Going Viral

Posted on November 27, 2022 by admin

Now I know what it feels like, or may have felt like. Kind of. Sort of.

I will never experience, in all likelihood, the very worst the COVID-19 virus can inflict on human beings. I was lucky in many ways. First, the virus just never found me as a target until early October of this year. Second, I am very physically fit for my age, and I don’t suffer from any chronic conditions that often expose people to more severe reactions to the virus. Third, by the time COVID-19 found me, I had the two initial shots of the Pfizer vaccine, and later a Moderna booster. My only failing was not having obtained the more recently released Omicron booster, but there is no question that vaccines made my path far easier than was the case for those who suffered earlier in the pandemic.

I spent most of my COVID time not knowing I had it, though there were indications that aroused my suspicions—just a bit. Late Sunday, October 9, I experienced some mild cold symptoms, but I sometimes have sinus problems that become more persistent as Midwest weather changes in the fall. On Monday, I began to experience more of a cold and struggled through online meetings, two about a video project, one preparing for an upcoming online training workshop. In the evening, I was supposed to volunteer with

It’s a lot easier to get a test now than at the height of the pandemic, when tests were as scarce as the places that provided them. Now you just pull up for an appointment, take the kit through the window, tickle your nostrils with a swab, and hand it all back to the pharmacist.

signature collection to help place our incumbent Chicago alderman, Daniel La Spata, on the municipal ballot next spring, but I called it off because I was not feeling well. By the next morning, I took a nasal swab COVID test at Walgreen’s, but the test came back negative the following day. As a result, I assumed I simply had what I called “the ordinary crud” of a normal cold. Just deal with it for a few days, I thought, and get over it.

I made no real changes to my plans and tried to maintain my normal pace. The previous week, curiously, had included my participation as a consulting expert in two online symposiums, both lasting two and three-quarter hours, on Tuesday and Thursday for a project at Johns Hopkins University addressing pandemic community recovery. I moderated the final panel on Thursday, dealing with the use of metrics, which are essentially statistical targets, for tracking the many variables concerning social equity and public health factors that would guide such recovery. In other words, COVID-19 already had my intellectual attention. I had no reason to suspect It would seize my medical attention as well.

But I was wrong on that count. By that Tuesday, some of the infamous COVID-19 fatigue was settling in, and the cold was tightening its grip. I had planned to attend a program of the Society of Midland Authors at Cliff Dwellers in downtown Chicago that evening. As on Monday night, I never made it. It seemed wiser to stay home. It was becoming a pattern.

Nonetheless, I spent Wednesday morning at a dealership service department. While in the waiting room, I met online with two planned guest speakers for my online University of Iowa class, which meets in the fall semester on Thursday evenings. I was very much looking forward to letting Linda Langston and Kehla West take over the class a week later because, in my opinion, both are impressive members of the natural hazards professional community and could share valuable insights. “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery” offers graduate planning and public affairs students serious comprehension of the natural-hazard threats facing our communities. Linda is a former county supervisor of Linn County, Iowa, who had helped lead her community through the 2008 floods that overwhelmed Cedar Rapids and into the recovery that followed. She later worked nationally on resilience issues with the National Association of Counties before returning to Cedar Rapids as a consultant. Kehla works with Region 5 of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Chicago. Although she was doing me a favor by sharing her federal government experience, she regarded it as a great honor to be asked to speak to a class in which she was once a student. I was enthusiastic about sharing my virtual stage with them for two hours. The meeting was a breeze.

All right, this is a simulation of what I may have looked like, but it’s probably close. I found myself waking up in a seated position on the couch more than two hours after falling asleep early in the afternoon.

But most days that week, with increasing frequency, the afternoon was not. I no longer even remember which day was which, but I know that on several occasions, I would hit a wall of fatigue by late morning or early afternoon, and work would grind to a halt. One day, this happened around 1 p.m., and to regain some energy, I went downstairs from my home office to sit on the living room couch. I simply disappeared into deep slumber, with no recollection of anything. Sometime well after 3 p.m., I woke up, looked at the clock, and wondered where my day had gone. For someone very conscious of pending deadlines and obligations, it was deeply frustrating. At the end of the day, I like to know what I have accomplished. I did not want to find that I had lost a major chunk of my day to exhaustion. It became hard to believe that a mere cold had done this, but I kept thinking about that negative test. It was not COVID. I was just worn out fighting a cold. But day after day, I watched in growing alarm as the number of tasks falling behind schedule kept growing. The will power and drive that sufficed in normal circumstances to overcome such deficits never materialized, and the gap widened instead. The spirit was willing, but the flesh fell asleep, day after day.

That Thursday evening, I taught my class as usual. But it was not so usual. It became patently obvious that I was struggling with my voice, with sinus difficulties, with watery eyes, with fatigue, but I plugged away for two hours. By Saturday, in a phone conversation with someone about a potential film grant proposal, I struggled again in the conversation because my voice was weak, but I pushed ahead because the call was important, and the proposal deadline was at the end of the month, just two weeks away.

And so it went. If a meeting was on the telephone or online, I could make it work even if I was exhausted after it was over. If it was in person, I would cancel. Fortunately, most meetings, including a debrief with Johns Hopkins about the symposium two weeks earlier, a HUD guidebook review panel, and a Midland Authors board meeting, were online, usually via Zoom. I had contacted my doctor over the weekend of October 15-16 through a patient portal, and he asked me to come in, which I did by Wednesday, October 19. He made some suggestions but accepted the negative COVID test result. Following his advice, I began using a Neti pot to control the sinus congestion—and it works, by the way. In combination with Flonase (after the Neti pot), it has been effective. The fatigue, however, took its own good time to fade away.

The next day, Thursday, I had class in the evening, the one at which Linda and Kehla would speak in tag-team fashion about local and federal perspectives on planning for disaster recovery. That afternoon, Jean tested positive, much to her surprise. In our pre-class banter on Zoom, I mentioned that to Linda, who repeated it to Kehla when she logged on: “Jim’s wife tested positive for COVID.” Kehla immediately expressed her regrets. They taught the class, I offered occasional commentary, and for the most part, I got to rest my voice and conserve my energy.

But I had also decided at that point that getting another test the next morning was imperative. By mid-day Saturday, a Walgreen’s e-mail informed me that I had tested positive. I discussed it with an emergency room doctor, and later my primary physician, who said the symptoms we discussed just a few days before sounded a lot like COVID to him at the time. The ER doctor stated that, based on our discussion of what led me to get tested again, I had probably had COVID all along and may unwittingly have infected Jean. The verdict of these two men made sense to me, but of course, it was now after the fact. I was actually near the end of my COVID experience before I ever knew for certain that I had it.

Alex, to right of candle, after baptism service, with me at far right, Pastor Nancy Goede, Pastor Matt Stuhlmuller, Alex, sponsor Kornelius, and members of my family, including Jean, far left. I later wondered about any unintended exposure I may have cause through unawareness that I even had COVID at that point.

If there was one situation that brought some regret–it seems not to have produced any adverse consequences that I am aware of–it was that, not believing I had COVID, I joined others at our church for our grandson Alex’s baptism on October 16. Mass spreader events were at one time rather scary propositions. But there I was, unaware, part of a ritual and celebration that was a happy event but could have infected others. The following Sunday, I stayed home because by then, I knew I had contracted COVID.

Although I am certain that skeptics of the vaccines (and I know some) would say this was just one man’s opinion, the ER doctor stated that the vaccines had surely helped make my case milder (and Jean’s was milder still), and that the vast majority of those now being hospitalized or dying from the virus are unvaccinated. The statistics I have seen on the subject seem strongly to suggest as much. But people love to argue from anecdotes, which are easier to understand than statistical data, and the resistance will surely continue. The COVID-19 pandemic seems closer to having run its course after nearly three years. All pandemics eventually lose steam.

COVID is no longer half as scary as the ghost lady and her companion on Halloween. Okay, just kidding. But that guy is freaky.

By the following week, with minor help from a cough suppressant the ER doctor prescribed, I was able to regain energy and focus on the tasks that I had neglected for almost two weeks. They were too important to me to do otherwise. One was completing a grant proposal for a film project I am leading under the auspices of the Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division of the American Planning Association. The deadline was October 31, and with significant money at stake, I was not about to blow it. We had been laying the groundwork for weeks, but I needed to write some powerful explanations of our project and submit all the necessary documentation, which I did by that morning. I was able to walk our grandson through the neighborhood for Halloween and pass out candy afterwards, while triggering the spooky voice of our alabaster “ghost lady” without being noticed. She impressed only the very young, drawing only amused yawns from tweens and teenagers.

But that was just the beginning of a list of tasks and projects needing my urgent attention. I had promised to create a case study of Hurricane Michael recovery to present to my students on November 10. I finally completed it just an hour before class. On Saturday, November 12, I hosted with Amanda Torres, formerly the city planner for Rockport, Texas, an all-day training workshop on hazard mitigation and disaster recovery, offered as part of my teaching commitment with the University of Iowa School of Planning and Public Affairs. I had two documents I had promised to review, for which I sought and received additional time.

During the illness, I stopped my exercise routine. I currently visit the gym twice weekly with a rotating routine of exercises. After the illness had run its course, I still missed the workouts in favor of catching up on work. Before Christmas, I will turn 73. I find the exercise vital to good health at this stage of life, and I became anxious about the six-week gap that developed before I finally resumed the workouts on November 16. I have taken to them with relish. I simply feel better because of it, and I can finally spare the time again. Two days after Thanksgiving, I ran into a former trainer I worked with at X Sport, Michael Caldwell, who told me about his new work with companies on employee fitness and ergonomics, noting the serious toll on many people of failing to pay attention to such issues. I wished him well in his new enterprise. He seemed pleased that I was returning to form, just as he had always respected my resilience in the past after some injuries and surgeries.

But I also know that I am very fortunate. I find absolutely no evidence that I have developed any long-term COVID symptoms. I never fell victim to COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic despite a short-term hospital stay in May 2020 on the only floor with non-COVID patients. I have even discovered the accidental grace of hundreds of presumed strangers who, in successive waves in October and November, registered as new subscribers to this blog at a time when I was seldom posting anything. I wanted to change that but just could not get it done. Their attention to my blog despite several weeks with no new posts encourages me to get back into the ring. I must have offered something in earlier posts that still attracts readers, and I hope to keep it that way for a long time. I hope this humble story adds to the blog’s overall value. I shall certainly try my best.

Jim Schwab

My Ode to Negativity

Posted on January 1, 2022 by admin

I am proud to announce that I started the New Year on a negative note. Having had a very mild fever Thursday evening and a very mild nagging cough, I thought the better part of wisdom these days was a COVID test, even though I would have bet serious money that it was something else, like a mere cold. But it did make me slightly uncomfortable. The fever was gone yesterday. So, at just after 8 a.m. today, I walked to a nearby National COVID Center, which offers free tests without appointment and was open today from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. I strongly suspected there would be no line, that few other people had roused themselves out of bed, let alone showered and dressed and gone outside, so early this holiday morning.

I was right. I got there, a storefront on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago, and the lone public health nurse staffing the place greeted me, the only person who had arrived, the only person the whole time I was there, had me fill out the forms, gave me both the rapid antigen and PCR test, and we chatted a bit while I waited 10 minutes for the antigen result. We discussed our dismay at the apparent lack of critical thinking among anti-vaxxers, and when I said I was trained to think analytically, she asked what I did, and we discussed the relationship between urban planning and public health, which goes back more than a century to Jane Addams days, when health officials and civil engineers and planners made common cause to clean up the city, build sanitary sewers, and pay attention to what makes cities healthy places to live. We discussed college as a gateway to learning how to learn for a lifetime. It was a great conversation. Then the ten minutes were up, and the antigen result (75% accurate, she said) was available: Negative. We must wait three days for the lab to e-mail the result of the 99% accurate PCR test, but I would stick with my original hunch.

But out of an abundance of caution, and a concern for those around me, I am still glad I took the time to find out for sure. You just never know, which is one thing I have also learned in spades as a planner specializing in disaster issues. This pandemic has been nothing if not a public health disaster, which always brings us back to this question of critical thinking. Give me one wish for 2022, and that would be it. The gift of critical thinking for the entire population of the U.S. and the world. I can dream, can’t I?

Jim Schwab

Our Collective COVID Cabin Fever

Posted on February 28, 2021 by admin

I am not a doubter when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccines. All I want to do is sign up and let them put a sharp needle in my arm and inoculate me. Do it twice if the vaccine demands it. Even my experience in early February with the shingles vaccine cannot deter me. On a Tuesday afternoon, a pharmacist at the local Walgreen’s provided a shot that I requested at my doctor’s suggestion. It has been two decades since I experienced my second episode of shingles, but I vividly recollected the piercing pains in my shoulders and arms that made it nearly impossible to exercise my fingers on a keyboard, one of the most basic things I have long done to earn a living. I told the pharmacist that I “noticed it but did not feel it.” He put a bandage over the location on my upper left arm, and I left, thanking him.

It was that evening that I noticed my reaction as muscle aches spread from that left arm across my upper chest. Then the chills set in, and I pulled the covers over me in bed. I repeatedly felt my forehead, testing for a fever. Nothing happening. The next day, the muscle aches diminished, but the chills persisted, and I sat in a leather chair with a blanket pulled over me, doing little but reading a newspaper and then falling asleep. I had slept all night, but it mattered not; the fatigue overpowered me. Late that afternoon, I struggled through two online meetings, and my energy again failed me. I spent the next day feeling slightly more energetic until about 3 p.m., when I fell into a deep sleep, again with blankets covering me as I accomplished nothing. My wife says I turned white, but I wouldn’t know. I lacked the energy to look into the mirror.

By Friday, I at least posed a question to my primary physician on the patient portal: Is this normal? He wrote back to say that about 20 to 25 percent of people getting the shingles virus experience such a reaction, which mostly proved that the vaccine was beneficial. My immune system was relearning how to fight the shingles virus. That was vaguely reassuring, and I knew he knew whereof he spoke, but it took one last development to convince me.

Late that Friday afternoon, with the better part of a week lost to malaise, I suddenly felt the fog lift and the fever break, though it was not really a fever. All within an hour. It just stopped. My immune system had learned what it needed to know, and it ceased fighting what was not there. And I was fine. That’s part of how vaccines work, but I could not recall ever experiencing such a reaction to any previous vaccine.

Our backyard after the Presidents Day blizzard.

Amid this experience, however, the snow piled up in Chicago. First came a snowstorm that covered our yards and streets in blinding whiteness. Often, in Chicago winters, these snows come, sit around for a few days until the sun comes out, and they melt away as the temperatures rise.

But not this time. Until February in this season, we had seen little more than timid flurries of pixie dust that barely covered the ground, with green shoots of grass still poking out from below. Now it came to stay, as temperatures soon plunged to zero and slightly below, solidifying the growing accumulation of snow even as we struggled daily to clear a path down our gangway and along the sidewalk in front of our home. I shoveled in front of a neighbor’s home as well, knowing he had recently had hernia surgery. And the very next day, we had to do it again.

Jean wanted her turn at shoveling as a way to get some exercise. She got her wish.

The three weeks of persistent snow culminated in a 17-inch overnight debauchery on Presidents Day that left us staggering and feeling quarantined by virtue of a simple inability to move a car down the alley, or the challenge of climbing over hip-high snow piles at intersections. During those three weeks, our cumulative snowfall mounted to 40 inches.

Our somewhat metaphorical confinement by way of extensive pandemic restrictions now took on major physical dimensions, leaving us feeling imprisoned. Not only was there nowhere to go because the restaurants were closed, but there was no way to get out, either. In place of my brief fatigue in reaction to a shingles virus, I now felt a very real spiritual and emotional fatigue at the mere thought of needing boots and a heavy coat just to step outside. Staying at home felt more like incarceration than refuge. Even the mail, which provides some tangible connection to the outside world, was no longer arriving. The carrier on our route, and probably on many others, was not braving the snow piles and frigid weather, and the mail piled up at the post office until, one day, I simply walked the mile to get it, standing in line for more than half an hour for a pile of paper surrounded by a rubber band, partly containing bills to pay. The process took long enough that, by the time it was over, I needed to use a bathroom and home was too far away. I opted for the nearby Cozy Corner diner, and showed my gratitude by staying for lunch. It’s a very decent eatery, actually, and I enjoyed my California melt with fries. And then I walked home again, through the very snow piles that had impeded its delivery. Watch where you walk when you cross the street.

After weeks of erratic service, the mail came all at once, and not again so far.

By the following Sunday, temperatures rose and stayed above freezing. The snow began to melt, removing the impediments to delivery. Nonetheless, in the past week, delivery occurred only on Tuesday, when the mailbox was suddenly full, but it was an aberration rather than real change. No mail arrived for the rest of the week. This has been an ongoing problem across Chicago, for systemic rather than purely weather-driven reasons, and even more so in some South Side ZIP codes than ours, which is itself bad enough. The Chicago Tribune ran an article about the Trumpian mess in which U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush expressed his impatience on behalf of his constituents about the staffing excuses, saying there were plenty of unemployed people in the city, so “if you have a job, do it.”

The as yet uncollected recyclables in a bin filled to the brim.

That comment formed an interesting backdrop to the other event the same day all mail arrived. The city recycling pickup occurs on our block on alternate Tuesdays, and our bins were full, if somewhat piled around with snow. The trucks seemed to be very selective, leaving our stuff uncollected, so that we are now storing recyclables in paper bags in the garage. I complained to the city Streets and Sanitation Department in an online forum that left little room for comment, then forwarded the complaint and further explanation to our 1^st Ward alderman, Daniel La Spata. I noted that the previous week, the regular garbage pickup occurred without a problem under worse circumstances. He informed me that a private company had been hired for the recycling, similar problems had emerged elsewhere, and added, “Honestly, that’s the difference between public employees and privatized ones, and why we’re pushing back on the latter.” Some might question that comparison in light of the post office problems, but I would suggest that the U.S. Postal Service, to a significant degree, has been the target of efforts to undermine it as a means of justifying privatization and subverting the integrity of mail ballots. In any case, I still want them to empty those blue recycling bins.

During all this, I nonetheless wanted to access the COVID vaccine so that I could move beyond the sense of limitation that nearly a year of closed stores and restaurants, and mask wearing and social distancing, has instilled in all of us. For compulsive extroverts like me, the compounded effect of long-term pandemic restrictions followed by a month of being buried in frozen precipitation is producing a profound restlessness. Put simply, I want out.

I have not yet mentioned that five grandchildren have been studying remotely in our home since September. We are guardians for one, and the others are here as their mother engineers a major change in her life, and besides, my wife is a retired public schools teacher who can mentor them. Throughout February, the Chicago Teachers Union engaged in a vociferous public debate with the Chicago Public Schools and Mayor Lori Lightfoot about reopening schools, arguing over the adequacy of the preparations for protecting teachers and staff from coronavirus exposure. This took place against the backdrop of the larger national debate over online versus in-person education, but I know what I see. The kids are noticeably glazing over and tuning out, and listening to a teacher on a screen is getting old. Students, particularly students of color (most of our grandchildren) and those with working parents, are falling behind, and the schools will have a major challenge in coming years of reversing the impacts of online education. Students in the early grades need human contact to remain fully engaged. None of this is to deny the necessity that drove the schools to close, but the national failure to manage the pandemic has greatly exacerbated the consequences.

We need to get our national act together, and moving millions of doses of vaccines to sites where people can get some sense of relief is the most important step right now. Instead, I’ve found myself checking online daily, sometimes multiple times daily, only to find no availability for vaccine appointments. But my wife finally got her call for March 2, so I remain hopeful. I have no other choice.

That expression of patience is at the heart of our dilemma. I could live with the snow, however impatiently and with some humor, because I knew that warmer days lay ahead, and snow cannot outlast St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago. Unlike Texas, our infrastructure is designed to handle winter. A slow, steady rise in temperature would allow snow to turn to water at a steady pace without triggering floods. We will be fine.

What has been less certain has been the ability of our national public health infrastructure, as disheveled as political neglect has allowed it to become, to respond to the pandemic. But I can also feel a steady warming trend since January 20, however halting it has seemed at times. The big snowstorm, which jostled its way through Kentucky and Tennessee and Arkansas all the way down to Texas and Louisiana, slowed distribution of vaccines, but maybe for a week. My wife learned that she got her appointment because PrimeCare, a local health care provider, had just received a big shipment.

Snow recedes to a manageable level as the weather has warmed.

My turn will come, and so will yours if you’re smart enough to get vaccinated. My outlook will change with the warm breezes of spring, and I will start to think about where I can go and what I can do. We will end this year-long cabin fever that has been induced by a tiny virus with protein spikes that latch onto receptor target cells in a microbiological process most of us do not understand.

But it may be a long time before we stop talking about it. Our collective COVID cabin fever does that. Let’s all talk about what we as a nation can do better next time. Do it over beer or coffee or tea, but make it a productive, meaningful conversation. I’m tired of gripes. I prefer solutions.

Jim Schwab

Collateral Damage

Posted on January 13, 2021 by admin

For those who have noticed, it has been more than five weeks since I last posted to this blog. It has been a rough stretch, but it could have been much rougher. At least to my knowledge, I never have contracted COVID-19. Not that people weren’t asking, especially relatives.

There were the holidays, of course, and who wouldn’t take it easy for at least a few days?

Then came the call on Christmas Eve, around 8 p.m. CST. It was my younger sister, choked up, reporting that our mother had died about an hour earlier at 8 p.m. EST. It was not entirely unexpected. She was living in a small nursing facility near Cleveland. My younger sister and brother live nearby. At 103, our mother had lived a very long life, overcoming more obstacles and health threats than I could imagine, but time takes its toll on all of us. In her last few days, she could barely speak, was on oxygen, and finally on morphine as hospice nurses took charge of her situation.

My mother, Hazel, at 100th birthday in 2017.

Still, Christmas Eve is not an ideal time for such news. It completely dampened the tenor of the evening at our house, as I shared the news first with my wife, and then with six grandchildren who were present. We all went to sleep that night knowing that my mother, who survived our father by more than 13 years, would no longer be a presence in our lives, though she would certainly be a memory. Losing a parent is almost always a tectonic shift in one’s life. Losing a parent in the midst of a pandemic, even if not to the pandemic, adds an extra element of sadness to the event. Funerals have become small events since last March. There is no need to add to the death toll.

We celebrated a slightly subdued Christmas, but we wanted to maintain the joy for the grandchildren, who range from 6 to 17, and their mothers. There was a more than ample dinner, much of it planned before the news arrived, and the kids played with their new gifts. Nonetheless, two of them, Alex, 11, and Angel, just two days away from his 17^th birthday, made clear they wanted to come with Jean and me to Cleveland for their great-grandmother’s funeral. That was already a full load for our 2018 Chevy Malibu.

Christmas, of course, was on Friday, which meant that my siblings in Cleveland would not meet with the funeral home staff until Saturday to settle on plans. Over the weekend, they learned that, because of COVID-19, the funeral home was backed up, and the funeral could not occur until Tuesday, December 29. Their pastor had another funeral Tuesday morning, so he could not arrive until later, so, while visitation was permitted to begin at 11:30 a.m., the service began around 1:15 p.m. Pastor Brad Ross, of Triune Lutheran Church in Broadview Heights, Ohio, kept it reasonably short out of necessity. The cemetery was also backed up, and we would need to complete the interment service no later than 3 p.m. That meant we were all leaving the funeral home no later than 2 p.m. This was a very different environment from the more relaxed and expansive schedule that accompanied my father’s funeral on a sunny May day in 2007. The last pandemic that had ever ravaged the world on the scale of COVID-19 had occurred in 1918 and 1919, just a year or so after my mother was born. I kept thinking of all the changes she had seen in her lifetime, but they were often hard to imagine. The best I could do was try to broaden the lens of my own 71 years, but it never seemed like enough. Cars were new on the city streets when she was born, and she graduated from high school during the Great Depression. Our nation was already sending men into space while I was still in elementary school. We can imagine, but can we relate?

My niece from upstate New York, Cheryl, provided the one family contribution to the service, which was otherwise a short homily and some scriptural readings from Pastor Ross. Cheryl has a beautiful voice. With instrumental accompaniment from a recording, she sang “The Old Rugged Cross.”

Through it all, and it was brief, I had flashbacks to moments of both separation and engagement with my parents, particularly my mother. I was always well aware that she was less than pleased when I said I was moving to Iowa in January 1979, at age 29 taking the helm of a small nonprofit public interest advocacy organization. In her mind, such a move could be justified if I were working for some large firm that wanted to transfer me there, but the type of job I had sought was, in her mind, a waste of time and talent. I stood my ground because I knew already that I was profoundly restless in Cleveland, striving to redefine myself and find a new role in life, and this modestly paid position posed a challenge to my intellect, my moral fiber, and my emerging sense of identity. I was a “child of the Sixties” who believed passionately in positive social and political change, but it was more than that.

Even while in Cleveland, I had often written and spoken in ways that revealed some innate, but not yet well-developed, skills at communication. I had published several op-eds in The Plain Dealer, Cleveland’s major daily newspaper. But I did not feel that anything I was doing was plumbing the depths of my skills and beliefs, so it was time to move on and immerse myself in an entirely new environment. Had I been more daring, I might have joined the Peace Corps, like my long-time college friend, Jim Quigley, who spent two years in the Marshall Islands. That surely would have driven my mother over the edge. “Why do you want to do that?” would have been her first question.

Within three years, I shifted gears in Iowa to become a graduate student at the University of Iowa, pursuing two Master’s degrees in urban and regional planning and journalism that have become the cornerstones of my career for four decades. She first greeted that, too, with some skepticism, wondering why I wanted to “struggle” for a few more years like that, but she acquiesced. She had no choice because it was all on my own dime or with my own student loans. To be fair, however, I must emphasize that both my parents strongly encouraged all of us to attend college.

She may also have feared that I would never return to Cleveland. I visited often, but she was right. Cleveland no longer held much allure. In the end, with Jean, who was from Omaha, I ended up in Chicago. Life offered a far bigger palette here on which to paint my career.

A long-time high school friend of mine who also now lives in Chicago, Larry Barr, theorized recently that middle-class parents of our generation—and my parents were blue-collar middle-class—tended to want success for their children through conventional careers. Getting hired by a big company was a sign of economic security. Many of us Baby Boomers had a more creative streak and wanted to discover who we were. That made our parents nervous about our prospects in life. My extended search stretched into three and a half years of graduate school because I used the journalism training to refine what I had always sensed were powerful writing skills that had not yet been refined and tested, and I wanted to push the development of those skills as hard as I could while also refining a clearer sense of my own values in life. I emerged from the University of Iowa, not a different person, but a far more mature and determined person than when I started. In the years that followed, I turned a Master’s Project in Journalism into my first published book, followed by book tours and a review in the New York Times. I was far more confident than when I had enrolled, and my vision of what was possible grew exponentially.

That was the point, Larry suggested in a recent conversation. Skeptical at first of such personal searches for self-definition and meaning, our parents could nonetheless embrace success when it was staring them in the face. The kid is getting published. He’s an author, and a planner. He must have known what he was doing.

A few years later, a second book emerged, my role at APA had grown, and things just kept evolving. During one visit to Cleveland, they listened as I was interviewed with another panelist on the local NPR station. Not everybody’s kid gets such positive public attention. They reported enjoying the discussion.

There was no denying that, whatever differences of opinion we still had—and there were plenty—I seemed to have planted my stake in the world. I might not have become an automotive engineer for Ford or GM, but their doubts had been resolved. (My father would love to have been trained as an engineer, but college seemed out of reach in his youth, which is sad. He had some amazing mathematical and mechanical skills, and the world would have benefited from providing him such an opportunity. He worked as a truck mechanic in a chemical plant, but was a beacon of stability throughout his life.)

Those are the essential reminiscences after all these years, and they all passed through my mind during the funeral. I was a pallbearer and took my place in the procession with nephews and my brother, but before we left, I asked for a moment to grab my overcoat, as I was feeling a bit cold. We loaded the casket into the hearse, and our parade of cars followed to the cemetery.

It was about 23°F., a damp, chilly day as we reached the cemetery in Hinckley, about a 20-minute drive from the funeral parlor. I was not especially comfortable as we brought the casket to the burial site and listened as the pastor intoned a final prayer before we all left, most of us for my brother Jack’s house, where he and my sister-in-law, Tina, had a casual dinner of sandwiches and pasta salads ready for all of us. They also had a small cake for a joint birthday: Mine had been on December 20, and my other sister, Nancy, who lives in Pennsylvania, was born on New Year’s Eve.

I struggled to enjoy it all, but it soon became apparent to everyone—most notably, Tina and Jean—that something was wrong. I was looking pale, feeling cold, and lacking energy. I sat near the fireplace and simply watched a movie, The Princess Bride, that was on the living room television. It was still early in the evening when we left for our hotel room with Angel and Alex, and I fell asleep beneath the covers not long after 8 p.m., a remarkably early time for me. There was by then no question that I was ill.

The hotel, relatively empty and operating post-holidays in pandemic mode, offered a simple complimentary breakfast of either a bagel with cheese, egg, and sausage, or without the sausage, and orange juice in a small plastic bottle. The dining area had been closed months ago. Amenities were minimal. Alex went to the lobby to get the breakfast for all of us, but I passed on the bagel and simply drank the orange juice because I was feeling queasy. Even that proved a big mistake. By the time we had packed the car and checked out, I was getting nauseous. As Jean, who had committed to driving the entire trip without my help, pulled out of our parking space, I said urgently, “Pull up to the front door.” She looked puzzled, and I repeated, more firmly, “Pull up to the front door!” She did so, and in a moment, I was racing for a bathroom, and the orange juice departed my stomach like a liquid missile. Now I knew I was in trouble, and a six-hour drive down the Ohio and Indiana Turnpikes, plus I-90 in Chicago, lay ahead.

On the way home, we discussed what to do about my situation when we got there. I avoided both food and drink the entire time in order not to test my stomach. If it was empty, there would be no emergency. I was decidedly uncomfortable when we visited service plazas to use the bathroom because the weather was at first rainy and cold, though it improved in Indiana. I used her cell phone to call an urgent care center near our home and was told that, unless I needed a COVID test, I could be treated as a walk-in.

In Chicago, however, I discovered that one needed to get the attention of someone inside the urgent care center for someone to come to the door to let you in, and two ladies standing outside indicated they had been waiting a half hour for someone to respond. I said I would become a wreck if I stood outside that long, so I drove home.

After I rested a bit and warmed up, Jean took me to the emergency room at nearby St. Mary’s Hospital. I expected that they would test me immediately for COVID-19, as they had done last May, but to my surprise, the admitting clerk simply asked about symptoms and referred me to a nurse. Within minutes, I was in a treatment room with a doctor. No COVID test ever happened. Dr. Jorgensen ascertained instead that I had a viral sinus infection. Because the infection was viral, not bacterial, they could not administer antibiotics but would have to let me wait it out, while advising that I continue using Flonase to clear the sinuses and Tylenol for headaches or fever. He prescribed Zofran for the nausea, which I used for maybe two days before that symptom disappeared. An attending nurse attached saline fluids intravenously to relieve dehydration that, no doubt, had materialized from my precaution in not eating or drinking during the trip. “We’re putting the fluids where they matter without testing your stomach,” he assured me.

I spent the New Year’s weekend either in bed or lazily reading newspapers and books until I got drowsy. My siblings and in-laws were calling and texting to find out how I was doing, and to make sure I had not contracted coronavirus. I reassured everyone that no such diagnosis was in the works, but some worried anyway. You never know, and we all know someone who has suffered, and one illness can lead to another. But in my case, it did not.

What it led to is my current anxiety. Work piled up as the first week of January rolled on and I struggled to regain my normal energy level, which happened but far too slowly for my satisfaction. I never lost my sense of taste or smell, a key COVID trait, and when feeling energetic enough, I continued to craft some wonderful meals as my inner chef, another part of my creative identity, reasserted itself. Lord, I would hate to discover someday that ginger/sesame-marinated salmon tasted like paste or wallpaper!

By January 6, I was more or less back to work, albeit at a slow pace. Then came another opportunity to feel sick, but the symptoms were emotional and were triggered by the President himself, inciting an angry, deluded crowd of supporters to attack the nation’s Capitol, killing a Capitol police officer, and creating a new day that will live in infamy, alongside Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That some Americans were proudly doing this to their own country was by far the worst part. I found the news consuming what little free time I had mustered by then. Emotionally, it felt like collateral damage to a political system gone badly awry.

By Friday, a new disturbance arrived, though I was able to take it more in stride. I received a notice from the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES) that an unemployment claim was filed in my name at a local sheet metal manufacturer, where, of course, I had never worked. It was clearly a fraudulent claim and was followed the next day by a benefits debit card from a bank in Cleveland. I spent Monday of this week requesting cancellation of the claim at IDES, taking other protective measures, and filing a financial fraud report with the Chicago Police Department. I do not believe in letting this activity go unreported. Providing evidence may add ever so slightly to a case against some perpetrator somewhere who needs to be brought to justice. I learned that IDES had been hacked in 2017. If so, although it happened under a prior administration, Gov. J.B. Pritzker needs to take ownership of the solution. Too many such issues in Illinois linger from one administration to the next, with computer systems not updated, problems not fixed, issues unresolved. The avalanche of claims under the current pandemic-caused recession has only exposed existing vulnerabilities. It is time for states and the federal government to get serious about addressing these challenges.

As for me, I am feeling better and getting more done every day, though I am still checking in with doctors in the near term. As for the nation, I hope we can all feel better after January 20, but I don’t envy President-elect Biden or his administration for the work that lies ahead. We have a viral infection in the body politic for which the only vaccines are truth, respect, and common sense.

Jim Schwab

Charting a Path to Sustainability

Posted on November 23, 2020 by admin

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 19^th-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

Plotting Post-Pandemic Recovery

Posted on July 20, 2020 by admin

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

Community Planning and Pandemics Podcast

Posted on July 16, 2020 by admin

Periodically, I have linked blog readers directly to a new podcast in the Resilience Roundtable series, produced by the American Planning Association and hosted by the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. Last fall, I became the moderator of this series, and the last, pre-pandemic podcast interviewed Florida planning consultant Julie Dennis about her experiences in recovery planning for Hurricanes Irma and Michael.

Earlier this month, however, we shifted gears, and I interviewed Dr. Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist and research fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. Our topic was community planning and pandemics, and she shared numerous insights into the public health and community planning aspects of dealing with a pandemic like COVID-19. Most readers already know that I have written repeatedly about some aspects of the pandemic since March, but Monica in this interview sheds light on several other features of our current situation that I had not yet illuminated, in part because I lack her specific technical background.

Therefore, I am happy to provide this link to the new 40-minute podcast.

Jim Schwab

A Taste of Reopening

Posted on June 14, 2020 by admin

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 35^th 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

Posted on June 4, 2020 by admin

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

Inside the Hospital in the Time of Coronavirus

Posted on May 13, 2020 by admin

It started last Thursday evening after dinner. By 8 p.m., suffering shivers and chills and fatigue, I retreated to bed, unsure what was affecting me but hoping a solid night of sleep might provide some respite. I was near the end of two busy weeks. The previous week, I had been deeply involved in a huge experiment by the American Planning Association, which it called NPC20 @Home, a three-day online professional conference that would replace its canceled National Planning Conference, which would have taken place in Houston April 25-28. Instead, on opening day, April 29, I was moderating a session with three speakers[i] on “Demanding Equity: Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery.” We had rehearsed our approach, and it came off seamlessly before more than 1,600 participants, which made all of us very happy.

The following Monday, as chair of APA’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division (HMDR), I led our annual business meeting, which also had gone online after the NPC was canceled. With the support of our executive committee, particularly Christine Caggiano, our secretary-treasurer, who played the Wizard of Oz for our Zoom controls, it too had been a remarkable success with attendance spread across four time zones. So it went through Thursday, when two other speakers[ii] and I presented a webinar for APA’s Michigan chapter on the 2020 update of APA’s Hazard Mitigation Policy Guide. That was over by mid-afternoon; we patted ourselves on the back, and I went on to other business, such as a blog post that remains unfinished. I will get to it, I hope.

It was only as the evening progressed that I sensed something was wrong.

My wife, Jean, began to share fears that I was the latest victim of coronavirus. She, of course, was simply reacting to visible symptoms and venting her worst fears. But as the night wore on, my intuition led me in other directions, and I was unwilling to succumb to simple answers. Only I could experience and report all of my symptoms, which included a few trips to the bathroom, and it reminded me too much of previous experiences with prostatitis. In April 2012, on a flight to Los Angeles, I experienced chills and fever somewhere over the Rockies. Chicago to Los Angeles is about a four-hour flight, so I had to endure two hours of personal deterioration before landing at LAX, where I struggled to hold myself together as I grabbed my luggage and found a taxi to the hotel, where I could check in for that year’s National Planning Conference at the nearby convention center. At the hotel, I was already sweating as I checked in and found my room, where I remained for the evening, under bed covers, skipping nearly every event at which I was expected.

I was basically a physical wreck throughout the five-day conference, but, on the advice of my primary physician, found my way to a nearby urgent care center, where I was diagnosed with prostatitis, an infection of the prostate gland that can, under the worst conditions, kill the patient, as my urologist in Chicago later explained. I will say it was one of the worst experiences of illness in my entire life, and people who saw me when I made an occasional appearance outside my room uniformly commented on how awful I looked, and asked what was wrong.

Thursday night was nowhere near that bad, but still, it reminded me symptomatically of that experience.

Yet, by Friday morning, I thought I had perhaps gotten past it all. I felt reasonably okay, ate breakfast, dressed, and joined an online faculty meeting for the School of Urban and Regional Planning (SURP) at the University of Iowa, where I teach a course on disaster planning. Our discussion with the dean of the Graduate College, John Keller, focused on what might happen with on-campus instruction this coming fall, a question for which the answer was indeterminate.

Somewhere in the middle of that discussion, the malaise began to reassert itself, and I felt weak and tired. I sent a chat note to Charles Connerly, the director of SURP, saying that if I disappeared from the Zoom screen, it was because I was not well. Less than an hour into the meeting, I did exactly that, and went upstairs to our bedroom to rest. My wife noticed that my fever was not abating and worried that I needed medical attention. By noon, she insisted on taking me to the emergency room at nearby St. Mary’s Presence Hospital, and I gave in, not because I had resisted the idea but because I needed to muster the energy to get up and do it.

At the hospital door, a small group of security and admitting staff sought to ensure that I was arriving as a patient as I exited the passenger door of our car. I explained the situation. My wife and grandson could not join me because, amidst the coronavirus pandemic, and with most of the hospital devoted to such patients, no visitors are permitted. They had to wait in the car or go home, which they eventually did after picking up take-out lunch at a nearby Wendy’s. Once inside and admitted, I was on my own.

The first step by the nursing staff was to administer a COVID-19 test, putting swabs deep into my nasal cavity; it later proved negative. However, my temperature was 100.6° F. They did a battery of other tests based on my symptoms and concluded over the next few hours, as I sat in an ER unit, that I was suffering from a urinary tract infection (UTI). How I acquired it, I will probably never know, just as I never learned how I acquired prostatitis. All that matters is the treatment. I learned, to my deep disappointment, that I would be kept overnight for monitoring because of my history of prostate issues, which has included an almost fruitless search for evidence of cancer. I say “almost” because elevated PSA scores triggered the search nearly a decade ago, before the incident in Los Angeles, and on one occasion a fusion biopsy discovered a tiny sliver of affected tissue. But that finding has never occurred in all the years since. As a result, no treatment has been necessary. But still, caution was apparently in order when a UTI materialized.

The one reservation, of course, is that most of the hospital by May 8 was occupied by COVID-19 patients. One floor was reserved for non-COVID patients requiring hospitalization, and by 9:30 p.m., that is where I was sent. In the meantime, as evening approached, the attending nurse, Jesse, offered the use of his cell phone so that I could call my wife and ask her to bring my cell phone, my Nook e-reader, reading glasses, and power cords to help me escape boredom. He could see that, with nothing to do during long spells when nothing needed to be done (I already had an IV in my arm for a broad-spectrum antibiotic), I was becoming slightly stir crazy. Jean obliged by delivering the goods to the ER door, where Jesse retrieved them. My Nook contains dozens of books. They would relieve my anxiety and let me feel connected to friends and family, so that we could discuss what was happening.

One situation that disturbed me early in the evening was that I had promised to be part of two online events from 5 to 6 p.m. The first was to host the Zoom “room” for HMDR as part of a much larger invitation for members of any APA divisions to participate in a virtual Divisions Happy Hour. Given that HMDR has more than 1,500 members, and APA now has 22 divisions and eight “interest groups,” the number of registrants may have been rather large, but I never had time to check. It was surely in the hundreds, though once they were dispersed to their own groups, each division may have had a few dozen attendees, at most. At the same time, SURP was hosting an online happy hour event for John Fuller, a 41-year veteran professor of the planning school who is retiring at the end of the spring semester. I had arranged to migrate between the two events by having two other executive officers of HMDR, Caggiano and Stacy Wright, our chair-elect, take over when I moved from the APA event to the University of Iowa event. John, in his early days, had hired me as a graduate research assistant when I entered the program, supported my career for its entirety, and played a role in my being hired as an adjunct professor at Iowa in 2008. Before Jean brought my iPhone, I felt guilty about my inability to let anyone know why I was not attending, even though I could do nothing about it. Once armed with the phone, I called Connerly to explain my absence at the university event, and he promised to inform John and Kathy Fuller. I also emailed Caggiano and Wright to let them know why I had not shown up. They assured me the event had gone well. My evening would have felt much worse if I had not been able to make those contacts.

I later learned that my two daughters had unwisely come to the hospital seeking information on my condition, which they could have attempted more safely by calling. One was put off by the cold response she got from the staff at the door, but I told her the staff had bigger concerns than her hurt feelings. It could instead be a lesson in using better judgment. She had also questioned Jean about why she took me to the hospital at all because she had come to understand that no one these days comes out alive. That is clearly not true, but probably not uncommon mythology among the public.

At one point while still in ER, I heard a PA announcement barking “Code Joy!” three times, followed by the opening bars of the theme song from Rocky. I wondered what that was about but could only make lame guesses. Later, from a nurse in my room, I learned it was a celebration of a patient who was being released from the COVID wards—someone who had fought the virus and won. Before I left the hospital, this happened five times. It became a reassuring indication that people do, indeed, fight the virus and win—every day. And not just every day somewhere, but every day in the same hospital. Five times in three days while I was there. I will surely never know who they were, but good luck to all, and God bless every one of them. The Great Virus is not invincible.

As noted, late that evening, I was wheeled out of ER, through the halls and onto an elevator, and up to the eighth floor, the only remaining non-COVID section of the hospital. After being tested for vitals, I quickly fell asleep. The next morning, I awoke early, around 5:30 a.m., and began a routine that would last for nearly two days. I would alternate between using my cell phone for a small number of e-mail and text messages, and occasional calls with relatives, watching one news channel or another, reading, and taking naps. With an IV in my arm and heart monitors on my chest, I could hardly be more adventurous.

The biggest commitment was to finish reading The Great Influenza, by John Barry, a 2004 book about the 1918 flu pandemic that killed tens of millions around the world at the end of World War I. That may seem a gruesome topic for someone in the hospital, but I had read three-fourths of the book before becoming ill, and I wanted to finish. Also, I approach such information more clinically, trying to understand what mistakes were made, what changes resulted, and how people were affected, and I enjoyed the opportunity to learn so much so quickly. By noon Sunday, I finished, even perusing the photo sections and some of the author’s acknowledgments. Certainly, I could not have been reading history more relevant to our current dilemma.

My selfie in a hospital bed. Nobody said such photos would be beautiful.

Then I was faced with the question of what to read next. I had no assurance that I was going home that day, although it was possible. The hospital had received the lab results by late Saturday evening, and they indicated nothing unusual or troubling that would make mine a difficult case. But there was some question of how soon an infectious disease specialist and the doctor would sign off on my release. At that point, it felt that the real issue was more bureaucratic logjam than substantive, and I began to voice some urgency both to the overnight nurse, Klaudia, and the day nurse who followed, Katorina, that I did not wish to waste space if my staying no longer served a legitimate purpose. They could only reassure me that it would happen sooner or later, but I must say that both were extremely attentive and remarkably pleasant, even when it was obvious how restive I had become about the need to be released. Given the pressures surrounding them, they seemed like angels.

It was Mother’s Day, after all, and I was also feeling regret about not only missing the Friday happy hour events, one to honor a long-time friend and colleague, but now draining the pleasure out of a day that should have been spent honoring Jean. It did not seem fair that my unexpected illness should rob her of this honor. I had planned to grill steaks and baked potatoes to accompany a lush salad for her dinner, but could do none of that. I could only wait.

I made an unusual choice of my next book—a 1950s theological essay, Your God Is Too Small, by J.B. Phillips. Despite its dated gender language in the introduction, it is remarkably lucid and straightforward in explaining how we “box” God into small roles in our lives because we cannot bring ourselves to understand God’s vastness and yet God’s importance to the minute details of our lives at the same time. There was something vaguely soothing about the message, given the situation. I did not finish the book in the hospital. That task still awaits. But I put a large dent in it.

Suddenly, around 6 p.m., Katorina came to the room to provide some medicine and the news that the doctor was authorizing my release, with the understanding that I should call to set up a follow-up telemedicine appointment with him a week later. Within the space of a half-hour, the nurse removed all the equipment hanging from my arm and chest; I changed clothes, packed up my limited belongings, signed the release papers, and she was walking me to the elevator, down to the lobby, and to the front door, where Jean had been alerted to find me. She arrived within minutes. Yes, non-COVID patients are also leaving hospitals these days, though far fewer than used to be the case. Non-essential surgeries, in many places including Chicago, have been pushed aside because those ill from coronavirus need the beds. But, clearly, they too often leave and return home, just as I was doing.

I took it easy on Monday. I was still a little light on energy, so I spent much of the day reading a few newspapers that had accumulated in my absence, but I had no special ambitions and no appointments. I did cook that steak dinner as a reward for Jean’s patience and a delayed Mother’s Day. But in the evening, I had difficulty sleeping because tension in my neck and shoulders, probably the result of stiffness induced by a lack of motion with all the equipment attached to my body in the hospital, was causing a mild headache. At Jean’s urging, I took two pain pills and a sleeping pill, but then she applied some massage to bring the congested energy around my neck down my spine to my legs and feet, and I felt some relief. In the end, I managed to sleep until 6:30, which is late for me, but very good in this instance. It was refreshing.

On the trail in Humboldt Park, a day and a half after release.

I have spent part of Tuesday composing this story, but part of it further releasing that pent-up energy by hopping on my bicycle and riding it to Humboldt Park, a 700-acre expanse of municipal open space just half a mile from our home. I wandered down one path after another, past lakes and lagoons and trees in the open air of a Chicago spring morning. I had written part of this before I left. I felt more energized to complete it when I came back, once I had eaten lunch. I learned you can enjoy nature much more when you have missed it for a few days. I can only imagine the restless agony of missing it for much, much longer.

Jim Schwab

[i] Shannon van Zandt, Texas A&M; Marccus Hendricks, Univ. of Maryland; and Chrishelle Palay, HOME Coalition, Houston.

[ii] Pete Parkinson and Kara Drane, who were also co-authors of the updated guide along with George Homewood, David Gattis, and myself.

Home of the Brave

Book Reviews and Discussion with Jim Schwab

Tag Archives: coronavirus

Going Viral

My Ode to Negativity

Collateral Damage

Charting a Path to Sustainability

A Taste of Reopening

Weep for America, but Build Leadership

Inside the Hospital in the Time of Coronavirus