Saturday, November 11, 2017

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?



     The moment I set eyes on this dim and cluttered place I thought, "Mmmm, could it...?" I know I'm batting zero when it comes to stumping readers on the Saturday fun activity—you just nail it every time. 
    But this is off-the-beaten track, almost the definition of off-the-beaten-trackiness, this private space in a public place, and I thought it might possibly provide a little challenge. At least it provided an excuse to bring back the Fun Activity for a special, one-day-only appearance to test my hypothesis.
     Where is this shabby room? Since I imagine someone will nail it at 7:01 a.m., I'll need a prize ... how about a volume from the official Kennedy assassination report? Sure to distinguish any coffee table. I'm cleaning out my office for the big move next week and just can't take it all with me. Someone will cherish the thing. Or not. Hard to tell.
    Anyway, place your guesses below. Good luck. Have fun. 


The Vital Role of Snacks in Recovery From Addiction


     The Saturday Fun Activity is back for a surprise visit—I found myself in a location that I thought might stump you. And since that, traditionally, the Fun Activity doesn't post until 7, I thought I would let you know, and give you something to consider until then: I'm speaking about recovery at Harper College a week from Tuesday, and, well, to be honest, I'll feel silly if it's just me. Please do consider coming. Not only is it free to attend, but there are snacks and, really, who doesn't like snacks? In fact, that is the theme of my talk: "The Vital Role of Snacks in Recovery from Addiction."

     Kidding, the talk is titled, "Recovery is the True Path of the Hero," a theme which I'm looking forward to discussing, ideally with you, Nov. 21. And yes, there really will be snacks.


Friday, November 10, 2017

Being alive is heroism aplenty


     In truth, we are but sentient gnats, crawling around an enormous, churning, steamy globe which, in turn, is itself a mere warm speck hurtling through the black and frozen void of  a generally empty cosmos utterly indifferent to us, we moist splats of life that ooze and wheeze and shudder for a single instant and then vanish forever.
     So of course we try to puff ourselves up, concocting awaiting heavens filled with ornate glory. Of course we conjure golden deities lavishing their divine attention on our endlessly significant selves. Four score years of messy life is not enough, we are not satisfied just to exist, that highest of honors and rarest of privileges. No, we need to also be brave, strong, peerless, both the apex of nature and the pinnacle of humanity, standing on the heads of our lessers, basking in their praise. 

     Saturday is Veterans Day. Patriotic soul that I am, enamored with tales of action and courage, I was excited to stumble upon one of those amazing tales so apt on such holidays: an aged vet, his heroic deed unsung, the story told now, just in time, before the waves of time and memory roll over the champion. I made my phone calls, then visits, conducted my interviews, took my notes, transcribed my recordings, scoured the internet, read dozens of pages of material.  I began to write. I had tears in my eyes. Thrilling stuff. Heroism.
     It was 4 a.m. Thursday when my eyes, now dry, blinked open and I thought: "What if this isn't true?"
     Because really, as much as I dug, it came down to an amazing story that one man was saying, richly detailed, filled with verisimilitude, facts and dates and places, official-looking documents that, on closer inspection, did not quite prove what had been claimed. It was an incredible tale, which was the problem. Incredible is very close to "not credible," or should be.
     I'm not going into the exact details, not to be coy, but because the story isn't in the paper, in part, because we don't want to out the guy. A major metro daily is a big bazooka to turn on an individual whose crime is, in essence, losing touch with reality, concocting a self-flattering fantasy and taking it to market to see if anyone will buy it. We're not the sheriff of old men basking in unearned glory. A few hours of frantic extra digging showed that not only wasn't it true, but other people already knew it wasn't true. "The entire story is fiction" said one historian I found at the last minute. "His claim is preposterous."   
     I can't remember ever yanking a story in this fashion, and as much as it represents a fuck-up on my part—I was rushing to make Veterans Day, and should have done this work last week, should have pressed harder, sooner. But I was mesmerized by the narrative, incredulous at the idea that someone could construct it all out of whole cloth, and certain that as I beavered away through his story that the verification I needed would present itself on the next page, just around the next corner.

   It didn't. 
     My bosses saved me, because I was happy to serve up the entire complicated mess as it was, a steaming bowl of contradiction, as a story that might be true, might not—you decide! You got a tale of heroism plus, as a bonus, a nagging mystery to unpack. I convinced myself it was even better this way. Complicated and enigmatic, like life itself. 
     That just won't fly, the editors chorused. Keep digging. I did, and on Thursday afternoon found one, two, three smoking guns. A damning archival document dredged out of a military web site and my two concurring historians.
     I felt so good, almost proud, standing at the edge of that cliff, pinwheeling my arms. Let me tell you why. We judge the media by what they publish, but we should also judge them by what they do not publish when a story falls below our standards. The rampant speculation, fabrication and distortion that geysers online, particularly from the Right Wing press, is anathema to those of us in what they glibly slur as "fake news." We sweat this stuff, or try to. 
     Up until yesterday, I was worried that any doubt I cast on his story would be seen as insulting a hero, and I had an answer ready. Challenged, I would say this:
     The soldiers who we honor today were not fighting for the flag, not to venerate a piece of colorful cloth affixed to a stick. Rather they fought—and fight—for the freedom of thought that the flag represents, and what can be freer than to look at a thrilling tale and ask, "Is this true? Is the hero really a hero? Are the facts as they are being presented really facts?"
     Some leaders demand loyalty, blind obedience even. They tilt their heads back and puff out their lower lips as if they were Il Duce. That isn't America. America is a lean Yankee, stepping back and squinting his eye and examining the goods. Is this real? Is it quality? Or are you pulling the wool over my eyes, mister? We are a dubious country—at least those of us who haven't become eager dupes—and should always be proud of that. Skepticism is American. Credulity is not, or shouldn't be, though it too often is.
     So no column in the paper today. By the time the story was spiked it was after 3 p.m., and I was tapped. I put on my jacket and my cap and walked out into the gathering Chicago evening. The city was glittery in the twilight, the people rushing home, dark forms under twinkling lights. I felt oddly happy, the relief of a guy who almost stepped in front of a bus but then didn't, who pulled back or, rather, was pulled back by the steady hand of a heroic passerby. 
    It is a buoyant thing to be in the truth business, working with people I respect, who had my back, and in general a boon to be alive and to not feel the frantic need to be glorious or a hero or live forever. They suffer from a curse—born of deep insecurity and feelings of unworth, no doubt—a kind of addiction, as we see in people who have achieved wealth and fame yet find it never enough. Who need nine houses, or would scorch the planet and kneecap democracy so they can get an extra $10 billion in the next fiscal year. Breaking their teeth, King Midas style, on their golden fruit. 
     Give me real fruit. I hope I can continue mushing my face into a dripping melon, unseen and unremarked upon, grinning with simple satisfaction, blissfully ordinary, unheralded, mundane. That I can amble into my own decrepitude and, unlike this guy I got to know over the past few weeks, not find myself clawing at life as it recedes, trying to dig up a false distinction that I don't deserve, claiming to have secretly written "Infinite Jest" or beaten Barack Obama at pick-up basketball or won two Pulitzer Prizes. 
     This is not to pooh-pooh soldiers who do heroic things. That is definitely important, and something they should be proud of, assumed they did what they are supposed to have done, and something they should be honored for doing, especially today. Though a word to the wise: let others do the honoring. It's already suspect and half curdled when the praise comes from the hero himself. That said, to point out that we who never got the chance to rescue our crew mates and defeat the Germans single-handedly should not despair, nor be tempted to conjure up imaginary greatness for ourselves. There is a heroism in facing quotidian life, and we all do it, earning our medals the hard way, in anonymous solitude and silent struggle, every goddamn day.


Thursday, November 9, 2017

Leaves falling like rain



     For a supposedly rational guy, I have my share of mystic habits. I will, presented with the opportunity—a clear night sky—wish upon a star. Or, after chicken, break a wishbone or, after a Chinese meal, not only read the fortune cookie fortune, which could be written off to social pressure but, if it seems propitious, also tuck it away for future private contemplation. 
     And those are the more mainstream occult rituals; I have a few kabalistic quirks that I assume are unique to myself. For instance, in the autumn, I like to catch a leaf during its transit from the tree to the ground. Meaning, while in the air—just scooping off the earth won't do. 
     Achieving this feat somehow is "good luck." I have no idea how long I have been doing it or when the tic started. It seems an artifact from a solitary boyhood spent wandering around the de-populated but treed streets of Berea, Ohio in the early 1970s. 
      Grabbing a leaf in flight is more difficult than it sounds—leaves are asymmetrical, and twist and jink their way through the air, falling as if avoiding your grip.
     Actually, "falling" is too passive a word to describe what happens to leaves in autum. Despite the season's common name "Fall," gravity isn't pulling the leaves down, nor is wind pulling the leaves off. Rather the trees are flinging them away, using special cells located where the leaf stem meets the branch called "abscission" cells, whose name shares the same root as "scissors"  and which perform the same function: cutting away the dead, no longer productive leaves so as not to sap scarce winter resources until new ones can grow in the spring.
     Whether we consider them falling or being tossed away, leaves were fluttering down in abundance Wednesday morning. Returning from my walk with Kitty, I noticed the cimmaron ash that I planted 17 years ago and has now attained a 40-foot height thanks to religious applications of expensive anti-ash borer elixir, was dropping its leaves at a prodigious rate. They fell like rain, in bunches.  I hurried over and ... 
      You know, the fall vs. cut duality is also echoed in the type of the tree: "decidious," meaning trees whose leaves fall, a word whose Latin root, cadere, to fall, is very close to cædere, which means to cut, and is the root of "decide," harkening back to when making a determination was equated to cutting through the knot of a problem.  (It's a shame it wasn't the other way around, because the "æ" in cædere is a dipthong called an ash, which would be fitting to my tree and I better stop now).
    Where were we? Ah yes, leaves, from my as-yet-unkilled ash, raining down. So much that they made noise. I positioned myself under the tree and, with golden oval ash leaves practically pelting me, raised my hands up, fingers spread, Kitty's leash looped around one wrist. The first three or four eluded me, but I managed to catch one, if "catch" isn't taking too much credit—it veered into my open hand and I closed my fist around it and snatched the thing.
    Good luck achieved, I released the leaf to join its friends and headed inside to breakfast, though not before shooting a brief video to document the phenomenon. 



   
     

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Students learn to be much more than farmers at Chicago Ag




    
      If your lettuce wasn't an enticing shade of green this summer, maybe the problem is you weren't fertilizing with fish poop.
     The rows of lettuce at the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences were so appealing, it was all I could do not to tear off a leaf and pop it into my mouth. That seemed rude, so instead I fled over to peer into the murky depths of one of the four big tanks where tilapia swim, generating their contribution to agronomy, their soiled water used to water the plants. The fish themselves eventually are fried at a school party.
     The Chicagoland Food & Beverage Network was holding a symposium at the school Monday about the city's role in food and agricultural education, and invited me.
     While bad-mouthing Chicago Public Schools is a constant theme in both public life and journalism, and not without reason, the system's pervasive problems have a way of obscuring gems like Chicago Ag, as students call it. 
     The school sits on 72 acres in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood, half of which is planted with crops. Last summer the school raised sunflowers, zucchini, squash, tomatoes, pumpkins, both orange and pink (for breast cancer awareness), Swiss chard, kohlrabi, broccoli, peppers, watermelon, cucumbers, mustard greens, cabbage, onions, okra and soybeans.

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Joan Sanford shows the Chicago High School of Agricultural Sciences' cannulated cow.

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Trump: An opportunity as well as a curse



     Yes, Wednesday is the first anniversary of Donald Trump being elected president of the United States.
     And yes, were I so inclined, I could don sackcloth, dab myself in ash, and squat at the city gates, beating myself on the head and wailing. 
     I could go the "Nakba" route—evoking the word Palestinians use to describe the founding of Israel, "catastrophe." And there is no question that a Trump presidency has inflicted lasting damage on this country.
    But lots of people can be counted on to express that. And to be honest, my heart isn't in it. We are heading for catastrophe, too. But we also now clearly see what for years could be ignored. And you can't fix a situation that you don't yet recognize.
     Sometimes terrible occurrences can have good results. Something awful happens, but then you become aware of it, and change and things get better. And if there is one thing that is true about Donald Trump, as I've said before, he's a symptom and not a cause. He is the same lying, bullying fraud he has always been, subtle as a brick, obvious as can be. 
      Nearly half of America voted for him anyway.
      That is the terrible part. America elected him. He spread his goods—xenophobia, malice, deceit, delusion, ignorance—and 63 million of us signed on up. 
      The question now: is Trump our rock bottom? Or are there hells below this one?
      At least we now get to see what it's like to have a leader like him. Where those qualities take us. The sort of people who will support a Donald Trump—81 percent of Evangelical Christians. Imagine how that will sit in elections to come.
     Lots of people are in denial—that's what got Trump elected in the first place—but not everybody is. Trump's poll numbers are at historic lows. Pushback is enormous and immediate.
      I don't want to put too rosy a spin on it. Refugees have been turned away, healthcare undermined, haters emboldened. The Republicans are busy suppressing voting rights, skewing the system to bind the whip in their minority hand.
      All troublesome. But we are not watching the American Reich rise. Not yet anyway. The marchers in Charlottesville found themselves outed on Twitter and lost their jobs. Red-hatted gangs of thugs are not prowling the streets. ObamaCare was not repealed. The line-the-pockets-of-the-rich tax reform seems too horrible to actually pass. When you look at whatever environmental regulation or safety policy is being scrapped, odds are it was enacted five years ago. We aren't going back decades in time, not yet anyway. 
     Maybe we had to go through this to get to the other side. And I'm not even convinced that Trump is the nadir. We could get Ted Cruz and who knows what kind of Trump 2.0, more polished, more effective. There are hells below this. If Donald Trump, elected one year ago, is the rock bottom that we bounce up from, then America will have gotten off lucky, again. I can't tell which, because I live in an area where revulsion with Trump is the norm, and I've pretty much filtered out all his fans by now.
     This is a process. The election of Donald Trump is an x-ray with a big tumor on it. The tumor was already there. Better that we found out, and as painful and terrifying as this treatment is, it is treatment nonetheless. We can't say our problems are hidden from us anymore. The situation is painfully clear. Success is uncertain. But the battle lines are drawn. We see the eyes of everything ugly in this country, staring starkly back at us. Recognizing electorate who would embrace this, has to be the first step in fixing whatever the problem is, in building a better country. Trump didn't have to happen, but he did, and it is an opportunity as well as a curse.
   

Monday, November 6, 2017

Federal government tries to blind Chicago to grim gun statistics



     When Republicans are shrugging off the need for any kind of rational gun policy — not that they ever consider it — they enjoy mentioning the high murder toll in Chicago and pretend that doing so proves their argument.
     “I think if you look to Chicago, where you had over 4,000 victims of gun-related crimes last year, they have the strictest gun laws in the country. That certainly hasn’t helped there,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Oct. 2, drop-kicking the issue in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre.
     “The most stringent gun laws in the U.S. happen to be in Chicago,” Donald Trump tweeted in 2014. “and look what is happening there!”
     What is happening here is that Chicago — though banning gun sales but not gun ownership — is ringed by suburbs pumping guns into the city and by states whose lax gun laws provide a direct pipeline to the city’s streets.
     Legal gun sales are a big part of the problem. The Sun-Times outlined that situation again last week. According to the second “Gun Trace Report,” the work of the Chicago Police Department and the University of Chicago Crime Lab, more than half of the 27,500 guns recovered by CPD between 2013 to 2016 came legally from 5,000 federally licensed gun shops in Illinois and other states; almost a quarter from Indiana.


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