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 She seemed withdrawn and shy, telling me all this in a low but calm and insistent voice.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

 

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

Small Gestures Matter

Last week was for me an eventful time, including a four-hour trip to Dubuque, Iowa, on Thursday for the Growing Sustainable Communities conference, an event the city sponsors every year. I spoke in a session that afternoon, October 24, on community planning for drought, but mostly what I remember was the combination of keynote speeches that addressed the major issues of our time, notably including a luncheon talk on Friday by Dr. Katherine Hayhoe, of Texas Tech University, on communication about climate change. It was impressive and inspiring but underscored how much work lies ahead to reverse damaging trends affecting our planet.

But the week started out differently, with smaller actions that I think are extremely important in setting the tone for the way all of us relate to our fellow human beings.

My wife and I are members of Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park, in Chicago. Situated catacorner from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago on E. 55 St., our church enjoys the benefit of the knowledge that abounds among the LSTC faculty. I serve as coordinator of the Adult Forum, an adult discussion group that meets during the Sunday School hour. That makes me responsible for finding speakers, programming discussions, and promoting the events. On Sunday, October 20, we discussed actions we could take following a five-week series covering the World War II Nazi death camps, visited by Dr. Esther Menn and her husband, Bruce Tammen, in August during a trip to Poland and Ukraine, which fed into considerations of how we treat immigrants and minorities in our own time.

Our pastor, Rev. Nancy Goede, told me about an incident that occurred the prior Tuesday in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, at Lincoln United Methodist Church. Lincoln has chosen to become a sanctuary church out of concern for the safety of undocumented immigrants, but a man shouting Nazi slogans came to the building in an angry confrontation with church staff. It was not the first time the church had been targeted for its actions. The man proceeded to smash the front window.

There is little we can do directly about an incident that is already past, but we decided that we could establish a supportive relationship with the congregation in the face of this hate crime, so we composed the following letter, eventually signed that day by at least 25 members of Augustana:

To the Members and Staff of Lincoln United Methodist Church:

We are very sorry to hear about the incident on October 15, in which a man shouting Nazi slogans smashed the glass window on the front door of Lincoln United Methodist Church.  We have learned that you have been targeted by right-wing groups for your stance in establishing Lincoln UMC as a sanctuary church.  We support your efforts and pray for your safety as you continue to follow your consciences in doing the Lord’s work.

Your Brothers and Sisters in Christ at Augustana Lutheran Church

Indeed, part of the purpose of this letter is to reassure Lincoln United Methodist Church that its members are not being left to handle this attack in isolation from the rest of the Christian community. We had learned a great deal about the high cost of silence during the Holocaust, as well as the need to forcefully address racial equality as we commemorated the 100th anniversary of Chicago’s race riots in 1919, a story detailed well in Claire Hartfield’s recent book, A Few Red Drops.

But that is not all we chose to do. Esther Menn then noted the American Jewish community on this past weekend would be commemorating the first anniversary of a violent anti-Semitic attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which eleven members were killed, and seven others wounded, by a man apparently inspired by right-wing rhetoric. Robert Bowers, a truck driver from Baldwin, Pennsylvania, was arrested for the massacre, and authorities said he used social media beforehand to post criticism of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which has been supportive of the human rights of immigrants to the U.S.

In solidarity, Augustana announced that members of the congregation, as well as people from LSTC and McCormick Seminary, would gather last Friday evening to walk to nearby KAM Isaiah Israel congregation in Hyde Park to join its Friday evening shabbat service. Once again, Augustana would make a simple statement in opposition to hate crimes and violence against religious and ethnic minorities and immigrants. Because traffic on the way back from Dubuque that afternoon obviated the possibility of my own participation, Esther related to me that 27 people from Augustana and the two seminaries joined the effort, plus others who met them at the synagogue, and that their presence was greatly appreciated.

Supportive visitors at the doors of KAM Isaiah Israel synagogue. Photo provided by Esther Menn.

Sometimes, it is worth remembering that the simple act of reaching out to say we care and stand behind others is enough to establish lasting and meaningful bonds between otherwise disparate groups of human beings. It certainly is a place to start.

Jim Schwab

If You See Something, Say Something

National Park Service photo

We have become so accustomed to a certain Homeland Security phrase since the events of September 11, 2001, that we have never seriously contemplated its larger meaning. “If you see something, say something,” for most people simply means that, if you notice something strange, someone leaving a package on a train platform and walking away, for instance, you need to call 911 or point it out to a nearby security official. Having done our civic duty, we can go on about our lives and hope for the best. We may save someone’s life, or we may simply be exercising caution. Check it out.

But suppose we interpreted that phrase in the context of our duties as citizens of an endangered, or even potentially endangered, democracy. Suppose the threat were to our democratic institutions and not just to the lives of those in a single public place. Suppose the threat involved policies that affected thousands of people threatened by racism, ignorance, or hatred? Ought we not to speak up? How different would the history of the world have been if millions of Germans had spoken up about what they saw even in 1933? How many Russians in the past two decades have risked their lives and their careers to speak up about the threats they see to a democracy being strangled in its cradle? In the past year, the people of Sudan have arisen against a brutal military dictatorship and forced remarkable changes. Are we Americans somehow so special as to be free from such obligations? Do we not eventually lose our moral authority to speak for democracy in the world if we fail to speak for it at home?

If you see something, say something. Let me tell you what I see:

I see children housed in filthy cages at the southern border by the U.S. government, separated from their parents, their eyes full of fear and bewilderment, when their only alleged crime was to be brought here by parents from Central America who sought to remove them from gang warfare, violence, crime, and corruption in desperately poor countries. I see a U.S. President, as a form of retribution, cutting aid to those countries that was meant to promote reform and economic opportunity to reduce people’s need to flee such chaos in the first place.

I see Temporary Protective Status (TPS) denied to survivors of Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas, a neighboring country with deep ties to the U.S., even as that nation struggles to rescue and house its own people in the face of mind-numbing devastation. The rationale from the President was that “very bad people” would harm our country if this were allowed, although TPS has been standard practice in the past in the very same circumstances. It is unclear, other than being people of color, what makes the Bahamians especially dangerous in his eyes.

I see neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Ku Klux Klan members marching and chanting “Jews will not replace us” through the campus of the University of Virginia and the streets of Charlottesville, defended ardently by a President who sees “very fine people” on both sides while an innocent young woman is run over and killed by a young Nazi sympathizer with his car. I see this rhetoric emboldening an ever-widening circle of mass shooters who sow terror in American cities with unlimited access to weapons of war, but I also see a widening circle of brave citizens rising to demand effective action against such terror.

I see America losing the moral courage of the Emma Lazarus poem at the Statue of Liberty, pleading for the world to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and nearly mocking Lady Liberty as she seeks to lift her lamp beside the golden door. The Golden Door is becoming instead the Great Border Wall built with money never legitimately appropriated by Congress, and members of the President’s own party unable and unwilling to stop him or even raise the weakest of objections lest they be expelled from the halls of power—or are they becoming halls of obeisance, like the Roman Senate in Nero’s time?

I am telling you what I see because I understand the moral and civic obligation to say something. We must all be whistleblowers for the future of democracy. What do you see? Are you prepared to say something as well? And what shall we do once we have spoken?

Jim Schwab

Ghosts in the Schoolyard

In 2013, the board of education of the Chicago Public Schools succeeded in closing 50 neighborhood schools, an action fully supported by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Of these, 90 percent had a majority of African American students, who comprised 80 percent of students in the closed schools. These, in turn, comprised fully one-fourth of the city’s schools with a majority of both African American students and African American faculty.

Chicago is not a city where people take abuse and discrimination lightly. Predictably, many parents in the affected neighborhoods rose up in civic rebellion. At Dyett High School, they launched a hunger strike to make their feelings known. Protesters succeeded in keeping Dyett open, but overall, little of this had any effect because Chicago has the only unelected school board in the state of Illinois. Instead, courtesy of special state legislation, the mayor appoints the members, who respond to the mayor, not the voters. Recent mayors have liked it that way.

If you imagine that this might be a political issue, you are exactly right. In the mayoral election that just last month culminated with the election of Lori Lightfoot, both she and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle vowed support for creating an elected school board. These two had emerged as the leading vote-getters from a mayoral field of 17 in the nonpartisan primary after Emanuel declined to seek reelection. As with many such things, the details will matter greatly in negotiations with legislators in Springfield, but Lightfoot’s 73 percent mandate unquestionably gives her considerable elbow room in the discussion. But such an outcome of the often harsh and certainly vigorous debate was hardly on the horizon when the closings occurred. So, too, was the explosive controversy over the police murder of Laquan MacDonald in 2014 until court-ordered release of the video exposed the official police explanation of the 17-year-old’s death as highly inaccurate. That set the stage for Emanuel’s exit from City Hall.

But back to the story of the school closings. This set of events helped to poison relations between Emanuel and much of the black community in Chicago even before the MacDonald shooting became the linchpin for relations with the Chicago Police Department. Lightfoot’s claim to fame—and she rose to challenge Emanuel even before he decided not to run—was her role in police administrative reform.

With permission from University of Chicago Press

In her new book released last year, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side (University of Chicago Press), Eve L. Ewing, assistant professor in the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, tackles the 2013 events to share with us why this was not just a one-off mistake by some misguided board members and school administrators, but part of a long history of institutional racism in the Chicago system. The closings did not happen in a vacuum; there was no blank slate. There was, instead, a powerful legacy of devaluing black students and their neighborhoods that played a significant role in the clash of world views between the powerful and the disempowered.

History matters. Ewing takes time to elucidate the migrations of southern blacks between the world wars to northern cities including Chicago. This was the origin of what has become known as the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side. Ewing notes that the black population in Chicago grew 360 percent in just two decades. However, while many other ethnic groups immigrating to Chicago developed enclaves by choice, blacks were forced to do so through a segregation enforced not by law, but by bombings and violence. Blacks attempting to move into white neighborhoods faced serious retribution. From 1917 to 1921, she notes, 58 bombs “struck the homes of black residents, of bankers who gave the mortgages, or of real estate agents who sold them property.” This was an average of one bombing every 20 days. It is not hard to imagine how this produced an intimidating effect for all concerned. The result was a ghetto in which blacks were confined in increasingly dense concentrations, eventually culminating in the infamous housing projects that lined the major corridors of the South Side. But we get ahead of ourselves here. In order to squeeze growing numbers of the southern arrivals into the same housing stock in a geographically confined area, landlords began to carve up existing units into ever smaller ones that came to be known as “kitchenettes,” often violating building codes and safety standards. Gwendolyn Brooks, the famous African-American poet laureate of Illinois, memorialized these housing atrocities in her poem, “Kitchenette Building.”

Ewing discusses her book in an April lecture at DePaul University.

That, in turn, led to overcrowded schools in the affected neighborhoods, accompanied by the morally constipated unwillingness of powerful school officials to consider integrating schools or allocating substantial resources to those neighborhoods to allow their schools to work. Instead, Superintendent Benjamin Willis took over in 1953, in an era when schools did not systematically collect racial data and he could somewhat disingenuously proclaim himself color-blind. As Ewing observes, “Local black leaders were not convinced.” This was, after all, also the time of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the United States Supreme Court ordered desegregation of public schools and overturned the philosophy of “separate but equal.” In time, Willis implemented a policy that placed black students in overcrowded schools in temporary aluminum auxiliary trailers that were soon derided as “Willis wagons,” while students attended for half-days while the affected schools ran double shifts.

By 1961, Ewing states, “tensions were flaring,” and a coalition of civil rights groups undertook efforts to enroll black students in white schools, where they were turned away despite vacancies. Operation Transfer served to expose the inherent discrimination in the system. Other forms of direct action followed, including black mothers visiting white schools to document open spaces (they were arrested for trespassing), and lying down in front of bulldozers preparing the ground for more trailers. Finally, the stage was set for a mass walkout on October 22, 1963, “Freedom Day,” in which more than 220,000 students boycotted school.

In short, the protests of 2013 had plenty of precedent, and the closings struck black parents not as an attempt to improve the education of their children—in areas losing population largely as a result of the demolition of the same public housing that once confined them—but as the destruction of families and networks that had grown in those neighborhoods over time. The full story is more complex and richly textured, but you begin to get the idea. Yet, the denial of this impact of history, and the insistence that new policies under Emanuel were somehow part of a clean slate to give disadvantaged students a fresh start, even as many had to cross gang lines and lost their lives to gun violence as they attended newly assigned schools, persisted.

That brings us to Barbara Byrd-Bennett, a black school superintendent chosen by Emanuel, who led the school closings. The fact that she was later convicted and imprisoned for taking kickbacks from a former employer and CPS contractor, escapes only those who suffer from a deprived sense of irony. Confronted at a public meeting with accusations of racism that touched a raw nerve, she reacted: “What I cannot understand, and will not accept, is that the proposals I am offering are racist. That is an affront to me as a woman of color.”

Ewing goes on, after quoting Byrd-Bennett at greater length, not only to examine the personal umbrage that Byrd-Bennett expressed, but the larger context of institutional racism, and the underlying question of why the schools in question were “underutilized” and “under-resourced” in the first place. After all, someone had made critical decisions to reallocate resources to charter schools and away from the very schools that were now being criticized for underperforming despite the clear history of policies that had helped make them so. The feeling of betrayal among parents and students in the schools facing closure was palpable, and the emotional commitment that led to a hunger strike was real. The fact that, yet again, the system found a way to turn a deaf ear to those who pleaded with the board to reconsider its approach spoke volumes about where power resided. There were numerous factors that led to this year’s election outcome, which also produced a growing progressive caucus in the City Council, but these battles over schools were surely among them.

The richness of Ewing’s book is much deeper than I can portray here, so I urge those interested in the topic to read it. Chicago is not alone in facing serious issues concerning the future of its public schools and fairness in the distribution of educational resources, so this book is not just for Chicago. It is for America.

Now, time for full disclosure: First, I was on a panel of three judges for the Society of Midland Authors that chose this book for honorable mention in adult nonfiction in our annual book awards context. That award will be bestowed at a banquet on May 14. Second, my wife is a retired Chicago Public Schools teacher and Chicago Teachers Union activist who wrote about the Dyett hunger strike and other actions against the school closings at the time they were happening. Her concern for students is not abstract and policy-driven but visceral and personal after decades in the classroom. There are many opinions about education policy in Chicago, but after three decades in the classroom, she has earned a right to hers.

Jim Schwab

Donald Trump’s Racism Diminishes America

Depiction of Du Sable taken from A.T. Andreas’ book History of Chicago (1884). Reprinted from Wikipedia

Greetings from the U.S. city founded by a Haitian immigrant.

Sometime in the 1780s, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, reportedly born of a French father and an African slave mother, who had gained some education in France and made his way from New Orleans to the Midwest, settled with his Potawatomi wife on the north shore of the Chicago River. He developed what became a prosperous trading post before eventually selling it for $1,200 (no small sum in the early 1800s) before relocating to St. Charles, in what is now Missouri, where he died in 1818. According to the best-known assumption about his date of birth (1845), he would by then have been 73, a ripe age on the early American frontier. You can learn more about the admittedly sketchy details of his life here as well as through the link above. However, Chicago has long claimed him as part of its heritage, and his origins speak volumes about not only Chicago but the diversity of the American frontier despite the attempts in some quarters to continue to paint a much whiter portrait of the nation’s history than the truth affords. His story, and those of many others, can be viewed at the Du Sable Museum of African American History on Chicago’s South Side.

Du Sable Museum of African American History, photo from Wikipedia

What does this have to do with President Donald Trump? As almost anyone not living in a cave knows by now, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) has said that Trump, while Durbin was at the White House for a meeting with the President and several Republican members of Congress to discuss a possible compromise on legislation concerning immigration and border security, began a verbal tirade asking why the nation was allowing so many immigrants from “shithole countries” such as Africa and Haiti. Yes, Trump now denies saying it, but there were other witnesses, and even Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) acknowledges it and reports confronting Trump personally about his remarks. Moreover, the sad fact is that such remarks are consistent with a much broader pattern of similar comments ranging from his initial campaign announcement decrying Mexican “rapists” to provably untrue tweets to his infamous praise of “truly fine” people among the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Ku Klux Klan members protesting the pending removal of Confederate statues in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer. Since those comments last August, Trump has continued to lacerate the Twitterscape with new gems of disingenuous absurdity.

It also betrays a disturbing lack of depth of any historical knowledge that might ground Trump in the truth. There is surely little question that Haiti is one of the poorest and most environmentally beleaguered nations in the Western Hemisphere. But it helps to know how it got there, which takes us back to what was happening in Du Sable’s lifetime. Emulating the ideals of both the American and French revolutions, including the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, deeply oppressed African slaves rebelled in 1791. An ill-advised expedition sent by Napoleon Bonaparte to suppress the revolution—Napoleon was more interested in financing his European wars with Haitian revenue than in honoring liberty among Africans—failed miserably when nearly 80 percent of 57,000 French troops first fell victim to yellow fever before being pounced upon by Haitian revolutionaries in their weakened state. Only a small contingent ever made it back to France alive. As time went on, however, Haiti found itself isolated in the New World. The United States, under presidents from Thomas Jefferson onward until the Civil War, refused to recognize the new republic, fearing a similar uprising among its own growing population of slaves in the South. Recognition finally happened in 1862, with the Confederacy in full rebellion against the Union and with Abraham Lincoln in the White House. The story gets much, much worse, including Haiti’s long-time mistreatment by France, its former colonial overseer, but those with more intellectual curiosity than our current U.S. president can read about it in a variety of books including Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution by Laurent Dubois; the fictionalized but brutally vivid and historically accurate trilogy (starting with All Souls’ Rising) by Madison Smartt Bell, whom I met 20 years ago at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference; and the more modern history of exploitation, The Uses of Haiti by Paul Farmer. There is much more; just search Amazon or your local library. It is all there for the learning. We are at least partly responsible for helping to create the historical pattern of misery and poverty in Haiti. Its people have suffered through vicious, greedy dictators like the Duvaliers and yet bravely insisted on creating a democracy despite all obstacles.

Why do I review all this? Because, especially as we celebrate the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday and the ideals of the civil rights movement, history matters. For the President of the United States, at least a respectable knowledge of history matters, as do an open mind and a willingness to learn what matters. Little of that has been in evidence over the past year. And that remains a tragic loss for the nation.

Instead, we have a President who, before taking office, spent five years helping to peddle the canard that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and thus not a native-born U.S. citizen as required by the U.S. Constitution. Based on his recent comments, one might suspect that, all along, he regarded Kenya as among the “shithole countries.” It is small wonder, then, that he holds Obama’s legacy in such low regard. (Several years ago, while in Oahu, my wife and I met a Punahou School high school classmate of Obama, working as a tour guide, who said he knew Obama’s grandparents. “I was not in the delivery room,” he mused, but “I think I would have known” if Obama had not been born in Honolulu.)

The problem, as millions of Americans seem to understand, is that, despite Trump’s claim that these nations “do not send us their best,” our nation has a history of watching greatness arise from humble origins. Abraham Lincoln, in fact, arose from starker poverty in Kentucky and southern Illinois than many immigrants even from African nations have ever seen. Major League Baseball might be considerably diminished without the many Dominicans who have striven mightily to escape poverty and succeed, more than a few making it to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. (I worked in the Dominican Republic in 2000-2001, organizing HUD-funded Spanish-language training on site planning for design professionals working on reconstruction after Hurricane Georges, and can attest first-hand to the national pride Dominicans feel about their achievements in the U.S.) How many Americans visit doctors who emanated from India, Nigeria, and other countries who saw opportunity here to expand their talents and contribute to this nation’s welfare? And, lest we forget, Steve Jobs, who created more and better American jobs through Apple than Trump ever dreamed of creating, was the son of Syrian immigrants.

Only willful ignorance and prejudice can blind us to these contributions and lead us to accept the validity of Trump’s vile observations. As adjunct assistant professor, I teach a graduate-level seminar (Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery) each year at the University of Iowa School of Urban and Regional Planning. Since this began in 2008, I have taught not only Americans but high-quality students—in a few cases, Fulbright scholars—from places like Zambia, Haiti, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. They do not see themselves as coming from “shithole countries,” but they do perceive that they are availing themselves of excellent educational opportunities in a nation they have typically seen as a paragon of democratic ideals. Now we are undermining that perception at a breakneck pace. These students, whose full tuition helps undergird the finances of American universities, know there are viable alternatives for a modern education in Britain, France, Germany, and Canada, but until now they have believed in the promise of America.

Meanwhile, Europeans—the very people whom Trump apparently would like to see more of among our immigrant ranks—are watching this charade with alarm and dismay. I know this evidence is anecdotal, but my wife and I, as noted in recent blog posts, traveled to Norway last July. We encountered New Zealand, South African, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, German, British, and Norwegian citizens, among others, as we traveled. Almost no one we met was impressed with Trump. This is a new development in European perception of American leadership. Moreover, our perceptions then are supported by reporting in the last few days on reaction to Trump’s comments. Despite Trump asking why we cannot have more immigrants from Norway, NBC News reports that Norwegians are largely rejecting this call as “backhanded praise.” If we want more European immigration to the U.S., we would do far better impressing them with our sophistication and our commitment to the democratic ideals we have all shared since World War II.

Beyond all this, it must be noted that thousands of dedicated Americans serve overseas in the nations Trump has insulted, wearing the uniforms of the Armed Services, staffing diplomatic missions, and representing their nation in other ways. No true patriot would thoughtlessly place them in jeopardy and make their jobs more awkward than they need to be. It is one thing to face the hostility of Islamic State or other terrorist-oriented entities because of U.S. policy. Those who enlist or take overseas jobs with the U.S. government understand those risks. It is another to engender needless fear and hostility among nations that historically have been open to American influence and leadership. How do we mend fences once they perceive the U.S. President as an unapologetic bigot?

That question leads to another, more troubling one. Silence effectively becomes complicity, but far too few Republican members of Congress have found the moral backbone to confront the reality that both their party’s and their nation’s reputation will suffer lasting damage if they remain too timid to stand up to the schoolyard bully they helped elect. A few, like Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Mitt Romney, and members of the Bush family, have demonstrated such integrity, but most have not. It is one thing to recognize that you badly misjudged the character of the man you nominated and helped elect. It is another entirely to refuse to speak up once it is obvious. Admittedly, Democrats right now have the easier job. But this problem transcends partisan boundaries. It is about America’s badly damaged license to lead in the world. We either reclaim it, or we begin the long, slow torture of forfeiting it.

Jim Schwab

We Are the Cure, We Are the People

Our nation is suffering from a terrible social disease. It is not a sexually transmitted disease, though it can be spread orally, through the things we say to each other and over the Internet and the air waves. Since everything seems to need a name, I will call it BJ Disease, which stands for blanket judgment. It has been with us for a long, long time, latent in our political system and society, but it has gone viral, it seems, and become an epidemic in a very bad political year.

If there is one thing I personally learned long ago, it was to view people as individuals rather than as monolithic groups. In part, that is because I learned as a Christian that this is the way in which God values us, and it saddens me when I see people use religion as a weapon or a tool of exclusion rather than an opportunity for moral and spiritual growth. It has paved the way for my wife and me adopting two girls of varied backgrounds and becoming grandparents of a passel of children of racially mixed backgrounds, each with their own unique characteristics.

Adopting such an outlook has allowed me to see many more shades of meaning and value in the ways people speak and behave than if I were to see them simply as blacks, whites, Hispanics, or adherents of one faith or another, or of particular ethnic groups or sexual identities. Yes, many people in all these groupings have limited things in common, but there are far more that differentiate them as individuals and many more that we share in common as human beings across all those lines. But far too often, we refuse to see them. It is costing us lives and endleDSCF1345ss heartache, and that is a very sad thing.

Amid the uproar over black lives taken by police officers, most often though not always white officers, there is among a vocal minority of protesters an unfortunate tendency to paint all police as racially biased and prone to violence against minorities. There is, no doubt, a small segment of many of our police departments with such tendencies, though I am inclined to think it is a much smaller segment than it used to be. It is, however, far more visible today as a result of technology. Certain members of police departments have not yet adapted to an era in which the ubiquity of cell phone cameras virtually ensures that bad judgment in handling suspects, often in minor incidents such as traffic stops, will end up on the evening news. But lest I be accused of BJ disease myself, let me note that there are instances in which traffic stops have resulted in the deaths of police who did not soon enough realize that someone had a gun and intended to use it. Traffic stops can escalate, and there are reasons why police may be wary of the drivers they have pulled over.

At the same time, it is also perfectly clear that the shooter in Dallas made statements to the police, as they were trying to negotiate with him, that he hated white people and police. His indiscriminate shooting of officers at the end of what had been a peaceful protest not only bloodied and sullied the message of the protest but made clear that, in his mind, the people he was shooting were not individuals with families and unique perspectives and experiences but a single mass of people not deserving of such differentiation. It is hard to see the difference between that outlook and the views of a white racist who sees blacks as an undifferentiated force for evil. Both perspectives simply deepen the propensity for violence in our society.

At a time when it would be extremely helpful to have political leaders who can help us to escape the bonds of blanket judgment disease, which can become contagious through peer pressure and the desire to conform in the condemnation of outsiders, however they may be defined, it is disappointing in the extreme to have instead candidates for the presidency who engage in spreading the disease through inflammatory rhetoric. Take, for instance, Donald Trump’s proposal to bar Muslims from entering the country. Trump may well understand that many Muslims condemn the violence of terrorists, and that many are fleeing their countries in search of safety, but the careless lumping of all Muslims into a suspect category that must be denied admission to the United States does nothing to further that understanding. It does nothing to foster our awareness of Muslims as distinct individuals, any more than racial fears of American Indians or Mexicans or Asians fostered such understanding in the past. But let’s be clear. While he emerged as the winner of the Republican nomination by dominating debates with such reckless proposals, Trump was hardly the only candidate to offer such blanket condemnations or stoke such fears. In fact, his ascendancy within the Republican party was made possible precisely by years of such pathetic pandering before he chose to take it to another level.

So—I have said my piece for this week in an effort to make peace. There are no links in this particular blog post because the links that matter are not on the Internet but between all of us as Americans and as fellow human beings. We need to foster those connections across racial and political and ethnic and religious lines. We need to reach out even when it takes courage to do so. We need to spend more time understanding each other and less time criticizing each other en masse. We need to focus on the eradication of BJ disease. I will pray for that tonight and every night until we can achieve a more civil and respectful dialogue. Is it too much to ask? Or, as Rodney King once famously asked, “Can’t we all just get along?”

 

Jim Schwab

 

The Angry Christian

The Angry Christian: A Theology for Care and Counseling

Over the years, I have met some types of people who, strangely in my opinion, have believed that anger is unbecoming for a Christian. Most people understand that there is a place for anger in our lives, although it needs to be tempered with judgment and compassion. The bigger question is what role anger plays and how we use it for positive purposes. Clearly, anger can be poisonous if unchanneled or misdirected. At the same time, suppressed anger can lead to sadness and even depression when we fail to give ourselves an outlet for legitimate reactions to injustice, or indifference, or even just incompetence in situations where competence truly matters.

It may be clear by now that I am not leading into one of my nicer, happier blog posts. I have not written much lately because I have been very busy both professionally and personally, the latter attested by my previous blog post about our home kitchen renovation, an undertaking that requires some patience amid necessary temporary disorganization. While I have been absorbed in such matters, a number of unpleasant events have unfolded on the world and local scene that have me very concerned about our moral fiber and angry about the tone of much of the public dialogue on those events. Let me start with the world scene before I focus back on Chicago.

By now, anyone unaware of the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13 could fairly be assumed to have been sleeping under a rock.  The attackers, allied with Islamic State, killed 130 people and wounded many more, indiscriminately shooting at a variety of public places including a concert hall and restaurants. It was indisputably a despicable act, one that cries out for authorities to carry out justice, and certainly raises questions about security in many of our public spaces and how we can better protect people from those who clearly lack a conscience about murdering innocent and unarmed people. It is entirely proper to react to such circumstances with a mixture of anger and sadness, no matter what justifications the attackers claim. It is equally clear to anyone who is not incurably prejudiced that most Muslims want nothing to do with such people, any more than most Christians would agree with the tactics of the shooter who killed three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs.

In fact, to escape just such brutal butchery, thousands upon thousands of ordinary Syrians of all faiths have been fleeing their homeland in recent months. Any thinking person must realize that it takes a great deal of both fear and courage for any person or family to flee their homeland to find a better life elsewhere. Most people are deeply averse to abandoning their native land. During World War II, millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other targets of the Third Reich perished not only because of the barriers to emigration erected by democratic nations including the United States, but because they were in many cases deeply reluctant until it was too late to believe that matters would become dire enough to require them to do so. There is far more push than pull for those who risk all to become refugees.

So how do numerous American politicians, including those in Congress and presidential candidates, react? We get calls to bar or severely restrict Syrian refugees on the grounds that we have no way of guaranteeing that just one of them might be a terrorist. There is, of course, no way of disproving a negative. And sincere Christians and patriotic Americans who believe in this country’s highest values must be nearly aghast at hearing someone like Donald Trump appear to suggest a database for American Muslims and the possibility of closing mosques—a concept eerily akin to the Nazi requirement that Jews wear yellow Stars of David. The underlying strategy is to make anyone who voices opposition to such measures suffer the blame when something inevitably goes wrong in a world where we can pretty much count on another terrorist attack somewhere, somehow, some day. Like the Boston Marathon bombings, which involved young men from Kazakhstan, not Syria, who grew up in America but dramatically lost their way, to put it mildly, and whose relatives were despondent over their actions, much like some of the relatives of the Paris attackers. It is not unusual, in fact, for such criminals to be lone wolves, alienated from their own families. In this respect, at least, they have much in common with the home-grown mass shooters who have repeatedly plagued American communities in recent years.

But there is a way of asserting a positive vision driven by compassion and common sense instead of directing fear and anger at people who are seeking refuge from the very terrorists and hypocritical bullies who engineered the attacks in Paris. And it is deeply rooted in both Christian and Jewish teaching. Let us start with the Old Testament passages concerning Jewish approaches to the topic:

Deuteronomy 10: 19 You shall love the stranger, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt.

Leviticus 19:34 The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

You might not know, from recent political reactions to Syrian refugees’ pleas for assistance, that the Bible ever offered such advice. Some 26 governors, mostly Republican, have vowed to keep Syrian refugees out of their states, including Gov. Bruce Rauner of Illinois. The U.S. House of Representatives demanded stringent measures before allowing such refugees to enter the country. Admittedly, we want to screen people for questionable backgrounds before admitting them, but many such mechanisms are already in place, and we have not been open to very many Syrian refugees so far. But let us move on to explicitly Christian teachings in the New Testament:

Matthew 25: 35 I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.

Matt. 25:40 Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of my brethren you did it to me.

To give credit, by the way, I have lifted these passages directly from the website of Cois Tine, an outreach project of the Society for African Missions. Whatever else the critics of Syrian immigration may say, this is clearly a Christian organization based in the Gospel and aware of its message of welcoming the stranger in need. It is just as clearly an organization concerned about social justice on a global scale.

My point here, however, is that there is more than legitimate reason for me to feel serious Christian anger at the sheer ignorance of the reaction to the dire prospect of numerous Syrian refugees desperately fleeing war, barbarism, murder, enslavement, and every other horror being inflicted on Syrian Muslim and Christian alike in a multi-sided conflict in which human compassion has not merely taken a back seat but has been crushed underfoot in the battle for survival. And while we who are privileged to live an ocean away from such conflict cower in fear of widows and orphans, it is Turkey, the nation next door to the conflict, which has just agreed to accept refugees in exchange for financial assistance from Europe. And before any cynic can scoff at the fact that Turkey negotiated financial aid for its generosity, we should note that Turkey has already hosted thousands of such refugees at great expense to itself with only a fraction of the resources available to the U.S. and most of the European community. It would be the height of hypocrisy to criticize Turkey, of all places, for seeking additional resources to handle the job. Few other countries could claim to be as vulnerable to attacks by Islamic State terrorists.

Admittedly, the United States has suffered its share of terrorism. The September 11, 2001, attacks claimed more than 3,000 lives. They also caused us to take airline security far more seriously. But it is also worth noting that, after that tragic episode, numerous people across the nation, including prominent political leaders, had the courage and integrity to object to targeting Muslims for discrimination and abuse. Where are those voices now?

If there is a legitimate basis for Christian anger, it is the righteous anger that should object to mistreating and isolating the stranger who seeks safety on our shores.

By the same token, we should be angry about the violence already occurring on our streets. Disappointingly, some of that violence seems to be emanating from those sworn to protect us. And just as I firmly believe that most American Muslims are peace-loving people who came here to enjoy freedom, so I also still believe that the vast majority of police are sincerely committed to protecting the public from criminal activity and want to uphold the values that their badges represent.

But there are others, and sometimes the code of silence among fellow officers allows them so much latitude to engage in abuses of power that the results become outrageous. Such now appears to be the case in Chicago with the shooting in October 2014 of Laquan McDonald, a young man trying to recover from drugs, with a troubled history that made a solid start for his life problematic, but who did not appear to pose an imminent danger to police when Officer Jason Van Dyke shot him 16 times, killing him. A police video released only after a judge’s order in response to multiple Freedom of Information Act suits by journalists show he was walking away from police when shot. He had a knife he had used to slash the tires of a police car. He was admittedly a troubled young man, but police handle numerous similar situations daily involving the mentally ill and the drug-addicted without killing anyone.

If that were the entire story, the outrage that triggered protests on Black Friday on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile on Michigan Avenue might not have entailed the level of anger that it did. We have learned that two officers immediately after the shooting demanded access to a security video from a camera at the nearby Burger King at 41st St. and Pulaski Avenue. The next morning, the Burger King manager and his employees discovered an 86-minute gap in the video covering the time of the shooting. Other police shooed away eyewitnesses from the scene without collecting names of those who could become material witnesses to a murder. Cameras from other police cars all seemed to be missing the audio that would have revealed police conversations at the time. Later, the city council, at Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s request following an investigation, quietly approved a $5 million settlement for the young man’s family to avoid a messy lawsuit. And no one can explain the video gap and missing audio other than to refer to technical difficulties.

Let’s cut to the chase. The public, including numerous African-American clergy, is angry for a reason.. The city cannot reasonably rely on a “trust us” rationale for these unexplained gaps, some of which potentially constitute evidence tampering and obstruction of justice, both of which are crimes whether committed by officers or civilians. It is time for an independent prosecutor because it will be hard for any of the players, whether aldermen who approved the payout, the mayor, the police chief, or state’s attorney, to be taken seriously without a thorough investigation beyond their control. It just does not pass the smell test. This is truly a test of the integrity of the system, and the famous “Chicago way” is in no way compatible with Christian ethics. It is also true that many honest Chicago police officers fear retribution from fellow officers if they speak up. That said, there is a time for courage and convictions. This is that time.

Many people have fairly also raised the question of the reluctance in the black community to speak up, or “snitch,” about gang activity that has resulted in far more deaths than have resulted from police misbehavior. This is a legitimate issue that affects much more than black Chicago. It affects civic morale citywide. When witnesses to crimes refuse to cooperate with the police, the gangs win, hands down. The police cannot properly prepare a case against gang criminals when witnesses refuse to help. This reluctance seems to have two key sources: first, a legitimate fear of gang retribution as a result of speaking up. These people have to live in these neighborhoods and are often unprotected, even by police. Second, however, the very reputation for abuse of power that the Chicago Police Department creates with such fiascoes as the Laquan McDonald case only serve to contribute further to the mistrust that many people feel toward the police. Being caught between gangs and corrupt police is truly a formula for creating a cynical public.  We have a long way to go in this city in restoring the sort of trust that will let us overcome the plagues of violence that afflict us.

So where does that leave the question of Christian anger that I raised at the outset? We have to help channel that legitimate righteous anger at social and official injustice into a productive passion for justice that forces solutions and makes clear what a truly compassionate, caring society looks like. Martin Luther King, Jr., helped show us the way. So did Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. We have seen significant moral leadership before, and we can all help provide it if we muster our courage and root our moral beliefs in hope and compassion rather than fear and prejudice. I know we can do it, and I have said my piece.

Call me the angry Christian. I am proud to be angry when it matters.

 

Jim Schwab

 

But for Fortune

Less than three weeks ago, on June 2, a Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) bus mysteriously crashed a red light on Lake St. during the evening rush hour, jumped the curb on the eastern side of Michigan Ave., and killed one pedestrian while injuring several others. The lady who died while pinned under the bus was a mother who seemed beloved by all who knew her.

I learned about the incident after going home, where my wife was watching the news. I immediately realized that this happened on a plaza in front of the office where I work, at 205 N. Michigan Ave., and that I had crossed that very corner not more than a half-hour before the accident. A co-worker related later that he had left just five minutes later. But for a matter of simple timing, either of us could have been swept up in the maelstrom. In the words of the Joan Baez folk tune, “There, but for fortune, go you or I . . . “

I was reminded of that when the news burst onto our screens this past Wednesday, June 17, of a mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, at the Emanuel AME Church in the heart of the downtown tourist district. As related in my blog just a week before today, my wife and I had spent the better part of a week in Charleston celebrating our 30th anniversary. While we did not step foot in the church—indeed, we did not visit any churches during our stay—we passed in front of Emanuel or near it multiple times while visiting museums and tourist attractions in the city. Had Dylann Roof chosen to launch his attack the previous week, who is to say that we might not have been caught up in some other kind of maelstrom, perhaps as he was fleeing the scene? Admittedly, being white, we were not among his intended targets, but when plans go awry, there, but for fortune, go you or I. And who is to say why it was the turn for any of his nine victims, including preachers who counted among them a state senator, to become part of the carnage? For that matter, how much do we know as yet of what made this young man the racist terrorist he apparently became?

I will not belabor the matter because we are all, at various times in our lives, either victims or beneficiaries of dumb luck. What makes us most human is simply our humility in coming to terms with that fact. Let life take a left turn here, a right turn there . . . . yes,  some people fight back nobly in the face of adversity while others collapse and surrender, but even that is to some degree a reflection of prior good fortune and mental conditioning, getting enough of a running start in life to acquire the necessary resilience, but still . . . . At some point a gun shot, a bullet in the wrong place, makes an end of things.

What makes me reflect on this is the almost absurd level of self-confidence and lack of reflection in some of those who seek leadership roles or some sort of public office. Sandwiched between the two incidents I mention above, for instance, was the announcement by Donald Trump of his latest campaign for the presidency of the United States. No humility was on display there. No sense of the limitations, real or potential, of Donald Trump. No sense of the degree to which fortune has shaped him for good or ill. He will solve everything for us, while others are simply stupid. Listen to the tape to count the number of times he uses “stupid” to describe others.

But he is not alone in his vanity or lack of self-knowledge, although his certainly seems to run deeper than the norm. Rick Perry reverts to the usual gross exaggerations of the National Rifle Association by decrying the “knee-jerk reaction” of the left in supposedly trying to take everyone’s guns away after violent incidents such as that in South Carolina. Rick Santorum, a lawyer but no scientist, says Pope Francis, who studied chemistry and once worked as a chemist before joining the seminary, should leave climate change to the scientists. (But he did attend the Sunday service at Emanuel AME Church the Sunday after the shooting.) It is a sorry spectacle.

And then there is Abraham Lincoln, a man of known frailties who somehow united a nation in the face of the worst conflict over its fate that it will likely ever face, who bled with his nation, who could express humility and inspire confidence, who led in part because he understood both the complexities of his times and how to lead in the face of controversy. And in the end, an assassin’s bullet found him. There, but for fortune, went our nation. We have not yet escaped the consequences, as another young man with a gun he should never have obtained proved yet again just last week.

Fortunately, in the most meaningful demonstration of the spirit of Christianity imaginable, several relatives of the victims of the Charleston shooting have publicly forgiven the young man. He may have a long time to ponder that forgiveness.

 

Jim Schwab