Tag Archives: Lori Lightfoot

When Every Vote Matters

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As a general rule, I am not about to tell people that the fate of the world depends on someone’s election to city council, even in a large city. On the other hand, some people climb the ladder to higher office after winning at local levels. But if candidates have commitment and staying power, one loss is unlikely to deter them in the long run. Barack Obama famously lost a Democratic primary election for Congress to U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush in Illinois’s First District in 2000, only to win a U.S. Senate seat by a landslide in 2004 and the presidency by a decisive margin against Sen. John McCain in 2008. People often learn vital campaign lessons from losing once or twice.

Meanwhile, aside from the question of who is positioned to run for higher office, most city council members, including aldermen in Chicago, have important jobs to do for their constituents. In Chicago, it is not a small job, as the city’s 50 wards average about 56,000 people, more than the population of all but a few suburbs. They are legislating for the third-largest city in the nation and handling constituent concerns about city services. Who holds these positions has some bearing on quality of life and civic satisfaction with city government. Collectively, the aldermen have considerable power and influence over property taxes, local environmental policy, land use, and development.

But this blog post is not a history or civics lesson. It is about the process of choosing these representatives who play a visible role in shaping the city’s future, and more importantly, about why participation matters. It is about the current Chicago election for mayor, other citywide offices, and 50 aldermen. In the bargain, Chicago is electing members of 22 new district councils that will work with the police department on law enforcement policy.

Chicago and all Illinois municipalities use a system created by the Illinois legislature in 1995 in which all candidates for local office run in a nonpartisan primary in late February. If any candidate for a particular office, such as alderman or mayor, wins an outright majority in the primary, that person is elected. If no one gets a majority, the top two vote-getters move on to a run-off five weeks later, and the winner takes office.

In Chicago, until 2011, either Richard M. Daley or Rahm Emmanuel won a majority overLori all other candidates and became mayor after the primary. Some wards had runoffs because no aldermanic candidate had a majority. That state of affairs ended in 2015, when Emmanuel, running for re-election, failed to win a majority and faced Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, now a member of Congress, in a runoff, winning against Garcia in a closer election than many people had thought likely. By 2019, the “old way” in Chicago was on its deathbed, with 14 candidates vying for mayor. Two African-American women, Cook County Board President Tony Preckwinkle and political newcomer Lori Lightfoot, a prominent lawyer and former federal prosecutor, led the vote, both with less than 20 percent. In a major voter rebellion against corruption, Lightfoot won the runoff with 73 percent of the vote, carrying every ward in the city. She became not only the first Black female mayor of Chicago, but the first lesbian mayor as well.

Daniel La Spata, Alderman, 1st Ward, City of Chicago. Photo from https://www.the1stward.com

The plethora of candidates was not limited, however, to the mayor’s race. Aldermanic races also saw far more entries than had been typical in the past. Progressive candidates became much more popular and prominent. In the 1st Ward, where I live, newcomer Daniel La Spata, a progressive with a city planning master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago, uprooted incumbent Alderman Proco “Joe” Moreno by a 22 percent margin. Moreno was weighed down by a scandal after he was charged with filing a false police report and insurance claim after police stopped his girlfriend, who was driving his Audi A6. She told police he had lent the car to her. He had claimed the car was stolen. Later, out of office, he was again arrested after hitting numerous cars on a side street in Chicago’s Gold Coast late at night during what police said was a case of drunken driving.

I met La Spata during that campaign and liked him. I had a slight acquaintance with Moreno but was turned off by his legal problems. I felt La Spata offered an intelligent alternative at a time when the ward needed one. Over the past four years, I have had a number of opportunities to interact with La Spata. I found him responsive and thoughtful. In one email exchange, we discussed his advocacy in city council of increased availability of public restrooms, which are often scarce in Chicago. I pointed out that this was an issue not just for homeless persons who often lack access to such facilities, but for elderly people and those with disabilities or medical conditions that could make access an urgent need. I saw it as a public health issue. As a planner, I see public health as a serious local government responsibility that faces too many detractors—even without considering the controversy surrounding COVID-19 issues.

La Spata ran for re-election in the February 28 primary. He faced two political newcomers, Stephen “Andy” Schneider and Sam Royko, and Moreno, who was seeking a comeback. Royko, son of the late newspaper columnist Mike Royko, was a serious candidate driven by a concern about rising crime after his girlfriend was carjacked in the ward last year. Schneider is a community activist with a decent following. As for Moreno, I felt strongly that, while I believe in second chances, they do not need to involve public office after the sorts of problems he had created for himself. There are many other ways he can find to prove his commitment to the community without being entrusted with public office, and I suspect he will be able to find those opportunities. In any event, he garnered less than 7 percent of the vote, finishing fourth. It seems clear that the overwhelming majority of voters in the ward agreed with my assessment: Sorry, Joe, find another line of work.

The real question was whether La Spata or anyone else would win a majority on February 28. Knowing the outcome was less than certain, I volunteered, helping with his petition drive for ballot access. Aldermanic candidates need 750 signatures but often collect two or three times that number to ensure they have enough even after signature challenges by opponents, a common practice in Chicago. I spent one very chilly evening in November knocking on doors in the Logan Square neighborhood, not finding enough people home but adding slightly to the signature totals. During the campaign, I aided with phone calling on a Saturday but did less than I had planned closer to the election because of personal and family distractions. La Spata’s campaign staff was gracious about whatever time I could spare. He seemed to have enough volunteers to be highly competitive.

At one unfortunate point in the campaign, someone vandalized the La Spata campaign office. It remains unclear who did it, but a campaign organizer told me Schneider and Royko offered condolences and sympathies to La Spata over the situation. Democracy should function and thrive unimpaired by such behavior.

On election night, the importance of all that effort became clear. La Spata led the four-person field at one point with 49.44%, with Royko trailing with about half that number, and Schneider in third with less than 20 percent. La Spata appeared to be about 100 votes shy of a majority, although the numbers fluctuated through the evening. If that situation prevailed, Royko would face La Spata in a runoff.

But it is not as simple as it once was. More people vote early, more vote by mail, and all those ballots must be counted, systematically and precisely. By law, the Chicago Board of Elections must count all mail ballots that arrive within two weeks after the election, in this case, March 14, although they must be postmarked by Election Day, which was February 28. People who obtained mail ballots, which can be done by request to the board, can also turn them at early voting sites, which I did.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will note that my wife has served for several years as an election judge. I respect what these people do because I have watched her go to the nearby polling place the night before to set up, then retire early to wake at 4 a.m., arriving at the polling place by 5 a.m. to set up, not returning home until about 10 p.m. That is an exhausting day for a person of any age, let alone someone in her seventies, as we both are. Readers may fairly surmise that anyone wishing to question the honesty or integrity of election workers, as has become the fashion in many right-wing circles, will win no support or sympathy from me.

As the days followed, there was a noticeable drift in favor of La Spata as mail ballots were counted. La Spata jokingly referred to this situation as a “mail-biter.” This is not some mysterious or nefarious development, as former President Donald Trump might allege, but simply the process of allowing late-arriving ballots to be counted. The post office is not always efficient in delivering election-related mail. My wife had to visit the post office the previous Thursday in person to retrieve a bundle of undelivered mail that included the election board’s letter of authorization that she needed in order to pick up an equipment key from the board by that Saturday to fulfill her function as an election official. People’s ballots should be not be disenfranchised simply because the U.S. Postal Service does not always deliver mail in a timely manner.

By March 15, however, the die was cast. La Spata had exactly 15 more votes than needed to avoid an April 4 runoff, winning the primary outright with 50.11% of the total vote. In Chicago’s First Ward, every vote had mattered. Royko, who appears to have much to offer the community despite his loss, conceded quickly and congratulated La Spata. I hope they can cooperate and collaborate on issues important to the ward over the next four years. But it was also just as well to bring resolution to the contest.

As for the mayoral race, the world knows by now that Lightfoot did not survive her first challenge for re-election. Nine candidates competed, including Garcia, but the runoff this time belongs to two men, Paul Vallas, a frequent former candidate and former schools chief in not only Chicago but New Orleans and Philadelphia as well, and Brandon Johnson, an African-American Cook County Supervisor. Johnson began his career as a teacher and has strong ties to the Chicago Teachers Union, which often tangled with Mayor Lightfoot. Vallas has the support of the Fraternal Order of Police. Both candidates have other union endorsements. I will not comment further on that race, nor will I venture any predictions for April 4. Chicago, however, simply is no longer the machine-run city that Sam Royko’s father once wrote about in Boss, his famous biography of former Mayor Richard J. Daley, who died in office in December 1976.

Sometimes, things really do change.

And every vote really does matter.

Jim Schwab

Moving Against Gun Violence

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Candlelight vigil for the 10th Annual National Vigil for All Victims of Gun Violence. All photos provided by Kyle Duff.

On Friday, December 16, our grandson Angel was attending a biology lab class at Malcolm X College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago, where he is currently aiming to lay the foundation for a health care career. In his first quarter in college, he has not yet established the exact contours of that career. His world is still full of possibilities.

While he was in class, someone else’s life possibilities came to an abrupt close. The 36-year-old driver of a car moving down West Jackson Boulevard, right in front of the Malcolm X campus, slammed into a tree after being shot in what police say was a gang-related shooting. His 29-year-old female passenger was taken to a nearby hospital in critical condition, having also been shot. She later died as well. The campus was placed on lockdown as police cars descended on the area, establishing a crime scene investigation and collecting evidence. We learned about it initially from Angel in a phone call. I checked online to find out what had happened.

That evening, I watched for more news. After all, Malcolm X is near downtown Chicago and less than a mile from a training center for the Chicago Police Department, also on Jackson. It is just two blocks from the United Center, home of the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks. It is near a major combination of hospitals, one affiliated with the University of Illinois at Chicago. On a Friday afternoon, this is a highly visible location.

But the event was superseded in journalistic importance that evening and in the next morning’s newspapers by a mass shooting at Benito Juarez High School that killed two students and wounded two others. To some, including this year’s Republican nominee for Illinois Governor, St. Sen. Darren Bailey, it probably helped justify his description during his recent losing campaign of Chicago as a “hellhole”—never mind Bailey’s long-standing opposition to gun control of all sorts. To others more aware of the larger social context, it provides more proof that the nation needs a better grip on the sale and ownership of firearms, including assault weapons. After all, Chicago is far from alone. In 2020 alone, more than 45,000 Americans died of gun-related injuries. Homicides from firearms have increased 14 percent over the past decade, while suicides by firearms have grown by 39 percent. We recently marked the tenth anniversary of the 2012 mass murder of dozens of children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. What we have is a nationwide epidemic, in which two shootings in one day in a large city like Chicago are an increasingly common occurrence.

These occurrences are among many reasons the voices supporting meaningful gun control legislation, including a ban on assault weapons, are rapidly growing louder and more insistent. In fact, just a week ago, on Sunday evening, December 11, Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park, on Chicago’s South Side, hosted the 10th Annual National Vigil for All Victims of Gun Violence. With indoor and outdoor displays of the

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot addresses the crowd.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin speaks to the audience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

names and faces of more than 630 people killed in Chicago this year, the gathering included a representative of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who missed the event due to illness, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, among others. Many of those attending were survivors of gun violence including relatives and friends of those whose portraits were on display. Many also represented or spoke on behalf of organizations of survivors such as Mothers of Murdered Sons and Chicago Survivors.

The issue, as has long been the case, is how to turn the pervasive, ongoing grief into action that matters in the face of an obnoxious and defiant gun lobby. It is not that gun owners do not have some legitimate rights and the right to air a point of view, but that the leadership of the gun lobby has made so many so resistant to accepting facts or considering the impacts of their positions on thousands upon thousands of innocent victims. Their diversionary tactics, such as both Bailey and former President Trump painting Chicago as some sort of living hell (it is not; I live here and know otherwise) resulting from liberal values and hostility to police, are not only unhelpful but fail utterly to offer intelligent, evidence-based solutions to complex problems that are in no way aided by the free-flowing traffic of firearms across state borders and city limits. Say what they will, the mere fact that someone as troubled as Robert Crimo III was able to acquire both an Illinois Firearm Owner Identity (FOID) card and an assault weapon at the age of 19 is symptomatic of a gun culture that is blatantly out of control, and dozens of people attending a July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois, paid the price with their lives or with serious injuries. Yet the response of the gun lobby and its defenders fundamentally has been to double down on opposition to any reform of gun laws. Bailey, for instance, remains opposed to even having the state FOID requirement at all.

Forefront, Pastor Nancy Goede in the Augustana narthex.

But the momentum is shifting, the tide is turning.

At the federal level, Congress finally acted this past summer by passing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which has been signed into law by President Joe Biden. Among other provisions, many related to mental health services, it expands background checks on gun buyers under 21, provides funding support for state red flag laws, and restricts straw gun purchases. It authorizes $750 million over five years for crisis intervention programs. The Wikipedia article linked at the beginning of this paragraph contains a full list of other appropriations established in the law, and explains the law in greater detail. Click here for a full text of the law, which resulted from multiple compromises between Republican and Democratic senators. The law does not come close to solving all gun-related problems, nor is any law likely to do so, but it is a step forward.

In Illinois, as of this date, action is pending on the Protect Illinois Communities Act, which would ban assault weapons in the state. The bill got a committee hearing in Springfield the day after the vigil at Augustana Lutheran Church. Bridging a gap that has often concerned activists against gun violence, the hearing brought forth as witnesses not only Lauren Bennett of Highland Park, a relatively affluent North Shore suburb of Chicago, but Conttina Phillips, a victim of Halloween gun violence in Garfield Park, a predominantly Black and low-income neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago. While the bill aims to ban assault weapons, Phillips advocated for further action against other types of guns because assault weapons are only one factor in the gang-related violence afflicting Black and Latino neighborhoods.

Sponsored by State Rep. Bob Morgan (D-Deerfield), who marched in the July 4 parade in Highland Park and represents that district, the bill aims to ban the sale, manufacture, or delivery of assault weapons and other high-caliber firearms in Illinois and would require current owners of such weapons to register that ownership with the state. It would extend current red flag restrictions from six months to one year. It would also bar the acquisition of a FOID card for anyone under 21 unless they are active in the military. Pritzker just the week before the hearing had called upon the General Assembly to pass and send to him such a bill before the anniversary of the Highland Park shooting.

We can only hope. Well, actually, we can do more. We can lobby our legislators. We can speak out. We can attend rallies. We can make clear that such action and more is long overdue.

Jim Schwab

Recovering Humanity Amid Terror

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Schwab

 

Our Collective COVID Cabin Fever

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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 1st 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

Isolated Adjustments

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I miss my gym already, closed just two weeks ago. There was a profusion of equipment to keep anyone in shape, whether you were working on legs, biceps, core, cardio, some combination, whatever. Here at home, I have small barbells, some ankle weights, and perhaps most importantly, a newly tuned 26-inch bicycle. There are other bicycles in our garage, mostly to accommodate grandchildren but also one my wife uses. We were out briefly yesterday for a ride in the neighborhood before the blustery spring winds brought more rain.

Closed entrance to the 606 Trail at California Ave.

A friend joked a few days ago that, after closing the Lakefront trail, adjacent parks, and beaches, and the 606 Trail plus park district field houses and playgrounds, Mayor Lori Lightfoot may have been praying for rain to enforce the stay-at-home, social distancing restrictions in effect throughout Illinois. If so, she got her wish over the weekend, but the weather is changing already, and Chicagoans are likely to take advantage of it. That’s okay, as long as we use those big park spaces that are still open to maintain social distance and help slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Alex at a closed entrance to the 606 Trail.

Quite frankly, just one week ago, after picking up my bike from a nearby shop that performed the tuning, I used it to ride a portion of the 606 Trail, feeling the liberation that comes with such a small adventure. That was Monday afternoon, and the closures came on Thursday. I was not surprised. The 606, which is a great community-building amenity in normal times, seemed far too narrow and crowded for public safety in these times. I have not returned. Future rides will be on winding paths in the 700-acre Humboldt Park, where one can move past other human beings without encroaching on personal space. And I can still invigorate my body and spirit with some healthy exercise.

Humboldt Park is open, but the playgrounds are closed.

So, what is this blog post about, exactly? It is about adjustments in the time of COVID-19. But let me be clear. I am sharing the adjustments being made in our three-member household, and everyone else is making their own. Each set of adjustments is unique, yet many of us can learn from one another. I am also painfully aware that we are safer and in a better position financially than many people who have lost jobs or are suffering lost income, or have a sick family member. I can empathize, while knowing their experience will unquestionably be very different. And I wish such people the very best. Our nation is in for one tough slog against a ghastly microbial enemy.

My wife and I are both in our early seventies, but our three-member household includes an 11-year-old grandson, for whom we assumed guardianship two years ago. His mother has long faced mental health challenges. Two weeks ago, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) closed, and as of now, they will remain so until April 20. After that? Who knows? At first, the closure was for two weeks, but that would have ended today. Officials at all levels of government have underestimated the scope and duration of this problem, but the important thing is that they are learning daily and adjusting strategies, as we all are. Universities have suspended semesters and moved classes online. A friend of mine who teaches at an area community college admits to being “dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century” as he learns online teaching skills. I, on the other hand, have already been teaching online for the University of Iowa. My one class each year occurs in the fall, so the question is whether we enroll enough students to move forward by August. The odds seem good, but so much changes so quickly. Again, who knows? I will have to wait for the answer.

I practice what I call “alleged retirement,” which involves a part-time mix of teaching, consulting, public speaking, and writing. At worst, my wife, Jean, a retired teacher, and I can live off our pensions and Social Security. We would have to retrench if I had no outside income, some provided by the university, but we could survive. That makes us feel far more secure than I know is the case for gig workers, restaurant and hospitality workers, travel and tourism workers, and many others affected by shutdowns and restrictions aimed at containing contagion.

Jean in front of Moos School, now closed because of coronavirus.

Meanwhile, precisely because she is a teacher, my wife works with Alex on reading and math, so that lost school days do not translate entirely into lost learning. But that has involved its own learning curve. In the first week, we both noticed Alex’s ability to refocus his time on television and video games. We were busy figuring things out in that week of canceled St. Patrick’s Day events and the Illinois primary, in which Jean was an election judge. But we discussed the situation, and Jean quickly began to insist on specific hours for learning exercises. I am grateful, and hope Alex is, for her knowledge of teaching methods to keep him fresh on everything from multiplication to vocabulary expansion. I can only imagine what single mothers with four children no longer attending school must be doing to cope with the situation. Many in Chicago or rural Illinois or throughout America do not have Internet, or lack personal computers, and lack daily connection with the schools that kept their children busy until just recently. We have a 16-year-old grandson who is a high school sophomore. He is staying with his father, who works long hours in a warehouse to pay the bills. While we provided Angel with a small laptop at Christmas, I have noticed that CPS is not updating information on Aspen, its grade- and assignment-tracking online program, so we have no idea what, if anything, he should be doing in his classes. I used to help him with courses like Spanish, but now I have not a clue what he should be doing. It is as if CPS just vanished into thin air. The only solution from a learning perspective may be to extend the school year in June—but only if we have coronavirus under control by then. Otherwise, you could take his lost opportunities and multiply them by the tens of thousands across the city.

Jean works with Alex on spelling.

Then there is the drumbeat of coronavirus news to which people can subject themselves if they sit in front of the television all day long. I choose not to do that because I find that one hour of news tells me 90 percent of what I need to know, barring some breaking announcement, and the rest is repetition. I read the Chicago Tribune thoroughly each morning. My wife knows counselors and others who suggest limiting exposure to such news to reduce anxiety. She has taken to using some online meditation one of them has provided, and it works for her. I don’t share the anxiety because I am a different sort of person. My professional experience in the urban planning field is heavy on planning for disasters and disaster recovery. I read the news with an analytical eye, looking for clues to what we, as a society or region or city, can do better, and often turning that into commentary on this blog, but also applying it in various planning tasks. Since I retired from the American Planning Association (APA), many of those tasks have been pro bono activities, such as serving on policy guide task forces and chairing APA’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. There is no shortage of opportunities, and I am grateful every day for the chance to contribute something through all those channels. It’s not all about earning money. Just helping makes our lives richer; how we do it depends on our skill set and interests.

But clearly, the precautions we are all observing can be frustrating and lead to adjustments. Travel, in most cases, is a non-starter for the near future. Little more than a month ago, I was in Rockport, Texas, assisting the APA Texas chapter with a Hurricane Harvey recovery event that allowed Texas planners to interact with planners from New York and New Jersey who could share perspectives from Sandy recovery. Two weeks later, after a quick recovery from a mild case of the flu, I was in Kearney, Nebraska, speaking at the annual conference of the Nebraska Planning & Zoning Association, sharing knowledge and ideas with colleagues there. The first hints of a truly serious public health catastrophe were becoming clear, and that became my last trip so far this year. By March 18, APA had canceled its annual National Planning Conference in Houston, an event that has typically drawn about 5,000 people. Not this year. As a division leader, I am involved in many of the leadership discussions about what comes next in taking many meetings and sessions and other events online, and moving forward. This is happening across the board to numerous organizations of widely varying sizes, with huge impacts on the hotel, airline, and convention industries not only nationwide but across the world. Caught in the maws of this economic and public health earthquake are millions of workers.

Yet, as obvious as this seems to me, with my laser focus on news that matters, I have learned that not everyone is fully aware of its consequences. Alex’s mother invited us to visit her apartment, and Jean declined because we have no way of judging how safe it is. Then, two other people visiting her apartment suggested coming to our house to visit Alex. Again, Jean said that would have to wait, but they seemed only marginally aware of developments like restaurant closures and social distancing. Meanwhile, my mother, whose resilience at an advanced age has been stunning, was released last week from a hospital in suburban Cleveland after a brief non-COVID illness to a rehab facility, where she is confined to her room for 14 days because she had been in a hospital. Visitors are not permitted, as they also will not be when she finally returns to her retirement home. In short, although I have two siblings who live near her, I could not visit even if I chose to drive there.

But that brings me to a closing note. I can stay home not only because I am “allegedly retired,” but because I am not a health care worker. Their adjustments have been the reverse of those of most of us, involving thorough engagement, exposure to life-threatening infection, and long hours of treating growing numbers of patients. And not just in urban areas. As of today, for example, Illinois has 4,596 reported cases, resulting in 65 deaths, spread across 40 of 102 counties. Small towns and rural areas will not be immune. I just heard New York Gov. Cuomo note that COVID-19 has spread to all but one county in his state.

Amidst all our concerns, the ducks in the lagoon at Humboldt Park are blissfully oblivious to human problems with the novel coronavirus.

We’re all making adjustments, most of us in our homes, but our public health workers, doctors, and nurses are making theirs at the front lines. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude and everything we can do to support them, especially those who have voluntarily returned to work from retirement, or serve in the National Guard, and didn’t have to take those risks. God bless them all, every last courageous one of them.

Jim Schwab

Ghosts in the Schoolyard

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

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

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

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

With permission from University of Chicago Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Schwab