our main problem was that we needed an easy way for people interested in supporting the project to make donations. Fundraising can be hard work, but there is little reason these days to make it harder than it needs to be. APA worked with us over subsequent months to create a dedicated donations page where people could donate online. Because we were the first division in APA’s history to attempt a project like this, we were also the first to need such a mechanism, but by late March of this year, it was ready. The donations page, which you can also reach with the QR code below, channels donations directly to HMDR and tracks the donor information for us, so that we can recognize our supporters appropriately (unless they choose to be anonymous). You can help keep this project moving ahead by donating now, and I sincerely hope you choose to do so. You will be helping us sell the concept of resilient communities to America.

If you need more information on the project itself, visit our project information page. I will be adding new posts regularly as we continue our work, including short blog videos summarizing what we are doing along the way. Please stay in touch.

Jim Schwab

*Early Supporters:

Atkins

APA Divisions Council

Michael Baker International

JEO Consulting

Association of State Floodplain Managers (in-kind donation)

Jim Schwab Consulting LLC

OVID Solutions

Richard Roths, AICP

Clarion Associates

Punchard Consulting

Recovering Humanity Amid Terror

Posted on September 12, 2022 by admin

When I first moved to Chicago, in November 1985, I came alone from Omaha. My wife, who grew up in Nebraska, chose to stay there until the fall semester was over. She was teaching across the river in the Council Bluffs, Iowa, public schools. I needed to settle in with my new job and find an apartment, after which we would move our belongings from Omaha. That happened in December. Jean house-sat for a carpenter friend in Omaha who vacationed in the winter until she too moved to Chicago in late January of 1986.

During those initial weeks, I stayed in a home owned by a widow in the Hyde Park neighborhood near the University of Chicago. She had a spare room to rent. We talked on a few nights as I got used to my new setting, and I learned she was Swiss but had emigrated from Czechoslovakia after World War II. She had married a Czech and was trapped with him in Prague after Hitler’s armies invaded Czechoslovakia.

In Switzerland, she presumably would have been safe. But one night, she told me, the Gestapo took her into custody because her failure to fly the Nazi flag outside their home raised suspicions. During the interrogation, they pulled out her fingernails, an absolutely excruciating torture intended to force her to reveal whatever they thought she knew about something or other, which she maintained was nothing. She simply had not flown a flag. Maybe it was a slow night for the German secret police in Prague. But the nightmare still haunted her in Chicago more than 40 years later. She seemed withdrawn and shy, telling me all this in a low but calm and insistent voice. Perhaps my willingness to listen, a trait developed as a journalist and interviewer, put her at ease about talking to me. I am not sure. It just happened.

After the war, and I don’t remember how, she found her way to the United States and was able to build a new life in Chicago. For her, this nation became a safe haven, an escape from terror.

The point of relating this brief story is that it made a huge impression on me. It made me acutely aware on a very personal level of how trauma shapes and distorts personality and lingers in the subconscious. I could not imagine reliving her experience. Just being a patient listener was deeply humbling. It is one thing to know of such horrors from a distance or from reading about them, quite another to sit across the kitchen table from a person who can share with you how she was subjected to them.

The world is still full of people experiencing such horrors even today. Certainly, the nightmare of the Russian invasion of Ukraine comes to mind, with all the trauma it will leave in its wake even if the Ukrainians succeed in defending their freedom from what clearly is now an insane regime in Moscow. There is also the war in Syria, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and the list goes on. Many in America have a profound tendency to compartmentalize, to choose categories, such as white Europeans, with whom we will sympathize, and to exclude from consideration Africans and Latin Americans, for instance, even though the reality of their own suffering is often no less traumatic.

This reality has in recent days become very clear in Chicago, which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, in his remarkably callous fashion, added to his short list of Washington, D.C., and New York, as sanctuary cities to which he would dispatch unannounced busloads of migrants from the southern border with no preparation for their arrival, in order to protest federal border policy according to his own far-right vision of who belongs in America and who does not. In response, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has welcomed them and called for donations, but that alone will not solve the long-term problem.

With that in mind, a small volume atop a pile of book award submissions from five years ago kept calling to me. Busy with other work, I ignored it, but it would not go away. It sat there atop this small pile on the floor, perhaps getting more attention because I had not yet decided what to do with that pile. I was not ready to cull more books from my collection. That pile was a remnant from the last year I had served as a judge for the Society of Midland Authors book awards contest. It had not made the cut, and to be honest, I had scanned it at the time. There are too many submissions, and too little time, to read every book thoroughly. Each judge uses their own techniques to manage that problem, which can involve evaluating 70 to 100 books in some categories in a matter of two or three months. My approach was to scan the first 20 pages to see if the book absolutely captivated me, then to concentrate on thoroughly reading the smaller contingent that made the cut, so that I could give potential winners the attention they deserved. With three judges on each panel, we sometimes influenced each other, suggesting attention to something that one judge found particularly meritorious. It was a collaborative effort.

None of that means the books left behind did not merit attention. They simply did not make it to the final rounds. Think of it as a preliminary heat in an athletic competition.

So it was with Human Rights and Wrongs, a 111-page collection of true stories by psychologist Adrianne Aron, who lives in Berkeley, California, and somewhat accidentally found her mission in life. She is a go-to expert for lawyers seeking to document asylum claims for immigrants who have suffered more trauma than most of us could handle. Sometimes, they can’t handle it either, but somehow, they made it to the U.S. and are seeking mercy and refuge, which is not always granted. To protect them, Aron does not use their real names, but she conveys very real stories with the flair of an aspiring fiction writer. If only what she relates were fiction. But these are real people, and she displays a unique and very human knack for finding ways to unravel the real story behind someone’s plea for asylum despite layers of fear, emotional numbness, and very often, cultural misunderstanding and language barriers.

I will offer two examples. One involves a woman from El Salvador whose religious beliefs became the shield against reality that allowed her to avoid becoming detached from reality through post-traumatic stress. The other involves a Haitian man, arrested while defending himself from a drunken attacker, whose (mis)understanding of his rights in American courts was quite naturally molded by the rampantly unjust proceedings he had experienced in Haiti. Judges cannot (or should not) assume that asylum seekers see the world through the highly educated eyes of the social circles in which judges circulate. The need for a more diverse judiciary, in fact, stems in part from the frequent inability of privileged people to understand the world and experiences from which most refugees have emerged.

The Salvadoreña, whom Aron calls “Ms. Amaya,” was a simple mother from a rural community who had a story to tell, but her lawyers feared that, if she told it all, she would not be credible. Yet, not allowing her to tell her whole story would deprive her of the power to tell her own story as she knew it. It would continue the process of disempowering her that had begun in Central America when soldiers came to her house, accusing her of hiding arms of which she knew mothing. The soldiers took her to an army post, where she was gang-raped and tortured for four days before being released. She prayed to the Virgin Mary for salvation for her children’s sake and thanked her when it was over and she was still alive. As the detention wore on with other ordeals, she saw the hand of God in causing soldiers’ lit matches to go out when they threatened to set her on fire, and when their rifles misfired as she expected to be shot. But how could she know this was an intimidation tactic common in Latin America? It fell to Aron, the psychologist, to document the use of such tactics and to show that Ms. Amaya’s deep faith in divine intervention and mercy in fact protected her from the sort of deep psychological damage she might otherwise have suffered from confronting the reality of what was done to her. Religion gave her a belief structure that fit with her culture and afforded her some sense of divine protection.

Having helped make a successful case for Ms. Amaya’s grant of asylum, Aron also thought it wise not to mention in her brief that some of the oppressive tactics used by the Salvadoran military were actually consistent with those taught to visiting Latin American military officers by the U.S. School of the Americas. Challenging the judge’s world view might not have led to the best results for her client. Save that education for another day.

Reprinted from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonton_Macoute.

Louis Antoine was attacked by a drunk one day who stumbled into his path on the way out of a bar. As local police arrived, they saw him striking back. He ended up in the police car; the drunk walked away. Louis peed his pants from fear on the way to the station. After growing up in Haiti, being beaten by the Tonton Macoutes, the murderous gangsters who enforced the rule of dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier when he was a child and who had killed both his mother and father, he expected nothing but the worst when hustled into the back of a police car. One obstacle to retaining the political asylum granted him earlier was that he did not understand what he had pled to in court and, speaking Haitian Kreyol, did not understand the proceedings. Nor did he understand that the purpose of the French translator sitting with him was to help represent him because he spoke only Kreyol, not French. Why had he not asked for translation into a language he understood? It was not his experience that the defendant was allowed to understand. In Haiti, the French-speaking elite simply handed down decisions to the less fortunate masses. Simply put, he was unaware of rights in America that he had never experienced in Haiti. The psychologist’s job was to explain all this, based on the horrific injustices that Louis Antoine had experienced in Haiti. The man had shown the resourcefulness to save money and find his way to the United States, seeking a better life, so it was not emotional inhibition or trauma that held him back, but lack of knowledge of how the system worked. It fell to Aron to document his history and make clear where the American system had failed him until she helped reframe his case.

Underlying these and several other poignant stories is the fact that Aron’s techniques were not simply a matter of professional expertise, but of her very human willingness to listen, to find effective interpreters, and to probe deeply enough to make sense of it all and restore voice and agency to people who had mostly experienced distance and disempowerment from those who determined their fate. The American system has the potential to dispense real justice, but only when staffed and supported by people willing to invest the time and moral imagination to make it work.

For that very reason, although the book is now five years old, every story it tells retains a powerful relevance to current circumstances. We remain a nation that must rise above its petty prejudices to bestow mercy and live up to the very promises that brought Aron’s clients here in the first place.

Jim Schwab

Hidden Treasures in Plain Sight

Posted on September 5, 2022 by admin

My mother was definitely a neatnik. Everything in its place, but don’t keep too many things in the first place. If something did not have an obvious use, get rid of it. A sentimentalist, she was not.

She lived her life in the suburbs of Cleveland, which is where I grew up. At the age of 29, however, I effectively “flew the coop,” a phrase I’ve hyperlinked for the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with its usage. I moved to Iowa, took the helm of a public interest group, later transitioned to graduate school at the University of Iowa, and after completing my degrees, ended up in Chicago. The rest is history, both personal and professional.

That meant that, on occasion, my parents visited our home in Chicago, though I far more frequently visited family in Cleveland. On every occasion that I can recall, at some point she would look around and ask, “What do you want with all these books?” The obvious answer was that I have a voracious reading habit, which she mostly did not share. That made it difficult for her to fathom the extent of the collection, not to mention that most of the books held no attraction for her. Her firstborn had a depth of intellectual curiosity that was also hard for her to fathom, though it clearly drove my academic success, which she respected.

It’s not that the collection was messy. As needed, I have acquired and assembled bookshelves, and I keep the collection well organized. Unlike some bibliophiles, I give away some books that I cannot imagine using anymore; I believe in thinning the herd. My mother, who also was frugal, surely wondered how much all those books had cost. In truth, while I spend a modest amount on books, I have also benefited from my writing habit, something else that was a bit foreign to her, though she tried to understand it as entrepreneurial activity. That habit meant that, as a volunteer book awards judge over many years with the Society of Midland Authors, I received dozens of annual awards entries in either biography and memoirs, or adult nonfiction, the two categories I judged in various years. Judges are permitted to keep the submissions. Some were worth keeping; others, I gave away after the contest was over. Other books arrived as review copies, also complimentary. I have occasionally reviewed books on this blog, but have also done so in magazines and journals.

Shortly after moving to Chicago, I carried my mother’s tradition of frugality into uncharted territory by discovering that Powell’s, a chain of used bookstores, had the habit of putting discards on the sidewalk outside their E. 57^th St. store and letting customers take what they wanted. At the time, I lived and worked not far away, so this was very convenient. I would flip through the pile to find what I considered hidden gems and take them home, quietly building my collection and sometimes immediately indulging in great finds. Like a bear drawn to honey, sometimes I also entered the bookstore to find something I was willing to pay for. Used books, often in good condition but cheaper, have exactly the same information as the new versions—imagine that! And unlike a used car, they don’t lose value. They just sit on the shelf, patiently awaiting their opportunity to expand your mind.

I must also acknowledge that my wife and I, on gift dates like birthdays and Christmas, often recognize each other’s reading interests with gifts. Jean’s tastes tend toward mysteries and spy thrillers and similar genres, on one hand, but also, since the rise of Donald Trump, toward the cornucopia of investigative journalism that has arisen in his wake. He is almost certainly the greatest focus of such political journalism since Watergate. My own interests are so varied that I must pose a challenge for her, but she often turns to environmental books and biographies as reliable pleasers. Her instincts about my interests are usually quite accurate.

By now, you may be wondering, after a few weeks of radio silence on this blog, why I am writing a paean to books, including old ones that may need the dust blown off before use. I will confess that recent events, both personal and professional, have kept me off balance enough to delay a new blog post. That is largely an incoherent story of distractions large and small and often unrelated and not worth relating. But the evolving circumstances induced me to spend more time reading, at a deliberate pace, books that I had previously put aside, books that have offered me a different way to see life and the world—even the universe—around me.

The point is that these are not brand-new books that just arrived on my doorstep. While I often may cite and hyperlink older works as sources for facts I use in blog posts on various topics, I have seldom centered whole discussions on them. But thank God they were sitting here because I am realizing some of them deserve attention in their own right, even if they are no longer “hot off the press.” One book, for instance, discusses in searing imagery the impacts of trauma on refugees seeking asylum in America. One hallmark of wisdom for any of us is to realize, no matter how much we know or think we know, how much more we can learn as long as the capacity is still in us. Much of that learning may come from books that in the past just never got our full attention.

So, don’t be surprised if I center a few articles in upcoming weeks and months on those very books, whether they are just three years old or ten or twenty years old, or even older. I will certainly be selective and purposeful about it, but I will give them their due while also discussing current issues and examining the new books that come my way. But I simply want to share the gems that have emerged from those back shelves. They are giving me a whole new motivation to learn and share.

Now, if someone could just come over and help me find that missing copy of Les Miserables . . . .

Jim Schwab

Modern Links to Lincoln

Posted on April 16, 2022 by admin

Abraham Lincoln Museum and Library. Library is across the street, on right side of photo.

It was spring break in the Chicago Public Schools this past week (April 11-15). Despite busy lives, I thought my wife and I should do something special with Alex, our 13-year-old grandson, so I proposed a visit to Springfield, the Illinois capital, to visit the Abraham Lincoln Museum, which we had never seen. The museum is part of a complex, opened in 2005, that includes the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, an invaluable resource for students and scholars on about Lincoln, the Civil War, and related historical topics, and the Illinois State Historical Library, founded in 1889. Across the street sits Springfield Union Station, which now contains an exhibit about the 2012 Steven Spielberg movie titled Lincoln. The library and museum are connected by a walkway above the street.

Springfield Union Station

From Chicago, Springfield is a fairly easy day trip, about three to three and a half hours each way, depending on traffic. The Lincoln Museum and the State Capitol are popular field trip destinations for Illinois schools, particularly those in central Illinois. Even with many schools out on the day we came, the museum was an obvious magnet for smaller groups of teens and for families. Lincoln, despite nearly 160 years’ distance in time from us today, remains one of the most fascinating figures in U.S. presidential history. The museum notes that only Jesus Christ may be the subject of more biographies than Lincoln himself. It is interesting to contemplate that both had more obscure beginnings than most major historical figures. Does that add to the fascination? I suspect that may well be the case.

Others have written about the museum and library since it opened, but this is a unique time to visit, given contemporary events in Ukraine, where war is ravaging an entire nation much as it did our own in the 1860s. One is almost compelled to make comparisons, and guests were asked to use flower-shaped paper cutouts and glue to write messages on blue and yellow strips that will be displayed to communicate messages of support to the Ukrainian people in their struggle for freedom against a Russian invasion. Blue and yellow, of course, are the colors of the Ukrainian flag. Jean and Alex both wrote their own messages; I wrote mine in Russian, which I learned half a century ago at Cleveland State University in classes half filled with Ukrainian American students. Мир, I wrote on half of the petals I glued together; Свобода, I wrote on the overlying petals: “Peace” and “Freedom.” Unfortunately, I do not know any Ukrainian, but most Ukrainians know Russian. The message is clear enough.

Depiction of antebellum slave auction

But back to Lincoln and his own times, when a battle raged for the unity of the nation in the face of slave holders determined to maintain white supremacy at any cost in a war that soon enough led to the liberation of more than four million enslaved African Americans. Nothing is ever simple, and Lincoln was not perfect, but his saving grace, unlike a recent American president, is that he never thought he was. He was simply an elected leader who was determined to find a path for his nation through its darkest days, and somehow succeeded. But he was also assassinated by John Wilkes Booth before he could ever see some of his most important gains for equality sacrificed to political myopia and expedience with no opportunity to do anything about it. His own vice-president, Andrew Johnson, proved not only inadequate to the task but riddled with racial bias. Vice-presidents in those days were often mere ticket balancers with little thought given to their abilities to lead the nation. Sometimes, one wonders how much has changed in that respect.

The intriguing thing about the museum is the way in which its designers have chosen to convey to visitors the realities of Lincoln’s life and times. This is truly a modern museum. After taking advantage of the opportunity to “get a picture with the Lincolns,” standing among their images in the lobby, we attended a short holographic presentation called “Ghosts of the Library,” in which a young researcher named Thomas helps people envision how the thousands of documents and historical items in the facility can come to life and share their stories. We realize that every item in the collection has its own story, so many that one could spend a lifetime hearing them all, but, of course, we had only a few hours to get the gist.

But that gist then, for us, moved to another theater, in which another narrator walked us through Lincoln’s life from a deprived childhood in a wilderness cabin to the peaks of power in the White House, surrounded by turmoil and controversy, until a gunshot rings out, and we know that Booth has struck at Ford’s Theater, and Lincoln at that point, as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously stated, “belongs to the ages.”

Paralleling that sequence are two very different displays, one small, approximating the size of the cabin in which Lincoln grew up, showing him reclined before the light of a fireplace, book in hand, educating himself, for he had only two years of formal education in his entire life. But his absolute fascination with books, and his ambition, served him well. In those days, one became a lawyer through such self-study under the aegis of a practicing lawyer, and it gradually became clear that Lincoln was an intellectual match for most of those around him. He served in the Illinois legislature in the 1830s, in Congress during the Mexican War, and despite periodic defeats including two Senate races, finally won election as president of the United States.

For Alex, seeing the cabin in which Lincoln grew up seemed to make an impression. Although Alex’s life had its challenges before we were awarded custody, he now lives in our three-story brick home with three bedrooms and modern furnishings. Yet, here was Lincoln, teaching himself to read and ultimately making one of the most profound impacts on human history. As I said, perhaps that is what makes the story so compelling.

Depiction of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln

Across the hall was a replica of parts of the White House and a sometimes-noisy presentation of the Civil War years, with holographic figures in one part of the passageway speaking aloud what was often said in print, in letters, newspapers, and other forums of the time. Some are angry men denouncing him as incompetent, but another is a young woman writing to the president about her brother, serving in the Army, who, in her view, did not need to serve alongside “Negroes” who would be unlikely to fight. The comment is even more compelling in light of our historical knowledge that Black troops, who joined the Union army in the second half of the war, were among the bravest, perhaps in part driven by the emerging news that Confederate forces who captured Black soldiers simply executed them instead of placing them in prisoner camps, although plenty of white troops died under inhumane conditions in such camps before the war ended. What comes across most clearly from this mode of presentation, in a way that written words cannot convey so well, is the sheer nasty divisiveness that infested the country in Lincoln’s time. It makes me wonder what impression this makes on anyone who still approves of the January 6 insurrection at the nation’s capital, inspired by a president who refused to acknowledge loss. When one thinks about Lincoln’s losses on the way to the White House, and the high cost of political division during his presidency, the lack of political grace by some today is even more appalling.

All of that is already compelling enough for a museum visit, but the museum offers one more powerful witness by including what docents warn is a display that visitors may find deeply disturbing. This new exhibit, “Stories of Survival,” opened at the Lincoln Museum on March 22 but was developed by the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. It displays artifacts and photos from the Holocaust in World War II, but also more recent events such as the migrations of refugees from Middle East hot spots such as Syria. The stories and images are heart-wrenching. In my mind, they force two compelling questions: What is different today from the slaughter of the Civil War, and how does that contrast with events in Ukraine?

The biggest single factor, it seems to me, is that those who were resisting the Union in 1861, and who started the war, as Lincoln anticipated, by shelling Fort Sumter in South Carolina, were doing so not to advance human freedom but to preserve the domination of one race over another. In Ukraine, a sovereign nation, Ukraine, although an offshoot of the politically depleted former Soviet Union, is seeking to preserve its gains in building democracy and freedom. It is the commitment to its own independence and the attraction of a more dignified and promising political system that drives the impressive Ukrainian commitment to fight so well against the odds. The outcome remains in limbo, the destruction remains appalling, but the desire for a free and better life could not be clearer. In other cases, such as Syria (which has been aided by Russia), the power of an oppressive system remains the driving force in continuing genocidal warfare now into the third decade of a twenty-first century that we might have hoped would bring an end to such conflicts. Instead, we find ourselves confronted with evidence of a continued determination by strongmen throughout the world to enforce their will and of the ability of all too many to follow such leaders and excuse their behavior.

It is a sobering realization that the struggle for human freedom, dignity, and equality remains the compelling work of our time.

On the way home, I asked Alex what he felt he had learned from his visit to the Lincoln museum. Sitting in the back seat of the car, he thought for a moment and then said, “Being president is a very difficult job, and lots of people will be against you or criticize you.”

If he got that much out of it at his age, I thought, this trip was well worth the time. I did not ask about the “Stories of Survival” exhibit. It’s a bit much for the most mature adults to take in, let alone a seventh grader.

Jim Schwab

The Struggle for Climate Sanity

Posted on February 7, 2022 by admin

It is Sunday evening as I start this blog post. Whether I finish it tonight is less important than simply getting it done. I had intended to get it done earlier, but other matters intervened, including a death in the family, so I am doing it now.

Part of my motivation is that I feel a small sense of empowerment from a successful start to a two-month series of Adult Forum discussions of climate change at my own church. I became the volunteer coordinator of the Adult Forum, which is the adult discussion group that meets during the Sunday school hour, in 2017, just in time for the 500^th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation. That is no small thing at a Lutheran church. Last week, introducing the moral and ethical questions surrounding the biggest existential question of our times—the radical environmental changes produced by humans in the industrial age—we had eight people in attendance, not huge but remarkably good as church attendance struggles to regain traction after two years of pandemic lockdowns and fears of new waves of COVID. Our congregation has taken the pandemic seriously, and many of the elderly and the immunocompromised watch the weekly services online. This week, Adult Forum attendance grew to ten. Most people seem committed to the series. And they have lots of questions and paid rapt attention. I supplement what we do in our one-hour discussions with email distribution of links and attachments to additional material.

We started on the first Sunday by focusing on Katharine Hayhoe’s new book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. My choice was deliberate. Before we tackled the science and the social and planning issues of climate change, it seemed important to consider how climate change became such a divisive issue for American society and the world. And there seemed no better place to start than with this excellent book.

Roots of Division

Why and how did climate change become such a divisive issue? Part of the answer is that climate simply became one of several issues that provided potent material for political polarization, which has also infected debates about racial justice, immigration, and a frequently paranoid distrust of science that has hampered efforts to address the COVID-19 pandemic. In other words, the larger political environment swept climate change into the cauldron of this hostile partisan warfare. Consider the timing. Newt Gingrich’s right-wing uprising in the Republican party during the Clinton administration, a predecessor of the later Tea Party during the Obama administration, came along just as climate change was emerging as a topic of serious scientific debate. In due course,

Source: US EPA

looking at the data, an overwhelming percentage of scientists in relevant fields came to accept the basic premise that human activities of the Industrial Age are the only credible cause of the warming effects we are seeing today, but the political discourse on the right largely dismissed the evidence. That discourse of dismissal was heavily supported by the fossil fuel industry and a public relations campaign to muddle the issue, a matter discussed in 2010 in the book by historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt.

However, there is also the fact that climate change poses a long-term threat that many people find difficult to recognize as a more immediate crisis, at least before it is too late to reverse the damage. History is replete with examples of people failing in this way, and George Marshall, in Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, published in 2014, explains why we are prone to disregard distant threats in favor of the problems immediately in front of us. Of course, in recent years, as evidence of the more visible and tangible impacts of climate change has accumulated, our attention to the larger problem has grown. But so, too, has the denial in some quarters, fueled in part by the growing distrust of science and scientists, who used to enjoy much higher regard in most quarters of modern society. But that was before they inherited the thankless task of explaining what Al Gore two decades ago called “the inconvenient truth.”

A Matter of Values

Katharine Hayhoe is one of those people who has found a mission in life. Such people are blessed because a positive mission, even or especially in the face of challenges, serves to help clarify one’s values. Hayhoe is clear about hers. An evangelical Christian from Canada, now working at Texas A&M University, she is committed to caring for the poor, the hungry, and the sick, but also to the truth, which means that, for her, facts matter. They matter greatly. She also likes to discuss what faith can teach us and how we communicate with each other in a civil and loving manner, something that is not always easily achieved. There are, in fact, times when the only option in a hostile conversation is to walk away.

The central point is to understand who we are and what we stand for as we undertake to persuade others not only that climate change exists and matters, but why it matters. And so, at the very outset, Hayhoe provides a chapter titled “Who I Am.” It is her suggested inventory of self-assessment:

Where I Live
What I Love Doing
Where I’m From
Those I Love
What I Believe
Be Who You Are

The underlying point, she stresses, is that people will care about climate change for different reasons, their own reasons. People, she notes, generally already have the values they need to care about the issue but often have not connected the dots. The only way those of who do care can help them connect the dots is by first inquiring about those values they share, and then listening. Without listening, we are largely talking past each other, which yields more tension than progress.

Photo from Shutterstock

As an example, she cites the day she spoke to the West Texas Rotary Club, whose banner declared “The Four-Way Test.” The test was, first, Is it the truth? Second, Is it fair to all concerned? Third, will it build goodwill and better friendships? And fourth, will it be beneficial to all concerned? She reports that she skipped the luncheon to spend the next 20 minutes reorganizing her presentation around those principles, noting, for example, that nearby Fort Hood, a military base, now draws 45 percent of its power from solar and wind, “saving taxpayers millions.” She won over some skeptics because, once they connected the dots, the whole proposition of confronting climate change became more meaningful in terms they understood and accepted.

Facts and Tribal Loyalties

“Facts are stubborn things,” President John Adams once wrote. They don’t bend to our preconceptions or political wishes. Nonetheless, people like to be able to choose the facts they embrace while ignoring those that fail to confirm their biases. To varying degrees, this probably describes all of us because human nature is seductive about illusions, but reality can be harsh when it asserts itself. The role of education is, in large part, to help us learn how to learn and, in the process, be willing to confront our biases. Learning is a life-long challenge.

One crucial bit of learning regarding opinions on climate change is that not everyone is on one side or the other. There is a spectrum between the polar opposites. While completing work on Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation several years ago, I discovered the work of two researchers, Tony Leiserowitz and Ed Maibach, who had produced a journal article titled “Global Warming’s Six Americas.” They systematically described six camps, or tribes, of people with different perspectives on climate change. Two, one on either end of the debate, corresponded with our common tendency to divide people into “pro” and “anti” factions. One, the Alarmed, are those who see a serious and near-term threat to the planet from climate change. Another, the Dismissives, reject any mention of climate change and are most likely to buy into conspiracy theories and misinformation.

But between them are four other groups:

Concerned, who accept the premise of climate change but see the threat as less immediate;
Cautious, who still need some convincing but are open to persuasion;
Disengaged, who “know little and care less”; and
Doubtful, who don’t see a serious risk.

I was pleasantly surprised that Hayhoe introduced their work in her first chapter, noting that the percentages of Alarmed had grown in the past decade, basically siphoning some numbers from the Concerned. The two groups combined form a narrow majority, while the Dismissives constitute about 7 percent. The percentage of Cautious had remained at about 20 percent.

The most important fact emerging from the survey work of Leiserowitz and Maibach is that those totally dismissing climate change as a reality are in fact a distinct minority. One conclusion that flows from that is that those working to educate the public on climate change have a large field to work with and can reasonably sidestep the Dismissives. Arguing or even talking with them is likely to prove a waste of time.

The Futility of Guilt

One approach that Hayhoe almost categorically rejects is laying guilt trips on individuals over consumer choices, in part because the tactic seldom includes a realistic assessment of the alternatives that people face in deciding how to live their lives and get things done. She particularly dislikes what she calls purity tests. For example, she notes that one British colleague questioned why she flew to a speaking engagement in Alberta instead of taking the train from Texas. The problem is that no such direct train route exists. Hayhoe calculated the time, hours, and expenses involved in even attempting this approach through roundabout scheduling and found, for one thing, that the miles involved in driving to Oklahoma City to catch a train east and north into Canada from New York City, in order then to use the Canadian rail system to cross the country from Toronto were enough to get her colleague from London to Irkutsk in Siberia. It would also take several days in each direction. It simply was not a practical option.

Many potential alternatives for reducing our carbon footprints must first be created through the political or economic system before individuals can be held accountable for failing to use them. In many parts of the country, people lack the ability to meet online efficiently because our nation has yet to make adequate or high-quality broadband available. One cannot use options that one does not have. People cannot be blamed for driving a car to a meeting in a location where mass transit is not available. It is small wonder that people often feel their efforts do not matter when they are faced with a paucity of individual consumer choices, especially when powerful forces have worked to ensure that more desirable choices cannot be implemented. Understanding this fundamental point is essential in recognizing why the debate over infrastructure policy is a debate about what future we wish to create for ourselves. Once upon a time, our nation chose to facilitate nationwide mobility by creating the interstate highway system. Today’s debate is in part about creating a network of charging stations that will make driving electric vehicles feasible for the average motorist. Societal choices dictate many individual choices, and focusing guilt on individuals is in most cases an exercise in futility. We could better spend that time moving mountains on Capitol Hill.

Why Everyone Matters

There is a great deal more to the book than I am recounting here, as is the case with almost any book that is well worth reading. The important conclusion Hayhoe offers, however, is one that should be common sense but suffers from a surfeit of wishful thinking. Basically, climate change is a situation wrought by humankind and, ultimately, fixable only by humans. Hayhoe makes clear that, in her belief system, it is illogical and irresponsible to expect God to intervene to solve the problem because God has given us agency to tackle problems of our own making. She quotes Proverbs: “Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity.”

Our failure lies in not realizing that we are simply subject to the rules of physics. Put another way—one perhaps more akin to Eastern philosophies–we have not aligned our lifestyles and social systems with a sound understanding of natural systems. As Hayhoe states, “If humans increase heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, the planet warms. Pretending we can defy physics by putting our heads in the sand or cultivating a positive attitude will merely keep us slightly happier until (and more surprised when) the axe falls.”

False hope is often fatal, and at the very least self-destructive. Hayhoe prefers rational hope, wherein we recognize risk and understand the stakes involved in the situation we have created, noting that this requires courage but also provides vision. Ultimately, vision is not simply some magical gift from the Almighty. It flows from the hard work of clarifying our goals and beliefs and acting on those beliefs. It is the hard but rewarding work of empowering the willing.

Jim Schwab

Truth and Consequences and January 6

Posted on January 6, 2022 by admin

Reused with permission from Wikipedia

Like most people, I learned of the insurrection that resulted in five deaths and considerably more than 100 injuries to Capitol police from television news. Don’t ask me which channel; it was probably either CNN or MSNBC, but honestly, I don’t remember. I only remember what I saw—the searing image of American citizens attacking the seat of their own government on behalf of a President who lied to them because his twisted psyche did not allow him to admit that he had lost an election, fair and square. If he believes that the election was stolen, it is not because he has ever had any evidence to that effect. It is because he has repeated the lie to himself so often that he has internalized it completely. Such men are very dangerous.

There are plenty of good, well-written commentaries on the events of January 6, and it is not my aim to add another broad assessment of the day. The testimony before, and the final report of, the House Select Committee will add immensely to our knowledge, but it remains to be seen whether it can change minds. Even in 1974, as Richard Nixon was about to resign the presidency after a visit by a delegation of distinguished Republican Senators convinced him the gig was up, about one-quarter of the American public still sided with him, either disregarding or disbelieving the criminality on display from the Watergate affair. Even the most venal and corrupt politicians have always had their supporters, often until the bitter end. It is not as if the larger public is composed entirely of angels, after all. When the support fades, it is usually because the politician in question is no longer useful.

Corrupt and authoritarian politicians are almost always bullies who are highly skilled at making offers that their followers, and often others, cannot refuse. There is nothing new about this phenomenon. It is as old as civilization itself. The Bible is replete with evidence of such venality, dating back thousands of years.

So, what do I have to offer?

On the afternoon of the insurrection, I was preparing for a pair of sequential consulting meetings when the news caught my attention. That led to a mercifully brief text exchange with someone I will leave unidentified. I will paraphrase for clarity while sharing its essence. The point is not who it is, but his perceptions in the face of what effectively was a coup attempt. I understood his politics for many years beforehand; sometimes, he would needle me about it, and sometimes in recent years I was forced to terminate a conversation that, in my view, had departed earth’s orbit and no longer made sense.

But at that moment, I had to believe even this riot, insurrection, coup attempt, call if what you will, would be too much even for him. I was wrong.

I asked if he was still happy with Trump after Trump had incited an insurrection at the Capitol.

I was told that, after years of corruption that no one had challenged, except for Trump in the previous four years, “people are fed up.”

I want to step back here and make two points about this expression of frustration.

First, regarding corruption, this is a vague term that, without specifics, can be used as a broad brush against almost anything one disagrees with, and I believe that was happening here. There is, in my view, little question that corruption has at times affected both political parties. Personally, I have been perfectly willing to cross party lines to vote against candidates and office holders with documented records of corruption of any kind. I intensely dislike politicians who put self-interest ahead of the public interest. I am also aware that my disagreement with their policies does not constitute evidence of their corruption. Those are two different things, and we need to respect that difference if democracy is going to involve any kind of principled debate about what is best for our society. There are times when those lines are blurred, and times when it is clear. For instance, I was pleased last year when Democrats in the Illinois House of Representatives voted to replace long-time Speaker Michael Madigan, who had become entangled in a corruption scandal involving Commonwealth Edison Co. and its parent Exelon, with Chris Welch, who became the first Black Speaker in Illinois history. Welch may not be perfect either, but it was time for Madigan to leave. He has retired into obscurity, but he may yet face federal charges. I could name dozens of such situations in either party.

But to suggest that no one had addressed such corruption until Trump did so is ludicrous. It also demonstrates a willful blindness to facts. The litany of evidence of Trump’s shady transactions in both business and politics is overwhelming, from the $25 million fraud settlement in the lawsuit against Trump University, to the tax and insurance fraud charges now being brought against the Trump Organization by the Manhattan District Attorney, to the investigation of Trump’s demand of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to allow Trump to claim victory in that state in the 2020 election—the details have filled multiple books over many years. No matter the depth of evidence that Trump not only does not fight corruption, but personifies it, followers will insist on dismissing such evidence, almost surely without ever reviewing it. Nonetheless, it is absolutely clear to anyone reading all this, as I have, that Trump has never been the weapon against this corruption that this complaint suggests.

For those who may think otherwise, or want to better arm themselves to discuss this topic, I include a short, incomplete bibliography of Trump-related investigative literature at the end of this blog post. Beware: It may keep you occupied for weeks.

But there is also the claim that “people are fed up.” This deserves closer analysis. One could ask, Fed up with what, exactly? My correspondent cited Biden “bringing back old retreads that Obama had in his cabinet.” That is hardly a crime, of course, and may well have indicated a preference by a new president facing a crisis of confidence in government for choosing experienced people who know how to make government work. That is hardly cause for a riot, let alone a coup attempt, and I said as much, though admittedly I may have sparked further anger in referring to the corruption claims as a “bullshit excuse” for an insurrection—especially since the express purpose was to prevent certification of the election. He also noted the need for better trade agreements, for someone to “actually help the working person,” and the loss of manufacturing jobs. I would readily agree that these are all legitimate political issues, subject to debate both on the streets and in the media, and in Congress and state legislatures, but justification for an insurrection?

Reused with permission from Wikipedia

That was the red line I could not cross, nor could I accept that anyone else should be allowed to do so.

The idea that all this frustration, not all of it based on accurate perceptions, justified an attempt to overthrow an election underlines a sense of civic privilege that I find appalling. If your preferred candidate failed to make his case to the American people—and that is precisely what happened to Trump—it does not follow that the only path forward is insurrection. The presumption behind this logic is deeply rooted in white privilege, even if its advocates do not wish to consciously own that brutal truth.

After all, if anyone is entitled to a sense that they are pushing back against persistent injustice, it would be African Americans, who can cite centuries of brutal suppression and slavery prior to the Civil War, the use of home-grown terrorism through organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to suppress Black voting rights and citizenship and economic opportunity, Jim Crow laws that enforced inequality well into the 20^th century, vicious housing discrimination, and violent police actions, such as those of the Alabama state troopers who assaulted peaceful demonstrators in Selma in 1965, all of which make pro-Trump protesters’ allegations of unfairness pale in comparison. Yet, most African American citizens have persisted across centuries to use what levers they have within the democratic system to achieve a more equitable society. Admittedly, there are times when tensions have boiled over, but who could reasonably have expected otherwise? I am not justifying violence, but asking reasonable people to consider the disappointments to which Black Americans have been subjected for generations before making comparisons to the complaints of the MAGA crowd.

Moreover, such issues of delayed justice have affected other minorities, such as Chinese, the subject of an immigration exclusion law for decades, the Japanese internment during World War II, and widespread prejudice and discrimination against Latino immigrants over the past century. One could go on, but the point is clear. All have sought doggedly to work through the existing system to resolve injustice.

That leads to the next element of the exchange, in which I insisted that any Democrat instigating such an attack would be accused of treason, and that to react otherwise to Trump’s insurrection is “blatant hypocrisy.” I wanted to draw direct attention to the double standard that was being applied by many Republicans in this instance. In fact, I added, “Coup attempt is crime.” Democrats made similar allegations, of course, in the second impeachment trial.

That led to the countercharge that Democrats were hypocritical in allowing “looting, burning, shooting and harassing of innocent people” in the demonstrations and riots that followed the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in the summer of 2020. He then referred to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot as “part of the elitist liberal problem in this country.” As with the corruption issue, we were back to the broad-brush approach to asserting problems without specifics.

At that point, I decided to end the conversation because it seemed clear that the discussion was going to veer off track. I made clear that “I have never endorsed violence and I never will.” But I added that in Trump’s case, “This is an official condoning this,” which separated it from mayors who did not like the violence in their cities, but were faced with challenges in deciding the best approach to handling it. His comments also ignored the fact that 93 percent of Black Lives Matter protests were completely peaceful. I contrasted such practical policy decisions to “federal crimes encouraged by a US president who should know better.” And with that, the exchange ended.

I realize, of course, that this is just one such conversation among millions of exchanges among friends and relatives with contrasting views across the country. I did not completely disagree with all of his concerns, but I also was deeply puzzled as to how those of us worried about the future of democracy when it is under attack by followers of a demagogue like Trump can wrestle with jello or shadow-box with phantoms, given the vague and disingenuous statements with which we are confronted, including some of his.

In the meantime, speaking of stealing elections, we are watching some amazing voting rights shenanigans, to say nothing of phony “audits,” at the state level. What will we say when the second insurrection anniversary rolls around? Will anything have changed?

Partial Bibliography: Recent Books on President Donald Trump and/or the Insurrection

Johnston, David Cay. The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Karl, Jonathan. Betrayal. Dutton, 2021.

Leonnig, Carol, and Philip Rucker. A Very Stable Genius. Penguin Press, 2020.

Leonnig & Rucker. I Alone Can Fix It. Penguin Press, 2021.

Raskin, Jamie. Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. Harper, 2022.

Schiff, Adam. Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could. Random House, 2021.

Woodward, Bob, and Robert Costa. Peril. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Woolf, Michael. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. Little Brown, 2018.

Jim Schwab

Rising from the Ashes

Posted on October 8, 2021 by admin

Wall art at the Peshtigo Fire Museum

Back on August 11, during a family vacation that involved circumnavigating the shores of Lake Michigan, my wife and I and two grandsons visited the small town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and spent an afternoon at the Peshtigo Fire Museum. It is housed in a former church that the museum acquired in 1963. While there, I decided to purchase some items from the small gift shop near the front; the museum sells a handful of books and mementoes. One was a reprint of a special edition of a local newspaper that commemorated the 1871 fire that destroyed the town. The other was a small book by the Rev. Peter Pernin, a Roman Catholic priest who wrote about surviving the fire.

I may have acquired another item or two, but if I did, I have no proof. Planning to write this blog post on the 150^th anniversary of the Peshtigo wildfire and the Great Chicago Fire, which both occurred on October 8, 1871, I wanted to read the items and discuss them here. Hours of searching my home office and the rest of our home turned up nothing. This is excessively unusual because I tend to be meticulous about keeping track of such acquisitions, but the anniversary approached and a maddening sense of futility took hold.

In frustration, I wrote to the museum through its online contact form and asked whether they could send me a new copy, and I have sent a $100 donation for their trouble. When I finally get a chance to read the material, sometime in coming weeks, I will supplement this post with a discussion of the historical materials. But before going on with the story, I want to commend the museum for a quick response from Wendy Kahl, who promised to send me replacements and expressed appreciation for the donation. I don’t remember the price of the items, paid in cash, but it was a fraction of my offering. The point, however, is that this small museum, in a small town in a rural area, is staffed by volunteers and operated on a shoestring by the Peshtigo Historical Society. They are, however, helping to preserve a vital piece of American history. Although I don’t often appeal for donations on this website, I will now. Those willing to help this humble enterprise can send donations to the Society at 400 Oconto Avenue, Peshtigo, Wisconsin 54157.

Most of us can gain only the tiniest inkling of the scale of loss suffered by a town like Peshtigo, which was a thriving lumber company town along the Peshtigo River near the shores of Green Bay, an arm of Lake Michigan, after the Civil War when catastrophe struck. I was about to write “when disaster struck,” but I quickly realized that the word “disaster” does not begin to do justice to the deadliest wildfire in American history. The extent of the devastation was so severe that no one really knows how many people died, but 1,500 or more seems to have become a reasonable estimate. The best narrative of the event I have read is Firestorm at Peshtigo by Denise Gess and William Lutz, published in 2002, but the museum website lists a few other resources.

Those resources in total can do far more justice to the story than I can hope to do in a blog post. However, the point that I can make here is one that, curiously, seldom occurs, although it is clear enough in the book by Gess and Lutz: the organic connection between the two fires in Peshtigo and Chicago. Separated by more than 250 miles, it is not that their fires shared a proximate cause. That would clearly be impossible. Recently, syndicated Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page mused about theories propagated by Chicago-area writer Mel Waskin that meteors delivered the ignition while recognizing how far-fetched that sounds and confessing to his own belief in pure coincidence.

But one can rely on science while saying that the two fires on the same day were more than pure coincidence. The reality is that a hot, dry summer plagued the entire upper Midwest from Chicago to Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Minnesota. Such conditions are the natural breeding grounds for wildfire, as fire experts in California and Colorado have long known. During the long summer of 1871, note Gess and Lutz, various fires peppered the landscape from Lake Michigan to the Dakota Territory. Storms in Texas drove winds northeast to Michigan and Wisconsin. But, as we now understand, the conditions were ripe throughout the entire region for a much larger conflagration.

Photo of a burning building at the Peshtigo Fire Museum

And it came, a raging inferno that swept through more than 2,400 square miles of northern Wisconsin, literally destroying the small town of Peshtigo. One reason the Peshtigo Fire Museum struggles in some ways to tell the story is that so few of the town’s structures and valuables were left in any recognizable condition when the fire subsided: a pile of metal spoons forever fused together by heat, a badly charred Bible. Small wonder that much of the museum consists of other artifacts from the rebuilt town that are not really part of the fire story. It’s hard to populate a museum with what no longer exists and could never have been saved. But they can tell the story with what they know and with the paintings in which people reimagined the horrors they had faced.

There is another point, however, that is often ignored: Chicago and Peshtigo, economically and environmentally, were in those days joined at the hip. Peshtigo was essentially a company town, largely under the control of Chicago magnate William Butler Ogden, who owned a steam boat company, built the first railroad in Chicago, and served as the city’s first mayor. Ogden Avenue and a few other things in Chicago bear his name to this day. He was a legendary presence during the city’s first half-century.

In 1856, he also bought a sawmill in Peshtigo. The lumber industry was in high dudgeon in the upper Midwest in those days, shipping logs down rivers to Lake Michigan and down the lake to mills and yards in Chicago, where the new railroads could ship it to markets in the East and elsewhere. Chicago was a boom town with a dense downtown of largely wooden buildings, but the same milieu of sawdust and bone-dry lumber created the same conditions for a wildfire that existed in the northeastern corner of Wisconsin, just miles from the Michigan border. It is not clear that anyone knows definitively what actual sparks triggered the fires in each community, but the common ingredients of fuel, heat, and oxygen that power wildfires were clearly readily available in both cities at the same time, largely driven by commerce.

It is hard to imagine today how dangerous it all was. Even without a fire, logging was an inherently dangerous occupation, with many men maimed or felled by attempts to control rolling logs as they were corralled downriver to lake ports, or by trees that fell as they were being hewn (known ominously as “widow makers”) in a time that knew neither worker’s compensation funds nor work safety regulations. Expecting the owners of logging mills and lumber yards to understand the dangers of wildfire any more than they cared about reducing workplace injuries would have been unrealistic at the time, although a dawning awareness of the need for such regulation led to Wisconsin leading the progressive era with state-level reforms by the turn of the 20^th century.

Aftermath of the fire, corner of Dearborn and Monroe Streets, 1871. Reproduced from Wikipedia.

But for the many people who fled or succumbed to the fire on the fateful day of October 8, 1871, that was all in the distant future. The immediate reality is that many were burned alive, some died after jumping into the Peshtigo River to escape the flames, and thousands lost homes and all they owned in a matter of hours as the fire spread. Meanwhile, the same happened in Chicago, where 17,450 structures fell to flames that swept through a three-mile area in just three hours, including the supposedly fire-proof new headquarters of the Chicago Tribune. More than 100,000 people, one third of the city’s population at the time, were displaced from their homes. For weeks, the city lay in ruins as community leaders sought ways to finance and rebuild a city from the ashes. Chicago, of course, even then had far better access to capital and media attention than lowly Peshtigo, which remains a town with a population of just 3,500, some fifty miles north of Green Bay, the nearest city of even modest size.

Chicago’s media dominance, and its ability to retell its own story, continues. The Chicago Tribune, for instance, produced a commemorative special insert magazine, “The Great Rebuilding,” with a great deal of useful documentation. The Chicago History Museum opened its special exhibit on the fire today. But at long last, Chicago media outlets are also paying attention to their sister in tragedy with articles like the one in the Tribune describing at length “the fire you’ve never heard of.”

Chicago also had the resilience, although the term was not in common use, to conceive of rebuilding in a way that would avert future disaster. If you notice a lot of masonry construction on your next visit, you are seeing the legacy of the Great Chicago Fire, which altered local thinking about building codes and fire resistance. Similar shifts of thinking about structural fire safety, of course, occurred throughout urban America over the next half-century because structural fire was strikingly common at the time, and insurance companies and firefighters alike realized something had to change. But that may be a longer story for a future blog post.

The fires also fed our nascent understanding of the dynamics of wildfires and how they are influenced by weather, in the short term, and climate over longer periods. As Gess and Lutz note, the Peshtigo fire gave us the word “firestorm” as the result of a growing scientific recognition that the intense heat of a large wildfire can create its own weather within the conflagration, including tornado-like winds up to 90 miles per hour, caused by the differential between the heat of the fire and the cooler temperatures of the surrounding atmosphere. Tornadoes, of course, are born of such meteorological conflicts, an endemic condition of the vast interior of North America where colder northwestern winds meet in mortal combat with warmer winds from the Gulf of Mexico throughout the summer and into autumn. In commemorating the two fires, we can also recognize that they came at the dawn of an entire science of wildfires that is working against time today to catch up with the deleterious impacts of climate change.

History matters. And I hope that I have sparked more than a smidgeon of interest among readers in what I consider a deeply intriguing and intellectually challenging topic.

Jim Schwab

Home of the Brave

Book Reviews and Discussion with Jim Schwab

Category Archives: Books

Spiritual Depth of Martin Luther King

Heading Out on the Film Trail

Not Too Mulch to Ask

Envisioning a More Resilient Future

Hidden Treasures in Plain Sight

Modern Links to Lincoln

The Struggle for Climate Sanity

Truth and Consequences and January 6

Rising from the Ashes