Flashback 2006: Reparations can't fix problems of the past

Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment Memorial (National Gallery of Art)

     Mayor Brandon Johnson has established a task force to look into the city reversing the wrongs of slavery. Good luck with that. The obvious retort is that Chicago can barely run the present, never mind repair the past. Evanston does have a reparations program, which seems more high-minded boondoggle than anything else. I wrote a column for today — on the Northbrook police — but it was held for tomorrow for reasons of space. So, this being Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the freeing of enslaved Americans, I thought I would share this 18-year-old column — which back then ran 1100 words and filled a page. I have kept the various subheads, and the joke at the end.

OPENING SHOT

     Are you a victim of history? Or a beneficiary? Do the crimes of the past echo in your head? Or do you see farther, to paraphrase Newton, because you stand on the shoulders of giants?
     How you answer depends, I believe, less on your station in life than on your outlook.
     Though generally glum, I consider myself a beneficiary of the past, beholden to countless individuals who have gone before, from the Founding Fathers to Alexander Fleming to my ancestors to the guy who invented indoor plumbing.
     Their suffering and struggle turned sweet for me. I'll give you an example. Anti-Semitism was a terrible thing in Europe in the 1930s. But it got my grandfather on that boat.* If things were better then, maybe he wouldn't have gone, and I'd be writing this in Polish or, more likely, not writing anything at all.
     Their loss; my gain.

TO TAKE ANOTHER EXAMPLE

     In many ways, black people -- as a group -- get a raw deal in this country, compared with other Americans. Their salaries are lower. They go to prison more. Their health care is worse, and their lives are shorter.
     But if you compare them with Africans living in Africa, all that changes. Their lives are far, far better, by every measure.
     My guess is that the average African, scraping out a living in Uganda, would leap at the chance to change places with the most humble resident of the West Side of Chicago.
     Thus the slavery reparations struggle is a mystery to me. While slaves certainly suffered, terribly, their descendants benefit, tremendously, by being here and not being back in Africa. Why focus on the harm of the past and not the benefit?
     Bottom line: The reparations effort will fail, and that is a good thing. It both would not solve the difficulties of black America — it might make them worse — and would set a terrible legal precedent, inspiring other ethnic Americans to wander back into the past and lay claims based on historical grievances. Why couldn't Chinese Americans sue the railroads for their undercompensated labor? Or descendants of socialists deported in 1919 sue the steamship companies that bore them into unjust exile? The possibilities are endless.

NO NEED TO WRITE . . .

     Whenever I address reparations, a few readers triumphantly bring up the reparations pried out of Germany and German companies for World War II atrocities. Their assumption is that, being Jewish, I would support such payments.
     I don't. Rather, I find them unseemly — a kind of extortion, just like slavery reparations.
     Yes, there are elderly people living in poverty who once, say, worked as slaves in a BMW factory, and if some cash can be coerced out of the company to help them, great. And if Germany wants to soothe its eternal shame by giving cash to Israel, that's great, too.
     But don't be fooled. Nothing is repaired. The damage of the past is not undone, not by an inch.
     Similarly, slavery was too great a wrong, its damage too pervasive and — I believe — lingering for a lawsuit against a few banks and insurance companies to do anything. Ironically, those backing reparations minimize the very tragedy that inspires them, by suggesting that a check might fix things. It won't. We can't correct the past; we can only move forward.
     Being a slave meant that someone else was responsible for your well-being. Being a free person means that you, yourself are responsible, no matter the past. That is hard responsibility for some to accept. It's easier to sue somebody.

ABOARD THE 8:16

     I look up from my newspaper and lock eyes with a silver-haired lawyer who also rides my train. I flash him my standard, tight, I've-got-no-people-skills smile and am halfway back to the news when I realize he isn't just gazing at me, but also pointing and saying something.
     "Write a column about that!" he hisses in a half whisper, half shout, trying to communicate with me while not tipping somebody off. I look to where he is indicating: a heavy man in a blue jacket jabbering into a cell phone.
     "It's going to be a good week, a good week, we're going to see the football game Sunday, so that is good. . . ."
     I cup my hand over my mouth and do the same whisper/shout back to the lawyer: "I already wrote that one."
     Then I try to go back to my reading. But the guy on the phone has one of those voices — a certain timbre, like a heavily rosined bow — that just cuts through your head. I didn't notice him before. But now I can't tune him out.
     "Stotis is just like us," he says. "He's just like us. He's a good guy to have on our side. Un-huh, yeah. We'll have to concentrate on the meeting. We'll have to get that over to Near North. Who's his partner? I never met him. . . ."
     Why is it, I wonder, that people never say anything interesting into their cell phones? It's always what's-for-dinner and I'm-on-the-train. Why not . . . and here I slip into reverie:
     "Look, I simply must have more tritium! Un-huh. Tell Og to dial it up to 90 million volts and open all the valves and see if that helps. . . . Right, the magnospectrometer. . . ."
     Or,
     "But I am naughty, a naughty little kitten, and naughty little kittens must be spanked. . . ."
     Or,
     "I want him dead! I want his head, in a bowling bag, on my desk first thing tomorrow morning, and Reginald, try not to leave the hacksaw behind this time, OK?"
     By now I'm chuckling to myself, having completely forgotten about and tuned out the cell phone guy. A reminder: Annoyance with public cell phone yammering is a temporary cultural phenomenon, based on the technology's newness. We will, in time, learn to ignore it. I hope.

It's alive!!!

     This column passes under no fewer than four pairs of eyes, in an attempt to make me seem less flawed than I actually am, and to avoid lawsuits.
     Since I see such oversight as completely necessary, you'd think I would avoid public utterances that are not carefully screened.
     But I don't. The latest folly begins at 9:04 a.m. today, when I and other journalistic luminaries join Steve Edwards on WBEZ-FM (91.5) to discuss September's blast of alarming news. **

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     Humor is fragile, and trying to analyze it proves inevitably futile, like trying to study clouds by catching them in mayonnaise jars.
      Only Joking, a new book by British wits Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves (Gotham Books: $25), is an exception to that rule, not only commenting thoughtfully on the nature of humor, but passing on some really, really funny jokes.
     This one, by Carr, stands out, for its loopy simplicity:
     Throwing acid is wrong, in some people's eyes.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 29, 2006

* This was showing ignorance of my own family history. My grandfather came to this country in 1924.

** While not having much value now, I kept this in as a reminder that, once upon a time, I regularly was a guest on WBEZ.