Recovering Humanity Amid Terror

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 She seemed withdrawn and shy, telling me all this in a low but calm and insistent voice.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

 

Modern Links to Lincoln

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

Truth and Consequences and January 6

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 20th 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

Like Water Flowing Downhill

The Major League Baseball team long known as the Cleveland Indians will rename itself at the end of this season as the Cleveland Guardians. The change will surely draw criticism from traditionalists, but it is long overdue. The logo is outrageously racist and derogatory. The name could conceivably be neutral in intent if it honored Native Americans, but the logo has always belied any supposed good intentions. Conservative fans in Ohio long defended the name and the logo, but time is up, and it is just as well. The image has worn out its welcome.

In my college days at Cleveland State University, I recall the American Indian Movement challenging reenactments of Cleveland founder Moses Cleaveland landing on the shores of the Cuyahoga River in 1796. A few years later, a friend of mine, Legal Aid lawyer Joseph Meissner, was suing on behalf of American Indian clients who claimed the name and logo were racist in intent. The lawsuit was undoubtedly ahead of its time, but Joe had a way of making a point. One day, he had a variety of posterboards in his office, done by a local artist, depicting various minorities in the same manner as Chief Wahoo, with names like the “Cleveland Negroes” and “Cleveland Italians,” among others I no longer recall. His point was that, if these other logos seemed offensive (and believe me, they were), then why was it any more tolerable to accept the Chief Wahoo logo for the Cleveland Indians? To this day, there has never been a good answer for that question.

But I know many Cleveland fans will be annoyed or angry. For years, relatives of mine argued with me in defense of the team when I said it was a matter of time before they would have to confront the reality of what the name and logo represented and accept change. I am not picking on them by saying that. Their reactions were quite typical, and part of that was a natural defensiveness about a city that had suffered depopulation, industrial decline, job losses, and the embarrassments of past mayors Ralph Perk and Dennis Kucinich in the 1970s. For my part, I moved to Iowa in January 1979, so I guess I was a turncoat in the eyes of some, but lots of people find new paths in life. It’s just that in Cleveland, every departure felt like another blow to the city’s pride.

Progressive Field in 2019

Gradually, the city adjusted to its setbacks of that era, grew a large medical services industry, bult a new stadium for its baseball team, replacing the cavernous Municipal Stadium (where a new Cleveland Browns stadium now sits on the lakefront), and cleaned up its once badly polluted river. Cleveland State and other universities grew to serve the city and the region. The Cuyahoga Valley became the site of a national park. As an urban planner, I might add that there is some good planning happening in the region. Although the Cleveland Indians lost the World Series in the tenth inning of the seventh game in 2016 to the Chicago Cubs, the Cleveland Cavaliers, with the incredible efforts of LeBron James, won the NBA title over the Golden State Warriors. So, there’s all that.

Cleveland’s Rock n Roll Museum on the Lake Erie waterfront, one of the city’s huge tourism attractions

In a brilliant way, the new name, Guardians, is a perfect fit for this mindset. It allows this defensive posture regarding a historically great American city to become a positive virtue, as protectors of its civic virtue and community reputation. Clinging to the moniker of Indians, especially with Chief Wahoo as a mascot, could never do that. It would merely ensure the need to defend a highly questionable tradition. Instead, fans can shift their attention to protecting and promoting the city’s future.

But back to the name change. Long ago, when I was in Iowa City as a graduate student, Pastor Roy Wingate of Gloria Dei Lutheran Church once commented in a small group conversation over lunch that, “Much prophecy is little more than knowing that water flows downhill,” which is to say that prophets often are simply observing what others refuse to see. (In a more literal sense, this point was not lost on me later as a planner involved in disaster recovery and hazard mitigation talking to people about floods.)

My occasional debates with Cleveland friends and relatives about the eventual demise of the Cleveland Indians logo was little more than Rev. Wingate’s observation about prophecy. Water flows downhill. Changing a racist logo was just a matter of time, and finally, the ownership of the team has recognized that the waters of justice have overflown the utility of calling a team the “Cleveland Indians.”

It was never if, but when. The time has come.

Jim Schwab

Acting in Good Faith

How does one portray the life of a man whose ultimate fate was a hanging at the hands of the Gestapo, with just four weeks left until the German surrender in World War II? Even an experienced professional actor might find that role daunting. I played that role last Friday evening in what amounted to my amateur acting debut, complicated by a Zoom platform in what we all hope are the latter stages of a pandemic. I’m certainly accustomed to being on a stage in front of an audience as a public speaker, but in those situations, I am speaking for myself. Portraying a historical figure of the magnitude of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a very different matter.

The collective performance of volunteers mostly from Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park in Chicago occurred on the anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s execution in 1945, at the Flossenburg concentration camp near the German border with Czechosolvakia. One suspects the SS, whose Judge Otto Thorbeck condemned him to die the day before the hanging, must have been in a hurry. Just two weeks later, American troops liberated the camp.

Script cover for “The Beams Are Creaking”

My intent in discussing this in a blog post is not to review the play, The Beams Are Creaking, by Douglas Anderson, but to reflect on what I learned from taking on this role in the first place. It is also the case that several rehearsals—and rereading the script a few times—occupied enough of my time to explain my hiatus from blog writing in recent weeks. It was only as we practiced our parts that I began to realize what I was trying to accomplish, but I was hooked. The play begins in 1933, with Bonhoeffer returning from the United States to Germany at the dawn of the Nazi rise to power. There are several biographies of Bonhoeffer, the most notable probably being that written by his close associate, Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, originally published in Germany in 1967, and later translated into English.

The necessary brevity of a play, if done well (and this is), condenses essential points and makes them more visible not only to the audience, but to the actors as well. I quickly realized from the full scope of the script that Bonhoeffer was not entirely the same man in 1945 that he was at the outset of the drama, when a streak of naivete about the German future still shaped his outlook. Born in 1906 in what is now Poland, Bonhoeffer returned from America with decided impressions about the injustice perpetrated on the American Negro, but not disposed to compare their situation with the plight of Jews in Germany, in part because he simply did not believe that Germany could succumb to the appeal of Adolf Hitler. Confronted early in the first act by Hans von Dohnanyi with the possibility of the Nazis gaining power, Bonhoeffer simply replies, “It couldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen in Germany.” By now, of course, the most observant among us are aware of a few too many historical developments that “could not happen” but did.

Photo of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reproduced from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer was soon disabused of his initial perspective, particularly when he dares to give a radio speech implicitly criticizing the Fuhrer. The Nazis silenced the radio station before he could finish. And that is the first of many steps that lead him steadily, inexorably, into a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler—a conspiracy that failed with dire consequences for those involved. When the play ends, he is sitting in Tegel prison, but Gestapo agents have come to transfer him to Flossenburg, which all around him know to be a death sentence.

The challenge for me in playing Bonhoeffer was to transfer to a Zoom screen that sense of the gradual but inevitable shift from a 27-year-old idealist, steeped in faith as a trained theologian and pastor, to a 39-year-old man who has come to terms with the deepest meaning of faith at the darkest moments in anyone’s life.

This struggle for almost anyone involves a powerful mixture of personal circumstances and challenges and some sort of deep faith that undergirds the transition that his life undergoes. One key turning point, midway through the play, involves the planned emigration of his sister, Sabine, and her Jewish husband Gerhard, to escape the coming Holocaust. In the play, this is the point when, having been approached by others who are involved in the plot against Hitler, he decides, “I will be a conspirator.” This is not a line that I shouted from the rooftop; it was one that I delivered with a heavy heart, realizing what will likely be demanded of Bonhoeffer in the coming years.

The second and final act opens later with Bonhoeffer in prison, chatting with a friendly guard, musing over his role as a thorn in the side of the Gestapo. The middle of the act consists of a monologue, Bonhoeffer with a mop talking to the floor, articulating his frustration with the official church in Germany, its betrayal of principles and purpose, ultimately concluding that it has driven the thinking man from the church because, “It honesty doesn’t know what to say to him.” One might call it a sense of despair, but it is also a lonely note of defiance.

One cannot gainsay the role of faith in Bonhoeffer’s life and how it affected his decisions. For a 39-year-old man facing death, he left behind some of the most meaningful spiritual writings of the 20th century, including his letters from prison, but also the classic The Cost of Discipleship, which begins with the theologically famous line, “Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.” Bonhoeffer was not about to lie to anyone about the high cost of confronting evil power.

That is the background. What did I learn from this volunteer dramatic effort? First, there was the challenge of presenting this on Zoom, as pandemic restrictions made a live stage presentation problematic. We practiced on Zoom, which was never designed for presenting plays, and learned to work with its limitations. These included the need for all of us to wait at strategic points to deliver our lines until Nancy Goede, pastor of Augustana, who conceived of this operation in the first place, secured the licensing rights to present it, and acquired the scripts for all of us, could produce sound effects (such as knocking on a door or a phone ringing) at points where that otherwise would have been a background stage noise. On Zoom, however, our talking would have filtered out such sounds, so we had to master the timing to allow those sounds to occur. There are scenes where the historical context emerges from radio announcements, and certain people had to provide those, speaking into makeshift microphones of the era, and so forth. In many ways, despite the visual presence on Zoom, our production resembled an old theater of the radio, and with a story set in the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps that aided the dramatic impact. But taking all the emotional impact of the story I mention above, and framing it within Zoom, was an interesting challenge and ate up a significant amount of time in rehearsals.

Given that almost no one had the spare time to learn every line by heart, this was “Readers Theater,” in which people used the script during the performance. However, to increase the impact of Bonhoeffer’s presence, I mastered the art of essentially hiding the script below the screen, that is, out of sight of the webcam, while also anticipating lines that I could deliver without even looking at it. On stage, all of this would have been impossible, but then Zoom made other things impossible, such as Bonhoeffer hugging or kissing his fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, when she visits him in prison. Live theater online involves its own fair share of compromises.

I would love to provide some photos here of the performance, but licensing rights prohibited recording. I have chosen to make do with other approaches to make this more visually interesting.

Me, as Bonhoeffer, in “studio” in clerical garb for scene with Hermann Goering and Bishop Ludwig Muller

In addition to the invisible but important influence of people like the pastor, I must mention that no performance like this operates without serious teamwork. Much of what I did gained from the adroit counterplay of other actors. Dan Friedrich, who played multiple roles, was a remarkably cynical Hermann Goering, making very effective use of Goering’s perverse sense of humor, as in a meeting between himself, Bonhoeffer, and Bishop Muller of the German national church. When Bonhoeffer offers to show that his opposition movement has some 6,000 pastors objecting to some new Nazi policy declarations, Goering laughs it off by noting ominously that “we already know who they are.” Both my role and Dan’s demanded an effective foil on the other side. I learned how to use such foils to the benefit of the portrayal of my own character. On

Theresa Fuchs in downtown Chicago

the other hand, Theresa Fuchs, a visitor from Germany working at the Goethe-Institut, played a very convincing and sincere Maria. Her soft German-accented English lent an air of linguistic reality to the play, but more importantly, she also schooled the rest of the cast on the proper pronunciation of German names (though it didn’t always take, as one might expect).

Andrea Holliday

Dan Friedrich played both sides: General Hermann Goering and the anti-Nazi conspirator Schlabrendorff. That is, when not also playing an American correspondent at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

As for Dan, a software developer who has a serious sideline hobby in comedy improv, he can take credit for introducing us to Andrea Holliday, who provided the narration where Zoom made certain stage effects either difficult or impossible.

In the end, this experience taught me a deeper respect than I already had for what professional and even community theater actors attempt to do all the time. It involves investing some of your own emotional energy in the portrayal of the character, and in the case of a character like Bonhoeffer, some significant willingness to try to achieve an understanding of that person’s world view and faith. Frankly, after this 2 ½-hour online presentation was over, I felt a significant need to unwind and recover from what I had just done. Acting is a unique artistic enterprise in the way it demands that you embrace another person’s perspective, especially when that person is a historic figure, rather than the product of a creative author’s mind. It stretches one’s mind and heart in special ways.

Jim Schwab

P.S.: For a blog perspective on the presentation by Pastor Nancy Goede’s husband, Jim Vondracek, click here.

Charting a Path to Sustainability

A presidential transition has always been a time to look forward in American history, anticipating change, contemplating new directions. Sometimes we like the new direction, sometimes we don’t; sometimes we think it just doesn’t go far enough to remedy the problems we face. But never have we faced the narcissistic spectacle of a president unwilling to release his grip on power. Every president before Donald Trump has been enough of a patriot to cooperate with a new president of the opposite party, and losing candidates who never ascended to the White House have been willing to concede. It is extremely unfortunate that some Americans are trying to deny others the right to focus on defining a more positive future.

But they are only trying because the right to map out an alternative future is still ours. The capacity to imagine a different future is one of the defining characteristics of a society that is capable of renewal, resilience, and sustainability. It is vitally important that civic leaders, academics, and authors help us clarify the truth of our past and map out paths to a better future. And, presidential transitions notwithstanding, it can and should happen below the national level, to help states and communities explore their unique history and their opportunities.

It is in that context that I wish to introduce readers to Green, Fair, and Prosperous: Paths to a Sustainable Iowa, the work of Charles E. Connerly, who by next summer will be retiring as professor and the director of the University of Iowa School of Urban and Regional Planning, recently renamed the School of Planning and Public Affairs after Connerly’s successful push to incorporate a Master’s in Public Affairs to the program’s offerings. Connerly has been at Iowa since 2008 since migrating back to his Midwestern roots after a long tenure at Florida State University in Tallahassee. As a matter of full disclosure, he was also responsible for hiring me as an adjunct assistant professor to teach one course each fall that has come to be known as Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery. His many years at Florida State, working alongside Robert Deyle, a colleague who worked with me on disaster issues as far back as the 1990s, made him supremely aware of the importance of addressing hazards in the planning process. I was hired in the immediate aftermath of the massive 2008 floods in Iowa.

Connerly (in gray jacket) during a 2014 field trip of post-flood redevelopment in Cedar Rapids.

Connerly is truly a comprehensive thinker in the best planning tradition, and this book shows it. While I am certain, because of publishing schedules, that he had completed his manuscript before the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police over the Memorial Day weekend, his book is incredibly timely in the fall of 2020 because of his focus on the history of racial and ethnic disparities in Iowa. In fact, Chapter 4 is simply titled, “Why Is Iowa So White?”

Indeed, that is a very good question. It is not just a matter of Iowa being farm country. After growing up in the Cleveland metro area in Ohio, then moving to Iowa in January 1979 before ultimately enrolling in graduate school at the University of Iowa, I remember being struck by the apparent lack of diversity, especially outside the handful of cities above, say, 50,000 people. There is, after all, industry in these cities, and industry has often attracted multiracial work forces. Unless, that is, political and social forces intervene to prevent such an outcome. Most people, however, never notice such forces at work and never learn about them in school. History can be very silent about such matters unless diligent researchers insist on exposing that legacy to sunshine, aka “the best disinfectant.”

Connerly digs deep on this topic, all the way back to antebellum Iowa politics. Sitting just north of Missouri, a slave-holding border state, Iowa was both a frontier of the Underground Railroad and a harbor of typical northern mixed feelings about African Americans. In 1850, Iowa was no less than 99.8 percent white, and did not dip below 99 percent, Connerly notes, until 1970. Since then, there has been a substantial growth in minority populations. But African Americans have historically been concentrated in just four urban counties. All that said, it was also the Iowa Democratic caucuses in 2008 that launched Barack Obama on a streaking path to the presidency. What accounts for this paradoxical history?

From the early days of statehood, Iowa suffered from a typical northern moral conflict between supporting emancipation and not particularly wanting too many blacks in the neighborhood. That is not putting too fine a point on the matter. Connerly notes that before the Civil War, Iowa had enacted laws banning blacks from the state. The territory avoided enacting such black codes to win statehood, but once that was achieved, Iowa legislators had no problem backtracking on the issue. The bottom line was that Iowans, overall, opposed slavery but did not necessarily favor civil rights for freed slaves.

That changed somewhat after the Civil War, with Radical Republicans pushing through changes that liberalized matters considerably, but it was only following World War II and through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s that serious, permanent change began to occur. By that time, however, previous history had done its work in making African Americans largely feel unwelcome. Iowa stayed overwhelmingly white, but not entirely by accident. At the same time, the state has been receptive to refugees, for example, after the Vietnam war, and remarkably progressive on some other issues. Northwest Iowa elected the remarkably ignorant Steve King to Congress, but Republicans themselves dethroned him in this year’s June primary.

Prior to white settlement and the rise of modern agriculture, much of the Iowa landscape enjoyed by Indians consisted of prairie. Photo by Suzan Erem

Connerly writes that African Americans were not the only minorities to feel the impact of 19th-century American racism. Before European settlement, which took place in earnest only after Iowa became part of the United States following the Louisiana Purchase, fourteen Native American nations had, over millennia, occupied some part of what became Iowa. Before the 1800s, their interaction with Europeans was largely through trade, but eventually their land ended up in the hands of white settlers. The short answer as to how that happened is simple: “We took it from them.” Today, only the Mesquaki settlement in Tama remains as a reminder of the formerly dominant Native American presence.

The Hispanic presence, and that of various Asian minorities, is a product of more recent history, some of it involving the evolution of labor relations, particularly in agriculture and meat processing plants, but today there is a distinct, but distinctly disadvantaged, Hispanic presence. It is no accident that earlier this year, some of the most intense controversy over coronavirus spread in states like Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota involved minority workers in the meat-packing industry and deficiencies in safety protocols among the companies involved. In a whole chapter dealing with labor issues over time in both the food and agricultural equipment industries, one can see the steady decline of leverage among white-dominated labor unions and the rise of cheap labor and mass production within the industry as it is today. It is hardly a stretch to suggest that these social and economic changes have had profound impacts on, and implications for, the future of Iowa’s economy and society. Iowa did not shift from supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012 to Trump in 2016 and 2020 without some massive strains within the body politic. How those tensions are resolved will go a long way toward determining whether Iowa can chart a successful path to a sustainable future, as Connerly’s book suggests. Iowans will have serious work ahead in improving social equity while adjusting to a changing demographic makeup across the state.

But I do not wish to create the impression that the book is strictly focused on such demographic issues, as important and critical as they are. It is important to notice that Connerly has tied together the issues of environmental health, fairness, and prosperity in his title. His larger point is that all these questions are inextricably related. To quote some planners I have known, “Everything is connected to everything else.”

Connerly takes us on a detailed, well-documented tour not only of Iowa’s demographic history, but of its environmental and economic history as well. Iowa clearly entered statehood as a predominantly rural, agricultural state, though not necessarily producing the corn and soybeans that predominate now. Originally, in fact, it grew more wheat, but trends shifted to corn and hogs. But the state is still heavily dependent on agriculture, with 43 percent of its 2015 manufacturing centered on either food processing or machinery used in agricultural production. These two gave rise in the twentieth century to some powerful unions representing workers who were largely able to achieve a blue-collar version of middle-class prosperity. Hogs, supported by state laws exempting agriculture from county zoning laws, gave rise to the growth of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in the past 40 years, and the meat-packing industry itself became more concentrated and able to mechanize increasingly and replace high-wage jobs with lower-wage mass production and weaker unions. The people working in the newer factories are definitely more racially diverse but definitely not more empowered and definitely paid less. The growing inequities have resulted in a shrinking middle class.

One factor that distinguished the Iowa packing plants prior to the major, union-busting shifts of the 1970s and 1980s was that the plants were closer to the farms, and thus, unlike larger plants in Chicago and Kansas City, bought animals directly from farmers. Connerly maps out the consequences in urban development for Iowa, namely, that Iowa never developed the metropolitan magnets of neighboring states like Minnesota, Missouri, and Illinois because of the dominance of the Twin Cities, Chicago, and Kansas City, and instead has a number of smaller cities, the largest being Des Moines, which has about 215,000 people, though the entire metro area is about three times that size. Smaller cities have mostly grown around agriculture-related industries.

All this has had significant consequences not only for quality of life but the quality of the environment, with water quality problems arising from rural land use issues such as CAFOs, soil erosion, and nitrate concentrations in groundwater. Connerly’s final chapter asks whether Iowa truly is the “best state in the nation,” a title bestowed in 2018 by U.S. News and World Report. As a former Iowan, I do not offer this review as a way of trashing the state, nor does Connerly offer his book in that spirit, but the question is an opportunity to explore the complexity of a state that too many elsewhere see as simply white and rural. Iowa, with the right policies, the right incentives, and the right opportunities, has the potential to create a healthy environment and economy, but it must examine current trends and determine how to reverse those that are moving the state in the wrong direction. The last chapter is a succinct compendium of recommendations for moving Iowa toward a growing middle class, a healthier environment with better recreational opportunities, and a progressive approach toward making agriculture more ecologically sound and resilient in the face of natural hazards, most notably, floods.

Testing facility of the Iowa Flood Center, 2019.

The state has created some interesting mechanisms for doing this, but has a stubborn habit in recent years of shooting itself in the foot. In 1987, the legislature wisely passed the Groundwater Protection Act, which created the Aldo Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, which has done remarkable research on establishing a balance between economic and environmental needs in agricultural practices. Yet, in recent years, the legislature has significantly limited state funding for the center at the behest of corporate agricultural interests. In 2010, following the devastating floods in 2008, the legislature funded creation of the Iowa Flood Center at the University of Iowa, which has become a model in advancing flood prediction and mitigation that other states are considering copying, yet some question the need for continued funding. It is almost as if Iowa wants to replicate the larger national battle between science and an increasingly poisonous distrust of “experts.” Would it not be better to marshal and support the best intellectual resources Iowa can muster for an assessment of the opportunities that lie ahead?

Connerly points out, in contrast, how Iowa could take the lead in solving problems like climate change and excessive nutrient runoff in the Mississippi River basin that leads to both groundwater contamination locally and hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. This last chapter is the biggest single reason to read the book, but its logic is only fully clear after reading the thorough research that precedes it.

My final comment is that it may seem that this is a book that is primarily or perhaps solely relevant to Iowans. I think that conclusion, however, would be short-sighted. While I am profoundly aware of the many books others have produced about other states, regions, and metropolitan areas across the U.S., I think it is vitally important that other scholars across the nation undertake similar efforts to assess the path to sustainability for their own states, regions, and cities. We could sorely use such a book in Illinois, and the same is probably true for every neighboring state. As I suggested at the outset, it is not enough to chart a new national path. We need these serious explorations at subnational levels as well. In that sense, I believe Connerly has done a major service for the Hawkeye state. I’d like to see more such books.

Jim Schwab

The Eyes Have It

I might have thought by now

you would have found the exit

from the hall of mirrors.

But no. You are mesmerized

by its dreamy distortions,

imprisoned by its illusions.

Perception arises from wave

lengths and shadows, reflections

against a shifting surface.

Tall becomes short, wide

becomes narrow. Eyes bulge,

then shrink into shocked sockets.

You must linger to feed the hunger.

Within the funhouse walls,

where the insecure, the paranoid,

the narcissistic control the asylum,

the Great Sphincter,

sustained by his Ras Putin coterie,

emits his daily surprises

to the surprise of no one

but the angry, the gleeful gullible,

the sheep led to COVID slaughter

while wildfires consume the hallways.

Is the funhouse aflame?

Now that changes the climate

amid the melting glass

of the deteriorating mirrors.

Alas.

 

Jim Schwab

 

 

Plotting Post-Pandemic Recovery

Photo by Carolyn Torma

In recent years, the development of local or regional recovery plans following major natural disasters has become increasingly common. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has long encouraged such planning, and I led the production of two major FEMA-funded reports from the American Planning Association on the topic—Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction (PAS 483/484, 1998) and Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation (PAS 576, 2014). I’ve spoken repeatedly on the topic, trained planners, and valued the collective knowledge of the two teams we assembled to make those projects happen. The underlying idea is to help a community assess its losses, reassess its goals, and find the silver lining in the dark cloud of the disaster that will allow it to rebuild better and stronger than before. This is the central concept of community resilience: the capacity to learn from such events, adapt to the changes they require, and move forward.

The idea of natural disasters has generally encompassed those caused primarily by meteorological and geological disturbances, such as storms and earthquakes, though it includes impacts exacerbated by human mistakes in building and planning. Disasters necessarily involve the collision of natural forces with the human and built environment, which has caused some people to question the very use of the word “natural” in connection with disasters. Personally, I am comfortable with the term “natural disaster” so long as we understand that no disaster exists without this interaction.

But there are those disasters where damage to the built environment is a secondary consideration, and the loss of lives is primary. Drought is somewhere in the middle. Damage to structures can occur, but only as the result of the slow, nagging loss of moisture in the air and soil. Heat waves can take hundreds of lives without affecting a single structure, though they can put enormous stress on energy and transportation infrastructure.

Pandemics, however, fall into another category entirely as biological disasters. They occur when bacteria or viruses emerge in the environment and attack humans before we have developed any effective immunity or vaccines. The current COVID-19 crisis fits this mold precisely. It can be far more devastating than a natural disaster simply because it can roam far more freely across the planet, as did the 1918 influenza pandemic, striking down hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. Before the era of modern medicine, pandemics like the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages could kill half of the affected population. Even without vaccines, we at least have the huge advantage of understanding how such microbial threats spread. Our disadvantage in the U.S. has been national leadership, starting with the President, that has been psychologically allergic to scientific advice. The result has been needless loss of life on a colossal scale.

It was a matter of time before some community, even without such federal leadership, applied many of the principles of recovery planning to the coronavirus pandemic. One critical question related to recovery is identifying the point at which the crisis is over, or at least waning. In natural disasters, drought being again the exception, this point becomes clear within a matter of days, or even hours in the case of tornadoes, as the storm passes. However, weather systems such as that which produced the 1993 Midwest floods, can last for weeks or even an entire summer. But at some point, it becomes clear that the emergency is over, and planning for long-term recovery can begin. In the absence of a vaccine, however, it is less clear when we can use the “all clear” signal for a pandemic. Right now, in the U.S., it is painfully clear that the rush to reopen is producing unconscionable and shocking consequences across the South and Southwest, and in a few other locations as well. It is incredibly hard, perhaps even impossible, to plan meaningfully for recovery when you are still stoking the fire by facilitating the spread of the virus.

Nonetheless, some states, notably including New York, much of New England, and Illinois, have fought hard against the odds to bring down infection rates, which are now a fraction of what they were in April or May. Their victory remains tenuous, considering the larger national crisis that remains a growing threat to public health, but Chicago under Mayor Lori Lightfoot has announced a list of states whose residents must quarantine for 14 days upon arrival, notably including Florida, Arizona, and Texas. Later, Iowa was added. By July 17, the Cook County Department of Public Health expanded that quarantine area to include all of suburban Cook County except a handful of suburbs that maintain their own health departments, and 17 states are on the list with new case rates exceeding 15 per 100,000 people per day. While it is nearly impossible to monitor all arrivals, the message is clear: We don’t want to re-create the problems we so recently overcame.

That is the context in which a large Recovery Task Force the city assembled released a recent report, Forward Together: Building a Stronger Chicago, which examines how Chicago could build a vibrant recovery from the coronavirus experience. Because such reports, especially those involving dozens of contributors and participants, are never crafted overnight, it is worth noting that the effort was launched on April 23, at a time when the outcome was far from clear. Neither the city nor the state could be certain then how long the problem would last or whether the stay-at-home orders and other measures would succeed at all in the near term. As of July 18, Illinois had dramatically increased its testing rate and brought its positivity rate for coronavirus tests down to 2.9 percent, well below most rates elsewhere, although it remains higher in Chicago at 5.4 percent.

So far, the strict measures announced in March have produced measured success, and the task force used that time to look farther down the road to the kind of city that might emerge from this ordeal. Forward Together is, to be clear, not a true recovery plan; it is billed as an “advisory report.” But it is the closest thing to a recovery plan that I have seen so far, and merits scrutiny and consideration for what it offers. (New York Mayor Bill de Blasio promised his own “road map to recovery” on April 26.)

The task force itself was broadly based. Lightfoot co-chaired it with Samuel Skinner, a businessman, lawyer, and political operative who served as both Secretary of Transportation and White House Chief of Staff under President George H.W. Bush. He has a long track record in public affairs. Committee chairs and members included elected officials, among them Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who was Lightfoot’s run-off opponent in the 2019 mayor election, labor and community representatives, business leaders, academicians, and civic leaders, including some prominent activists. The task force was broadly inclusive, which bodes well for public buy-in on the resulting recommendations. Moreover, the report shows significant evidence of wide community outreach, including a youth forum that tapped the ideas of teens and young adults.

Like all big cities, Chicago has witnessed significant disparities in impacts of the pandemic on specific disadvantaged groups, including the elderly, but also Blacks and Latinx residents. While these two groups each comprise 28 percent of Chicago’s population, they respectively comprise 30 and 48 percent of the cases of coronavirus and 44 and 32 percent of the resulting deaths. This is an important backdrop to the discussion of goals in the report.

The report discusses four specific initiatives to move the city forward and address many of the inequities and vulnerabilities exposed by the coronavirus. Invest South/West aims to bring public and private investment to those neighborhoods in the city that have suffered historic disinvestment, and where COVID-19 rates have generally been highest. Racial and ethnic inequities in coronavirus impact have been notably more severe among both Blacks and Latinx residents, in large part because of lower levels of insurance coverage but also because of differences in job exposures, poverty levels, and living conditions. Solutions Toward Ending Poverty (STEP) is a new program, announced in February by Lightfoot, that is attempting to identify evidence-based metrics that can plot a road map toward reducing urban poverty in Chicago. We Will Chicago—Citywide Plan aims over three years to develop what amounts to a comprehensive plan, something lacking in Chicago until now. The report says We Will Chicago “will encompass all elements of citywide planning.” Finally, Chicago Connected will aim to shrink the digital gap between more affluent and poorer neighborhoods by making broadband more readily available, a need whose urgency has clearly been exposed by the closing of schools and the challenges of assisting children from poorer households with remote learning.

A significant part of the report focuses on the economic development opportunities that Chicago can pursue to restore prosperity as the pandemic recedes. It is clear that certain categories of jobs—food service, retail, administrative, and manufacturing, but also arts and entertainment and personal services—have suffered the brunt of economic displacement from the pandemic. The report notes the opportunity for Chicago, as a result of some economic changes wrought by the pandemic, including shifts to online retail, to focus on transportation, distribution, and logistics (TDL) segments of the economy. These would take advantage of a longstanding Chicago advantage as a transportation hub.

TDL, however, faces its own challenges of inequitable opportunity. Food insecurity represents a serious challenge in “food desert” neighborhoods. Resolving those inequities is the intended purpose of the four initiatives, but it is hardly a challenge that will be resolved overnight. It has taken years of unequal opportunity, to say nothing of deliberate discrimination, to create the current dilemma. Failure to address these problems will slow down or even stagnate Chicago’s recovery from the current crisis.

The report makes what strikes me as an honest effort to address social services gaps that, if anything, grew under the previous administration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who closed some mental health centers in a bid to reduce budget deficits. The problem is that such reduced access to services only exacerbates problems among those needing such help and may increase other costs as a result. For example, a significant proportion of the inmates at the Cook County Jail (and many others around the nation) suffers from mental illness.

There is an urgent need to restore those services, but more importantly, the report shows that mental health services are far more prevalent on a per-person basis in more affluent, whiter neighborhoods than in poorer areas. For instance, 48 percent of whites with mental illness were receiving services in 2015, but just 31 percent of both Blacks and Latinx with mental illness were doing so. A map toward the end of the report shows differences shows a variation in presence of mental health providers ranging from zero or well below 0.25 per thousand residents in certain poorer areas of the city to well over 2 in predominantly white, middle-class areas and hundreds per thousand in downtown Chicago, a district well-nigh inaccessible to many South Side residents.

This may reflect, among other things, a disproportionate presence of white professionals in mental health and a need to bring more minority psychiatrists and psychologists to those neighborhoods. Reopening clinics in the neediest areas of the city would be a major step forward. As for the connection to coronavirus, the stress induced by greatly increased unemployment, to say nothing of job pressures within health care, can contribute to mental health challenges. Perhaps the most noteworthy proposal in this section of the plan is the recommendation to create a dedicated 211 line whereby residents can access a wide range of social services. It strikes me as essential, also, to reduce pressure on police to respond to personal mental health crises by instead responding to such incidents, to the extent possible, with mental health professionals and social workers.

As I noted, this is framed as an “advisory report.” I strongly suspect, however, given the tenor of the moment, that its recommendations will find widespread support among Chicagoans. What remains to be seen is how well voters and aldermen hold the administration’s feet to the fire to make it all happen. It is not enough to have confidence in a mayor who seems determined to make it happen. Implementation will require broad-based commitment to achieving the goals the report lays out. That includes embedding those goals in the comprehensive planning process that We Will Chicago envisions, and enacting measures to move them forward.

What is important about this effort for the rest of the country is the very idea of mounting such a broad-based effort to produce a forward-looking analysis of how our cities can recover from the coronavirus pandemic. Many may first have to learn how mayors and governors can exert the leadership, and evince the humility to consider the science, necessary to get the virus under control, as many other countries in Europe and Asia have done. These leaders must also be open to hearing from a widely representative cross-section of their citizens in preparing similar reports. Pandemic recovery planning is for all of us an experiment that can build on the foundations of other kinds of recovery plans while recognizing and thoroughly exploring the unique features of this monumental public health challenge. It is no small matter, and should not be treated as such, politics notwithstanding.

Jim Schwab

 

A Taste of Reopening

People in the Chicago area, and many beyond, some well beyond, are familiar with the city’s decades-old Taste of Chicago, featuring booths in Grant Park from dozens of the city’s iconic restaurants. Wandering the closed streets within the park, you can get pizza, jerk chicken, Indian foods, and a wide variety of other edibles while listening to entertainment and enjoying the sun, as long as the weather holds. The event has spawned numerous imitators throughout the suburbs, such as Taste of Aurora and Taste of Evanston.

Humans? Who cares? But thanks for the post.

But not this year. Big festivals are out, social distancing is in, masks are de rigueur, and the restaurants offer take-out or delivery, if anything. Some are now adapting to offering outside dining when weather permits, but indoor dining must await the next phase of reopening, not only in Chicago but throughout Illinois. Blame coronavirus, but please don’t try to tell us it’s a hoax, or that you can cure it with hydroxychloroquine, or that distancing doesn’t matter. Here in Chicago, we can read the numbers and follow the logic, and we know better. Someone else can drink the Clorox, or the Kool-Aid, or whatever. The vast majority of us prefer to stay safe. And yes, we are aware that the demonstrations for racial justice may produce an uptick in cases. On the other hand, we know that the issue of police reform has been brewing for a long time, and people are impatient. It is not hypocritical to insist that reform is overdue after the death of George Floyd.

Within the past week in Chicago, a few things reopened, cautiously. Navy Pier, which competes with Millennium Park as the city’s leading tourist attraction, now offers outdoor dining but does not yet allow tourists to wander the stores inside the complex. That is okay; caution is in order. We do not need to follow the practice of some states that either never instituted a stay-at-home order (like neighboring Iowa) or reversed one with a highly partisan state Supreme Court decision (Wisconsin, you’re not helping!). Unlike, say, Alabama and Georgia, Illinois’s numbers of COVID cases and deaths have been declining. It would be nice to keep it that way.

My wife and I reached our 35th anniversary on June 8. Occasionally, we’ve celebrated elsewhere (Honolulu, or Charleston, SC), but usually we’ve eaten out in Chicago, attended the Blues Fest, or done something else that was fun. This year, we had a few too many distractions just before the actual date (like getting the air conditioning fixed), so we chose to wait until Saturday, June 13, for a delayed event. We chose to investigate Navy Pier and enjoy a leisurely outdoor lunch instead, accompanied by two grandsons, Angel, 16, and Alex, 11. The outdoor tables at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville seat four anyway. We decided to get a Taste of Reopening.

Alex alongside the Navy Pier Ferris wheel, closed for now.

Did I mention gusty? Shortly after we were seated and the waiter had brought four large plastic cups of water, the wind caught my wife by surprise and knocked over her water. It spread across the entire table, soaking the paper menus and dripping onto both my lap and Alex’s. We hurriedly sought the waiter’s help and used paper towels to wipe up the mess as fast as possible. Fortunately, we had all chosen our orders, so we could dispose of the menus and laugh at the absurdity of it all. You can’t get angry with the wind. Besides, what is summer for? Roll with the punches.

Restaurants have all struggled with the restrictions, but I must commend the generosity of our hosts. Once the waiter shot photos of us after learning of our anniversary. (He mentioned his own mother celebrated a birthday on June 9). He also ensured that the manager complimented us with a $15 reduction of our bill. When we all ordered key lime pie for dessert, he brought a fifth slice as an anniversary bonus. They were doing all they could to help us celebrate within the limitations of the tentative reopening, and they clearly appreciated our patronage. My order of teriyaki shrimp and chicken, accompanied by broccoli and rice with a slice of teriyaki pineapple, was delicious. My wife and our grandsons made other choices, but no one complained. (Yes, we left a generous tip.)

A sailboat glides past a Lake Michigan lighthouse near Navy Pier.

The Chicago Shakespeare Theater at Navy Pier remains closed, but its time will come.

Jean and the boys pose in front of a statute commemorating captains on the Great Lakes.

We walked the length of the pier afterwards and can testify that the lakefront scenery remains as compelling as ever. However cautious the reopening, we appreciate the emphasis on public safety over the more pell-mell rush to reopen occurring elsewhere in the nation. We do not need a resurgence of COVID-19, which has already claimed more than 6,000 lives in Illinois. Let the disease wind down instead of giving it a second wind. We will take our time, just as we did in strolling the sights at Navy Pier. Life is beautiful if you act smart and protect it.

Jim Schwab

Weep for America, but Build Leadership

I weep for my neighborhood. I weep for Chicago.

I weep for the state of criminal justice in America when a police officer, hand in his pocket, a look of utter indifference on his face, feels the sense of impunity that empowers him to kneel on a black man’s neck in broad daylight for more than eight minutes until he dies.

I cheer for America’s resilient sense of justice when bystanders train their cell phone cameras on this officer and refuse to back down in documenting injustice while they plead for the man’s life.

These mixed feelings have haunted me for more than a week now, as events have evolved across the nation. I am glad that the state of Minnesota has arrested and charged officer Derek Chauvin for murder, not out of a desire for revenge but because justice demands it. The sense of impunity that allowed him to ignore bystanders’ pleas to remove his knee from George Floyd’s neck must be the first casualty in this crisis. Serious police department reform is a necessity. As I write this, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has announced that the other three officers at the scene have been charged with aiding and abetting the crime.

But America also faces some serious lessons in civic leadership, from top to bottom. At the White House, for at least a few more months, we are stuck with a president who, facing the second major crisis of his final year in office after failing to prepare for or respond effectively to a pandemic, now is fanning the flames of hatred while throwing matches on the fire. Emerging from his protective bunker in the White House, he used National Park Service police to clear his path of peaceful protesters for the mere purpose of standing in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, without invitation or permission to use it as a camera prop, to hold a Bible high while threatening violence against protesters and insulting the governors and mayors who have done the real hard work to bring calm to their communities. It is thankless work, lie-awake-at-night work, very unlike the simple-minded task of tweeting empty threats to violate the Constitution. Most presidents, while asserting their proper authority, have sought to unite the country. Trump prefers to drive a wedge with the help of a Bible he does not understand and seldom if ever reads.

Amidst this dearth of national leadership, there is a shortage of leadership on the streets that reflects both deep anger and a failure of our society to create a sense that everyone has a stake in the success and prosperity of our communities. And, to be sure, there are criminal elements that are only too happy to take advantage of these gaps in equity and leadership. That is where we find ourselves now, today, this week, this summer, this year, while still seeking to recover economically, medically, and emotionally from the toll of a coronavirus pandemic whose toll in America now exceeds 100,000 lives, and counting.

As most readers of this blog know, I live in Chicago. Over the weekend and into Monday evening, at bedtime, I could hear the sirens and fire trucks and helicopters in the distance and know that not all was well. I could see on local television channels the coverage of looting that damaged familiar areas of the city, as well as protests against police brutality. But I had not left the house, for a variety of reasons. However, it became clear that Wicker Park, an area less than a mile from us, was struck by looters Sunday evening, leaving windows smashed and property damaged. Small business owners have been waiting patiently, amid considerable financial angst, for the promised partial reopening from the pandemic on June 3, a few days after many state restrictions were lifted on May 29. And then this.

On Tuesday, after both a telemedicine meeting at 2 p.m., following up on my recent hospitalization, and a team meeting for a planning consulting proposal at 3 p.m., I decided it was time to find out what had happened. I walked down North Avenue to the six-way corner of North, Damen, and Milwaukee, the nerve center of Wicker Park, an area that gentrified in the 1980s and 1990s but retains an artsy demeanor, with independent bookshops, cafes, and art stores. I chose not to drive or even bicycle because being on foot seemed to me the best way to absorb a full sense of our tragedy and dilemma, even though I knew Wicker Park was far from being the most hard-hit area in the city. Those questionable labels belong to the downtown, temporarily cordoned off to all but essential workers, with many Chicago River bridges raised to prevent access, and to the South and West Sides, predominantly black areas where the torching of stores often exacerbated the food desert that had only recently been ameliorated with the opening of new grocery stores. One owner of Subway shops saw all six of his stores on the South Side destroyed.

The urologist with whom I spoke during the 2 p.m. appointment had recently moved to a high-rise near his downtown office in the Northwestern Memorial Hospital complex. I asked him about the situation. “It’s terrible,” he said flatly, then noted that he had walked down Michigan Avenue, and “it felt like Detroit.” Anyone who has spent time on the usually vibrant Magnificent Mile until recently knows what a stunning statement that is. Buildings are boarded up, many were looted, some were torched. At a recent mayoral press conference, the city buildings commissioner noted that her department was reaching out to the owners of at least 180 damaged buildings citywide to provide support for rebuilding. It may go without saying, but the damage harms not only the business owners, but employees who had fervently been hoping to return to work, many of them black, Latino, or Asian.

The walk down North Avenue was more routine than jarring, interrupted only by pedestrians passing in the opposite direction, some with dogs on leashes, some wearing masks, some not. It was at the six-way intersection that I began to see the impact of the past weekend. As I made the wide-right turn onto Milwaukee Avenue, it became clear that perhaps 80 percent of the businesses in the next half-mile southward toward Division St. were boarded up. Many businesses may have done so proactively, seeing the damage to others and wanting to avoid a similar fate on a subsequent night. Others, like Ragstock, had been attacked over the weekend, with windows smashed, merchandise stolen or destroyed, and equipment ransacked. It was hard to tell which was which, but the overall effect was that of significant lost opportunity and delayed reopening of a vital commercial district on Chicago’s North Side. For those that had been attacked and looted, the work of restoration could easily delay reopening by weeks.

Nonetheless, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who toured the affected areas on Tuesday (June 2), reported that the overwhelming reaction of business owners when she asked about possible delays in reopening was to encourage her to move forward, which she is now doing. Not everyone is pleased because of the induced inequality of opportunity, with consequent job losses and lost incomes, due to the damages that were inflicted. The only way forward is to assist with cleanup and rebuilding, not to put everything on hold.

Nor would everyone be pleased with my focus on this question. There are many who would argue that the rioting is an expression of frustration and powerlessness, and for some, I am sure, that is true. As Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page notes, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, explained riots in the 1960s by saying, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” He was not condoning such activity but trying to impress upon white Americans that racial justice cannot forever be denied or delayed without serious social consequences.

A small crowd gathers in front of Walgreen’s in late afternoon for a peaceful protest.

But it is important to raise the issue of how the protests against police violence can and did, in some cases, go awry. One factor is the pent-up frustration of which King wrote. Another is the deliberate attempts by those of ill will to take advantage of unrest to advance their own purposes, which may be criminal or manipulative. The latter category would include all manner of provocative agents either seeking to undermine the protests by discrediting them or by bending and twisting them to the will of extremists who would not easily carry the day in an open, democratic discussion of protest goals.

It has never been hard to find examples of either motive. At 70, I am a veteran of the 1960s and 1970s who has joined his own fair share of marches for the environment, to oppose war, or for civil rights. I can easily remember learning, in my college years, how to identify agents provocateurs of any political stripe who would seek opportunities to redirect a discussion or a protest toward unfortunate ends. And I also know that it was the spiritual strength of leaders like King, or Nelson Mandela, or Mohandas Gandhi that helped to maintain a discipline of purpose in countless demonstrations and protests around the world. Gandhi used the Hindi word “satyagraha,” meaning “spirit power,” which he said gave otherwise beaten-down people a sense of self-respect, purpose, and moral strength. Christians may find such solace in the Holy Spirit, but the concept has its own universality.

Why do I raise this issue? Because, clearly, we need a way to move beyond the stigma of riots and looting to maintain the dignity of the cause for which George Floyd’s needless death has become a catalyst. We need a way to channel the power of the protests to make the provocateurs and the criminals unwelcome, and to harness the anger of those wayward souls easily led astray. That requires the sense of purpose that spirit power unleashes in making leaders of those who have felt left behind. It requires instilling vision.

Make no mistake. I am proud of the political leadership provided at this time in Illinois by both Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Lightfoot, as well as many others in lesser posts, as well as some mayors and governors elsewhere. But the leadership needed to save and redirect the protests will not come from politicians. It will come from neighborhood leaders like Jahmal Cole, with the sense of humility that comes of building movements from the ground up, and thus understanding how to reach and relate to people where it matters. Cole spoke at Mayor Lightfoot’s press conference last Sunday (May 31), along with clergy and other civic leaders, but his impassioned speech reappeared on the op-ed page of the Chicago Tribune two days later, under the headline, “Looting isn’t the answer, but organizing is.” He distinguishes between mobilizing people and organizing them, making the powerful case that organizing is the true hard work, with fundamentals, or basic rules. Leadership does not just happen. It is trained, but it also grows organically from heart-felt commitment.

Cole closes with a “message to the cops,” stating that a badge “gives you a platform that will elevate your true character.” It will either amplify your wickedness or amplify your platform to do good. Perhaps it can be said that, in a much less formal way, joining a movement can do the same. Every protester faces a moral choice. We need leaders who redirect wayward energy and identify and exclude evil intent. They will not succeed in every instance. Many instances of crime and looting will be out of their control and depend far more on police response and readiness. But their efforts will nonetheless help our nation reframe the debate over racial injustice.

Jim Schwab