Blind reps help the tollway help you

     

William Bryant at the Tollway Customer Service Center

     “Thank you for calling the Illinois Toll Road. My name is William. How may I help you?”

     For all the times I’ve heard greetings such as the one above, this is the first time I heard it not through a phone line, not as a vexed caller, but live, in the flesh, sitting next to the person saying it: William Bryant, 49, a Marine who retired on disability.

     We are in the Illinois Tollway Call Center, a large underground room divided by partitions, with 150 customer service representatives in headsets holding similar conversations, gazing at flat-screen monitors.

     After nine months working here, Bryant’s assessment of his job might be unexpected.

     “Enjoyable,” Bryant says. “I enjoy talking on the phone, helping out people a little bit.”

      Then there is something unexpected about the call center itself. First, that it’s new — opened Nov. 1, 2013 — and in Chicago, not Mumbai, or in Texas, where some customer calls to the Illinois tollway used to go, which annoyed tollway trustees, who decided not only to keep the work in-state but spread some of it to the disabled.

      “Just as important as building the roads,” said Paula Wolff, chairwoman of the Tollway Authority. “More important sometimes.”

      Thus the five-year, $61 million contract for the new center went to the Chicago Lighthouse for People Who are Blind or Visually Impaired, to their near-astonishment.
     "I'm amazed the tollway board was so enlightened," said Janet Szlyk, Chicago Lighthouse president.
     Not only is the center in-state, but it's located on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, inside the UIC student center on South Halsted. Its entrance is next to the bowling alley, leading to stairs down into a lower level where a swimming pool had sat vacant for a decade after the university built a sports facility across the street.
     Half of the 244 workers fielding calls to the tollway, at 800-824-7277, 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. weekdays, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekends, are either blind or veterans, or both, such as Bryant, a lance corporal in the Marines when diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa.
     "The violation has been dismissed, I see. I'll make a note on your I-PASS account."
     If you're wondering how blind people use computer screens, remember that representatives are "legally blind"— with diminished eyesight, but nevertheless able to read text blown up to 2 or 3 inches on a computer screen. Only about 15 percent of the blind have vision so diminished they can't see light. That is also why the "The Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind," founded in 1906, changed its name to the current mouthful in 1999.
      Calls are announced in Bryant's headset with a gentle "beep-beep-beep." There is no standard problem to be dealt with: callers have gotten letters telling them of fines they dispute, or their credit cards have expired.
     "We get various calls," Bryant says during a break. "Some people are nice. Some people are extremely irate."
     As someone who knows what it's like to pick up the phone and find an angry stranger, I wondered if he has tips on dealing with that second group, the irate folks.
     "I try to talk calmly to them, tell them not to worry and if I can help them, I will," he says. "When they get high, I get a little bit lower. It's hard to argue with somebody who's not arguing back. I have a tendency to calm my voice down, talk to them regular, maybe throw a little joke in there, just to alleviate the situation."
     "Be patient," adds Shane Barbosa, whose eyesight was damaged by his albinism. "Let them yell. A lot of people want to vent."
     I'll have to remember that. Better than my own snarl-an-obscenity-and-slam-the-phone-down technique. Though tollway operators can hang up on abusive callers.
     "You can only take so much swearing," said Tom Nemec, the center's customer service manager.
      Employees of the center praise the benefits of working with other visually impaired colleagues, compared to previous jobs.
     "I felt more accepted here," says Marcin Okreglak, who was born in Poland in 1987 and developed toxoplasmosis as a baby due to radiation from the Chernobyl disaster the year before. "[Other employers] weren't as accommodating, weren't really as understanding. You would tell them you were visually impaired, and they would take it you can't see."
      Tollway call center operators start at $10.50 an hour, but after a year are earning $13 or $14. And yes, they are hiring, and yes, they particularly want you if you are blind or a veteran or both.
     "You're good to go. Anything else I can help you with today? Bye-bye."

   

Grapefruit has thwarted me

  
     There is nothing interesting to say about grapefruit.
     Regular readers will recognize that admission as an earthquake, coming from me.
     Because I believe that there is something interesting to say about everything, if you dig long enough.
     But grapefruit has thwarted me.
     "grapefruit, also called POMELO (Citrus paradisi), citrus tree of the Rutaceae family and its edible fruit," the Encyclopaedia Britannica begins, unpromisingly. "The grapefruit tree grows to be as large and vigorous as an orange tree..."
     That's whole grapefruit story, isn't it? A larger, sourer orange? The orange's dim older brother, who never went to college, and grew bitter over the years, up in his attic room, big and bulky and embarrassing.
     Now, if the subject were oranges, well, that would be another matter. Oranges would be easy. Books have been written about oranges.
     At least one book, Oranges, by the great John McPhee.
     Or limes. My God, limes, just the British naval aspect alone could fill a week's worth of posts: Grog. Limeys. Scurvy. 
     Not to forget key lime pie. 
     There is no grapefruit pie.
     Even lemons. How did troublesome cars ever get called "lemons?" I'd love to find out.
     But grapefruits....
     They're big. And heavy.  And ...
     ... delicious. There is that. I eat a grapefruit almost every day for breakfast. One entire grapefruit — no halving and segmenting; too messy and time consuming. No sugar or sweetening or demure half maraschino cherry placed at the center — defeats the purpose. 
       One grapefruitian orb, peeled, like an orange, eaten in segments, the separation of which can be a true challenge, tearing away all that thick white coating, but worth it, when you pop the first segment, feeling the sweet, nourishing grapefruit goodness coursing through your system, jump-starting your brain. Low calorie, but enough to hold you until lunch. 
     Most of my days begin with a grapefruit—220 breakfasts in 2014, by my count (I record the calories so it's easy to tally them up) which is what prompted this futile exercise: a lot of time with grapefruit. There must be something more to them than just the eating. And I would have consumed even more grapefruit, but our stock periodically runs out, or sometimes I do get tired of them — "grapefruited out" is how I put it — or just feel like an English muffin or a bowl of Wheat Chex instead. But if I do, usually I regret not sticking with the grapefruit. Cereal leaves you hungry; a grapefruit lingers.
     Must be the citric acid, which is in all citrus, of course, or the lycopene, which accounts for the pinkish yellow of grapefruit and it thought to reduce the risk of heart disease. 
     I suppose I could work the nostalgia angle. My grandmother every year would send a case of grapefruits up from Florida in the winter, a great luxury, because how were we supposed to get them otherwise? 
    Or there was the time, at the Royal Cafe in London, when we all ordered grapefruits baked in kirsch, because really, how often do you get the chance? And my mother, having never seen a salt cellar before, and thinking it was sugar, dosed salt all over the warm crusty delicacy. 

   But I want to do better than that. I suppose I could troll pop culture. Yoko Ono titled a book of random musings "Grapefruit," but to find out why I'd have to read it cover to cover, and I'm not willing to go that far. A glance is enough.
    Better to find refuge in the cinema. No great movie scene collection used to be complete without Jimmy Cagney mashing a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face in "The Public Enemy." But given our times, that moment has lost its whimsy. 
     One problem with finding lore on grapefruits is, they're a recent development. Oranges go back thousands of years in China. But what appears to have been grapefruit, referred to as "forbidden fruit" by the British, a nod to the Garden of Eden, were noticed in the Caribbean only around 1700. "It thus appears reasonable to assume that the name 'grapefruit' originated in Jamaica, and has been used since 1814," Walton B. Sinclair writes in his 667-page The Grapefruit: Its Composition, Physiology and Products. Which means the word "grapefruit" is a more recent construction than the word "computer." 
     According to Citrus: A History, by Pierre Laszlo,  the variety of names for grapefruit include pomelo, the British term (the 12 volume 1978 Oxford English Dictionary has no entry for "grapefruit," but tucks the word in a list of derivatives under "grape," identifying it as a U.S. term, so chosen, I found elsewhere, because the fruit bunch in the trees like giant grapes). Laszlo continues with shaddock, then pamplemousse, which is French. He doesn't mention it, but German for grapefruit is .... ready? ... grapefruit. A lack of imagination on their part but then, with grapefruit, that's par for the course. 
     Orange is a color. Lemon is a color. Grapefruit is a ... well ... grapefruit. Its only creative use as an adjective is "Grapefruit League"—baseball pre-season spring training games in Florida, where grapefruits migrated from the Caribbean by 1830. Florida also produces the most grapefruit in the U.S., which leads the world, grapefruitwise. 
     While looking at oranges, some of McPhee's gaze fell upon grapefruit, and, unlike me, he had no problem unearthing grapefruit-related wonders. 
     "Citrus does not come true from seed," he writes. "If you plant an orange seed, a grapefruit might spring up. if you plant a seed of that grapefruit, you might get a bitter lemon." 
      Thus the trees must be grafted to get the proper fruit, a technique sometimes used to dramatic effect.
     "A single citrus tree can be turned into a carnival," he continues, "with lemons, limes, grapefruit, tangerines, kumquats, and oranges all ripening on its branches at the same time."
      Yowza. I didn't know that. And neither did you. But now we both do. 
      The only writer beside myself I know of who loves grapefruit was — not to compare us in any other fashion — Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is laden with the softball-sized fruit.
     His Samoan attorney orders from room service, along with the club sandwiches, shrimp cocktails and rum, nine grapefruits.
     "'Vitamin C," he explains. "We'll need all we can get."
     In Thompson's book, grapefruits are practically a leitmotif: they're chopped apart with razor sharp knives; they're moved out into the trunk with the luggage; they become Thompson's only source of sustenance at one point: "I'd eaten nothing but grapefruit for about twenty hours and my head was adrift from its moorings." 
     He carries grapefruit in his satchel, pulling one out on an airplane and slicing it apart with a hunting knife, which makes a stewardess nervous. 
      "I noticed her watching me closely, so I tried to smile," he writes, explaining to her: "I never go anywhere without grapefruit...It's hard to get a really good one — unless you're rich."
    A grapefruit is key in one of the oddest sequences in the book, early on, when Thompson hurls one into the bathtub where his attorney is having some kind of drug-induced psychotic breakdown while listening to Jefferson Airplane at full volume.
     "I let the song build while I sorted through the pile of fat ripe grapefruit next to the basin. The biggest one of the lot weighed almost two pounds. I got a good Vida Blue fastball grip on the fucker and just as 'White Rabbit' peaked I lashed it into the tub like a cannonball."
     I can't tell you how often I've thought of that line. Because grapefruit are huge, we store them in the second-hand refrigerator in the basement, and I'll tramp down to get one for breakfast. Walking back up the stairs, that phrase, "a good Vida Blue fastball grip" — Blue was a hotshot lefty for the Oakland As in the early 1970s — pops frequently into mind, and I'll happily bounce the grapefruit on my open palm, sometimes even arrange my fingers around it as if I were about to fire it across the plate, and smile, thinking: mmm grapefruit. 
     Well, I guess we've dug up enough on the subject. Maybe something interesting after all. As I was wrapping up, I bumped into Craig Arnold's lovely little poem,  "Meditation on a Grapefruit," that sums up the breakfast process far better than I ever could. Compare my windy effort above with the concise beauty of this:

                  To wake when all is possible

          before the agitations of the day

          have gripped you

                              To come to the kitchen

          and peel a little basketball

          for breakfast

                          To tear the husk

          like cotton padding        a cloud of oil

          misting out of its pinprick pores

          clean and sharp as pepper

                                      To ease

          each pale pink section out of its case

          so carefully       without breaking

          a single pearly cell

                             To slide each piece

          into a cold blue china bowl

          the juice pooling       until the whole

          fruit is divided from its skin

          and only then to eat

                            so sweet

                                      a discipline

          precisely pointless       a devout

          involvement of the hands and senses

          a pause     a little emptiness

          each year harder to live within

          each year harder to live without

     This perfect paean appeared in Poetry in October, 2009. As a tribute, it turned out, not just to the fruit, but to the poet himself. The previous spring, while exploring Kuchinoerabu-jima, a minuscule Japanese island, he fell into a volcano and died.
     Which is a long way from where we started. But that's the marvelous thing about grapefruit: one will take you a long way. Or at least until lunchtime. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     That's a nice fireplace, eh? 
     And the big colorful balls, well, they're there for educational purposes.
     This place, I had never been.
     Not inside, anyway.
     So I'm hoping you've never been either.
     Though somebody probably has.
     I was just passing by. 
     Had an extra 10 minutes.
     So I went in.
     Didn't have to pay nothin'.
     It seemed very interesting, and I left promising myself to come back.
     And give it a longer visit.
     So where is this fireplace? And the beautiful wallpaper atop the blog?
     I'd give you more hints, but somebody probably was there three days ago.
     Anyway, the winner gets a bag of fresh-roasted, Bridgeport Bubbly Creek coffee. 
     Which reminds me, I need to tell you about that unusual name.
     Next week.
     In the meantime, post your guesses below.
     Good luck. 

And yes, I swung on the swing. How could you not? 

Take this quick and (not so) easy CIA torture quiz!

     Here’s a simple quiz. One question. Multiple choice. Pick either A or B.
     Ready? Then let’s begin.
     1. Complete the sentence:
     America is a great nation because
     A) everything we do is, by definition, right.
     B) we try to do what’s right and when we fail we admit it and try to do better.
     A simple quiz, but not an easy one, and many people get it wrong.
     I won’t tell you the correct answer just yet so as to leave some readers in suspense.
     But I will, promise.
     First, a bit of context, namely the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on the orgy of CIA torture the Bush administration unleashed after Sept. 11. Turns out,  Jack Ryan fantasies notwithstanding, that brutalizing people who had fallen into our clutches didn’t do much good in terms of keeping our country safe, didn’t help find bin Laden or uncover any big terror plots.
     Which fits in with what we know about torture; it tends not to produce intelligence.
     I can’t say my world was rocked by the news. We knew Dick Cheney and his henchmen consider themselves tough guys and, denied the traditional tools of rack and thumbscrews, were happy to make do with waterboarding and sleep deprivation.
     The details are repulsive—one prisoner froze to death chained to a concrete floor.
     But then, details of atrocities usually are.
     More surprising to me than the report were the howls of justification that came from the Right, starting with those who didn’t want to reveal the report at all because it might encourage terrorism.
     Sure it could. But is that our new standard of behavior? Are we against things that might inflame potential enemies? Because if that's our policy, it's a big list. We can start by scrapping the First Amendment and requiring women to start wearing veils.
     That's obviously not happening. The standard isn't trying to placate those who will hate us anyway.
     If releasing the report, in our role as a free society, is OK, how about torture as a way to try to protect ourselves. Is that OK?
     One wit at another local paper said, in essence, "Yes," offering up the classic "But Jimmy's doing it too!" defense so convincing to 4-year-olds. He carefully explained that the Islamic State rapes and kills, suggesting that this justifies our own loathsome tactics.
     "But it might be useful to realize that while we might feel queasy about what we did, the Islamic State is immune from hand-wringing after they cut American throats."
     Useful? In what way? He never comes out and says it — the timidity of bullies — but the implication is, we're facing these tough guys, so we better be tough guys too. They have no self-doubt; why should we?
     A few questions he never asks but we can:
     Wouldn't committing the kind of horrors they do make us just like them?
     Couldn't the ''hand-wringing" that you condemn also be referred to as "thinking?"
     Would you say that cutting off people's heads has been a success strategy for the Islamic State? Did it not end up hurting their cause, in the same way that torturing people hurt America's cause?
     Here's the bottom line, and it's sad that so few people see it. Torture doesn't work, but even if it did it would still be bad, because that isn't what America is about. The fact that something works to enhance security is not a recommendation. China has a vast system of gulags and is a far more stable society than the United States because anyone who dissents can be shipped off to prison. Their security is certainly enhanced. Should we do that too?
     When the report was first released, when some were talking about whether it should have been withheld, I thought of Turkey, where to this day it is against the law to talk about the 1915 Armenian genocide because it makes the Turks look bad. And Japan, where the right wing is trying to suppress Japan's brutal history of World War II atrocities, so as not to have their nationalistic preening undermined by the stark evidence of where such pride once led them.
     How does that make Japan look? And do we want to do that too? Are we a great nation because when we do stuff that's wrong, we don't talk about it, so we don't look bad to those who expect better of us?
     Not my country. Not America. The Economist summed it up perfectly in one simple sentence: "ALL countries fail to live up to the ethical standards they set themselves; only a few have the moral purpose to examine their lapses in the public square."
     Amen. Oh, and for those who haven't figured it out yet, the correct answer is: B.    

Just in time for Christmas...

     Maybe people do change after all.
     I would have sworn otherwise. "As I was at 5," Tolstoy said, "so am I now." 
     Ditto for me. The same kid then, 50 years ago, off in a corner by himself, on his knees, balancing one block upon another, constructing an elaborate castle the entire afternoon, the same adult now, off in a corner in a chair in front of a computer, building his little block castles, only with words.
     But maybe some people change, in more subtle ways.
     Tuesday I was strolling back from an appointment at the Pittsfield Building. I could have Divvied—I rode the Divvy bike down, parked in front of the Cultural Center. But it was lunchtime, and why not stroll to a different station? Why not cut through Macy's and see what people who don't do all their shopping at Kohl's are buying for themselves?
     My attention was caught by a blue Nautica button down Oxford shirt. "Ocean washed" Really? What could that mean? I pictured big sloshing vats of seawater, with bales of shirts being dumped into them, floating around, agitated by hatchet-faced New England salts wearing yellow Nor'easter slickers, wielding row boat oars.... 
     They can't do that. It has to be mere puffery.*
     I was almost out of the store, clutching my new shirt ("Ocean washed." It sounds so breezy) about to project through the revolving doors at the north end, when this display for fleece zippered jumpsuits caught me short. 
     Once upon a time ...
     When the boys were small, in their terry cloth zip front rompers.  I remember thinking: "That looks really comfortable. They should make those for adults. I'd buy one of those." 
     Or maybe it was even earlier. In my early 20s, when I drank martinis out of a Hello Kitty sippy cup and thought of myself as louche yet maintaining a certain childlike wonder toward the world. Remembering the feet pajamas of my youth, that last pair, before I grew out of them. I would have snapped up one of these adult versions back then, grateful. 
     Now Macy has got them. My private nostalgic yearning made real. Here's my chance. Snap up one of these puppies because, really, how often do you get the chance? Never. And on sale, half off: only 35 bucks. I wasn't crazy about the cow pattern, or the Super Man pattern—sorta strange. Okay, really strange. But the one with the skulls? Or the fish skeletons? Kinda cool. A blend of babyish and edgy. 
      That thought crumbled at a touch.  No, not even tempted. And I realized: that guy, the one who may have once wanted this outfit, had vanished. Utterly. I didn't want these at all. Not a bit. In fact, they seemed really stupid.  A uniform for morons. I had changed. 

       Or had I? Maybe because the culture had wrecked this sort of thing, by overuse. That blanket with the arms they sell on TV? The Snuggie? As repulsive an item of clothing ever created. This wasn't unusual anymore, but too similar, too familiar: couch potato fashion, fashion for people with no waists. 
      For a moment I wondered if this topic was beyond the pale; too embarrassing to address here, to admit ever having theoretically wanted something like this, even notionally, decades ago. But then I thought: Shit, they make them. They sell them. So somebody must buy the things. It can't be a line of clothing designed and manufactured based on something I mused about long ago. I can't be alone here.
      Heck, forget jump suits. Remember the convention last week in Rosemont? There are "furries," people who make a lifestyle out of dressing like low rent college football mascots, mingling, dancing, hooking up and, well, best not to follow that line of thinking any further.
      Here I'm worried about seeming strange, about admitting to fleeting thoughts about feet pajamas when I was 30; meanwhile people are dressing as Willie the Wildcat and trolling Rosemont for that special Winnie the Pooh.  I'm dogpaddling tentatively on the surface of dull conventionality, and there's six miles of deepening weird under me, plus a Mariana Trench of the truly strange under that.  
    Then again, strange is relative. My wife believes that everyone is odd, if you shine a life into their lives, and the closer you look, the odder they are. That makes sense to me.
    My colleague Dan Savage sneers at those of us living in what he calls "vanilla" lifestyles. I don't know. There is a blessing to normality, to being able to find happiness without props and special equipment. It's hard enough to find that special someone without requiring that he or she be wearing a particular costume. I don't think I'd have been happier than I am now if I had the opportunity to lounge around in a yellow terry one piece jumpsuit, with a big yellow duck embroidered over my heart, wearing a red fez and drinking a tankard of frozen lemonade and vodka.  I like to think that, even then, some part of me would look upon the scene from afar and be suitably revolted.
     That former wish, that former self, hovered for a moment around the display of this godawful line of merchandise, still in stacks, even at half price. Shoppers not exactly beating down the doors to get at them. Then that thought, that person, vanished, in a puff. I took a few photos and continued on my way, thinking, dodged that bullet.

* Mere puffery it is. To my vast surprise, Nautica replied to my email query ("I purchased a Nautica oxford shirt whose tag said it was 'Ocean washed.' What does that mean? Was it washed in the ocean? What benefits does that impart on the shirt? I was curious. Thank you") overnight: "Thanks for your question regarding the Nautica Oxford Shirt. That description reflects the color of the item and the 'look' of the item. It was not actually washed in the ocean, it is just a creative description of the coloring technique. We appreciate your purchase with Nautica and we hope this answered your question!"

Judy Baar Topinka, dead at 70

Judy Baar Topinka with Dominic DiFrisco, April 2014

     Judy Baar Topinka was your friend, almost your relation, "a kooky old aunt" in the words of one-time opponent Rod Blagojevich, nailing the sense of kinship but missing the love that Illinoisans felt for her.
      With her red-dyed hair and her thrift shop clothing, Topinka was like no other politician in the state. She played the accordion and danced the polka, once with Dick Cheney. She smoked cigarettes, she guzzled coffee, adored her dogs, and at lunch with a reporter was just as apt to pull out photographs of her beloved son as to discuss financial issues, of which she had a mastery that sometimes got overlooked because of her folksy demeanor.
     Topinka died at 2 a.m. Wednesday, according to Sun-Times reports. She had suffered discomfort, had gone to the hospital in Berwyn where she was undergoing tests when she suffered a stroke. She was 70.
     She was Illinois treasurer for 12 years—the first woman treasurer in Illinois— and newly re-elected comptroller, having defeated Sheila Simon in a tough race. She was also the former chair of the Illinois Republican Party.
    But her importance as a statewide figure came, not so much from her offices or her duties, as from the force of her personality, a brash, colorful, plain-speaking, competent, energetic product of Chicago's near western suburbs, someone who, in an era of bitter partisan divides, wore her Republicanism easily, for instance staunchly supporting both gay and reproductive rights.
    "I'm just a political mutt," she said, during the last election, noting that voters could relate to her. "They think I'm straight talking—one of them. I haven't forgotten where I came from They feel a familiar relationship. And I like that. I've come up the hard way."
      Leaders from across the spectrum mourned the passing of Topinka.
     "The state has lost a treasure," said former Gov. Jim Edgar, whose election in 1994 helped sweep Topinka to her first statewide office, as Illinois' first female treasurer and the first Republican to hold the office since 1962. "She had more spirit than all the rest of us combined in this business, she was always upbeat."
     Barack Obama entered the Illinois State Senate three years after Topinka left it, and the White House issued a statement from the president praising her.
     "Judy was an institution in Illinois politics," Obama said. "Judy was a fierce advocate for her constituents, which I got to see firsthand when she was state treasurer. . . . She was blunt, pragmatic, unfailingly cheerful and energetic, and always willing to put politics aside to find common sense solutions that made a difference for the people of Illinois. She will be greatly missed. Michelle and I extend our deepest sympathies to Judy's family, friends and constituents today."
     Governor-elect Bruce Rauner issued a statement Wednesday.
     "Illinois lost one of its all-time greats," Rauner said. "Comptroller Topinka's magnetic, one-of-a-kind personality brought a smile to everyone she met, and she had a servant's heart, always only caring about what was best for the people of our state."
     "She was a good friend," said former Gov. George Ryan, who praised her devotion as a "very good public servant . . . her main programs were 'How much is it going to cost?' and 'Where is the money coming from?' She was a great watchdog for the taxpayers."
     When she ran for governor in 2006, Topinka was the first woman to be put up for that office by the Illinois GOP. She lost to Gov. Rod Blagojevich. TV commercials showed a clip of her dancing the polka at the Illinois State Fair with ex-Gov. George Ryan, newly convicted of 18 counts of federal corruption, and tried to tie her to her old boss.
     "I dance the polka with everyone," she explained.
     "She was always a lot of fun to be with on the campaign trail," Ryan said Wednesday. "Occasionally, she'd bring her accordion along and play polka music. Occasionally, she'd grab me to do a polka dance."
     Topinka constantly sent journalists clippings of their work, which she would scribble over with compliments and observations, tucked into a rectangular paper folder. She had been a journalist herself, writing a regular column in the Riverside/Brookfield Landmark newspaper. She was also immensely quotable. How could you not love a politician who in 2006 called her Republican opponents "morons" and referred to Rod Blagojevich's "little weasel eyes"?
    She was raised in Berwyn and lived in Riverside. Her parents, William and Lillian Baar, were the children of Czechoslovakian immigrants. Topinka graduated from Ferry Hall, a private girls prep school in Lake Forest in 1962, then went to Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. She began her career as a reporter but, aghast at the corruption she saw, she ran for the State Legislature in 1980, spending four years in the Illinois House and 10 years in the Senate.
     In 1994, she was swept into the treasurer's office on the ticket with Edgar. She was re-elected twice and served until 2007. She was first elected comptroller in 2010, was re-elected in 2014, and was proud of her efforts to modernize the comptroller's office.
     "We have done some really remarkable things with this office," she said. "We are dealing with a 19th century office that we have to get into the 21st century."
     Topinka brought a joy to the dry fiscal aspects of her job and stressed the importance of sound management.
     "You need people who really want to be in those offices and want to deal with fiscal matters of the state, which I happen to like," she told the southern Illinoisan during the recent election. "I liked being treasurer, I love being comptroller . . . we hold the whole place together."
     She was divorced, and is survived by a son, Joseph, and a granddaughter, Alexandra Faith Baar Topinka.

Contributing: Mitch Dudek, Scott Fornek     
Listen to Judy Baar Topinka talk about her job by clicking here.

Judy Baar Topinka, front and center, watches Gov. Quinn sign the gay marriage law at the UIC Forum last November.

Ransom is un-American, but wasn't always

Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello

                                     

     When I began writing this, I was hoping to contemplate the ethical, almost philosophical, arguments against paying ransom. Then I stumbled upon the struggle our Founding Father's went through, trying to decide whether to pay tribute to the Barbary pirates, or raise an navy and fight them.  If you finish this and are just dying to learn more, historian Michael Oren delivered a captivating lecture on the topic at Columbia University in 2005 that you can read online, that was the source for the quotes used below. 

     Had the Navy SEAL team been successful Saturday in rescuing photojournalist Luke Somers from al-Qaida in Yemen, Somers would no doubt be back in the States by now, on the “Today” show, recounting his ordeal.
     But the raid turned into a firefight, and Somers was murdered by his captors, along with fellow hostage Pierre Korkie, a South African teacher who, it was later discovered, was hours from being released, thanks to a $200,000 ransom to be paid by his family and his employer, a charitable group.
     And there public interest ends, with a sad shake of the head. Such raids are enormous tactical challenges, this one didn’t succeed, and too bad that the South African fellow died, with freedom in his grasp, magnifying the tragedy for his family.
     That is the natural way to feel; it’s the way that I felt, at first. But then I thought about it a bit. The United States doesn’t pay ransom for kidnapped citizens because such payments only encourage more kidnapping, and the cash funds more terrorism. European countries do cravenly pay ransoms, to their shame, funneling tens of millions of dollars to al-Qaida and groups like it.

     South Africa, like the U.S., has a policy against paying ransoms. But families and private groups do pay, ignoring the fact that it is morally wrong. You are purchasing your loved one's freedom at the expense of the suffering of many others down the line.
     Not that such a moral calculus is ever easy. When it is your son in the video, begging for his life, focusing on what is best from an international policy perspective can seem irrelevant, even cruel.
     It might help to imagine another scenario. Let's say, instead of being kidnapped, the South African was instead delivering $200,000—the amount his family was about to pay—to al-Qaida out of zeal. The SEALs intercept and shoot him first. They would be doing their job and nobody would mourn the dead courier. You could argue that whether he is a captive or not is beside the point of a clear moral directive: Don't support terrorists; oppose them at all costs.
     If you wonder why the United States, normally bending over backward when it comes to the lives of our citizens abroad, takes this hard line, remember that our country has faced this exact problem since it began.
     Longer, in fact. Our split from Britain removed the protection of the powerful Royal Navy from our merchant fleet, which was then set on by Barbary pirates—privateers operating out of North Africa. The forging of our Constitution and the uniting of the colonies was done, in part, to better face what James Madison called "the rapacious demands of pirates and barbarians."
     Then, as now, the temptation was to just pay the tribute, and for years our new country did just that, at the urgings of people like John Adams, who deemed it better to give "one Gift of two hundred Thousand Pounds" in tribute than to risk "a Million annually."
     The trouble was, once begun, payments never end, and others want in on the action. The U.S. Navy was created in March 1794 by a timid Congress (nothing changes; if you think it dithers now in the face of disaster, just look at the agonized debates Congress had while pirates were capturing American ships and parading their sailors in chains through the streets of Fez before selling them into slavery). The first U.S. naval warship was used not to fight the pirates, but to convey tribute to them. Talk about shame.
     By 1800, 20 percent of federal expenditures were payments to North African pashas, according to historian Michael Oren.
     Only Thomas Jefferson assuming the presidency in 1801 led to a change in policy. He sensed that our spirit was better suited to "raise ships and men to fight the pirates into reason than money to bribe them."
     Not that doing so was ever easy. In 1803, 15 Marines from the USS Philadelphia were ambushed and slain in Tripoli—the first U.S. servicemen to die on foreign soil—and 308 crewmen were taken prisoner after the ship foundered on a reef. (The "shores of Tripoli" line in the Marine hymn immortalizes not that military fiasco but an 1805 victory.)
     Adams said something during the debate about the pirates that bears remembering.
     "We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever"—prophetic words, though Adams underestimated the mettle of his nation by adding, "this though, I fear, is too rugged for our people to bear." But bear it we did, and do. Americans turned out to be made of stronger stuff. We value each life, true, but prefer to lose a few citizens by standing for our values than to try to save them all by living on our knees.