Where's a bamboo cloth when you need one?

      When I was a little boy — maybe 9, 10 — I would take an empty amber prescription bottle and create what I considered "a survival kit." I'd tuck in a needle and thread, and a tightly folded dollar, a couple blue tip matches and ... I'm not sure what else. A peppermint, maybe. Pack the thing with necessities. 

     I don't recall toting it around much — and never actually using anything in one for any real world purpose. My memory is primarily of assembling them, fitting the various elements inside. 

     You don't need to be Sigmund Freud to figure out why. It's a big, scary world, and a little fellow wants to be prepared. Nothing shameful there.

     So I get, conceptually, the idea behind the VSSL survival tube I saw for sale at the Mazda dealership in Evanston when I went there to get the filters changed on my CX-9.  In case you can't read the little canisters, there is a fire-starting kit and a candle, fishing tackle and a bamboo cloth, first aid tape and a water bag, all in an attractive gold-colored aluminum tube.

    That isn't what jumped out at me. Try to put yourself in my shoes, and look at the photo above. What is the element that grabbed me by the nose and twisted? That I couldn't quite believe.

     One hundred and seventy-five dollars. At first, I thought this must be an excess of the dealership — they do soak you. But no, VSSL is some weird generic high end brand that is applies to audio equipment, coffee and "gear" that comes in aluminum tubes.  That seems the going rate.

     Actually, my very first thought, at the price, was to wonder if there might not be a missing decimal point. Maybe the thing was $1.75. Matches. A little candle. I checked with the clerk. No. "Do you sell any of these?" I wondered. 

     Contrast the slim pickings above, most of which you could assemble from your kitchen junk drawer in five minutes for nothing, with the below survival kit I noticed on Amazon for less than a third of the price. An axe, a shovel, a tent, a lantern, ropes ... 268 pieces. Quite a lot really. 

     Maybe because I'm so sunk in routine, I don't worry quite much anymore about being ready for any proximity. Or maybe caution is so inbred into me at this point, I don't notice. If it might get cold, I'll throw a fleece in my bag. If hot, a bottle of water. If I'm going to be out at mealtime, I'll grab some insulin. But not even in a fancy kit, which are also sold. I carry the injector pen loose, in my pocket, along with a two-tablespoon screw top plastic container I tuck in a couple cotton rounds and two needle tips (since a clumsy diabetic can, in theory and confessing nothing, manage to bend the first needle against a restaurant table while trying to administer it, and need a second one). 

     I think I have a flashlight in the map pocket of my car door. And a bottle of water in the back. But that's about it. Anything else can be managed with a phone and a credit card.

     I wish EGD had a wide enough hope that I could reasonably expect to hear from somebody who actually bought such a tube and found it useful. "My Mazda seized up on the roadside and, thank God, I had a fishing line in one of the little cylinders..."

      It makes sense when you view it as another entity turning fear into money. There's a lot of that going around.

 

Next they'll claim the ICE officer was killed, but he's better now

 

     See, if only American citizens would just close their eyes, hide in their basements, and let the federal government ramp up its national goon squad of masked thugs, rampaging around Democratic-run cities, challenging brown people and randomly plucking them off the street for possible dispatch to Third World hellhole prisons, then this sort of thing wouldn't happen.
     But there was do-gooder Renee Nicole Good, 37, in her Honda Pilot, on a residential street in Minneapolis Wednesday, acting as a "legal observer" — a self-appointed concerned citizen who doesn't want to let her neighbors be secretly muscled into SUVs and whisked off to fates unknown.
     On the video, you see Good didn't comply with ICE orders to get out of her car, instead trying to roll away, and was shot in the face and killed for it. 

     Typically, I don't encourage readers to watch such death videos — they can be jarring. But sometimes they're necessary to understand what happened in a situation. You see the split second between when Adam Toledo tossed his gun away and when the officer in that alley fired in 2021, and realize he shouldn't be charged. You see Jason Van Dyke's bullets slamming into the prone body of Laquan McDonald and know his subsequent stint in prison was deserved.
     With Wednesday's fatal encounter, you see, from several angles, the yawning gap between the lies President Donald Trump and his administration instantly spun, and what actually happened. You see she was driving slowly away from the officer who ran up and killed her.
     Kristi L. Noem, aka ICE Barbie, aka Homeland Security Secretary, called Good's attempt to escape “an act of domestic terrorism,” that she “attacked them" and "attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.”
     Donald Trump somersaulted past that — rare is the lie so bald he can't embellish it — condemning Good because she “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer.”
     I thought the Trump administration is sympathetic to citizens assaulting police officers. Or is that only while storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021? Pity Good wasn't filmed beating a cop with a metal bar on the Capitol steps. The Trump administration might give her a medal.
     Don't worry, the ICE officer is recuperating from his imaginary injuries after being notionally run over. Just the way the "serious injuries" suffered by the ICE officer who killed Chicago cook Silverio Villegas Gonzalez in September magically got better upon closer inspection.
     This might be a good moment to step back and remind ourselves what is happening, big picture.
     Totalitarian states demand that citizens trade freedom for security by positing harms that do not in fact exist, then promising to liberate people from the perceived threat of these imaginary wrongs.

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Constant Comet

     Is there a statute of limitations for childhood confusion?

     I'm asking because ...
     Well first, let me remark upon a central challenge of the columnist. You want to straddle the unique and the mundane. Share an outlook that is simultaneously unusual enough to be interesting —not just some familiar, trite truth everybody already knows. Yet common enough to be relatable. Fresh, but not strange.
     Sigh. I might as well just tell it.
     So my wife was working, at the little triangular computer table in the living room one morning this week. And I went down to get some tea, and, in my friendly fashion, asked if she wanted some.
     "Would you like some Earl Grey?" is what I said. I was having Twinings Earl Grey. I normally go for coffee, but today didn't. Earl Grey is my go-to morning tea.
     "How about some Constant Comment?" she said. Another type of tea, made by Bigelow.
     And in the next half dozen steps toward the kitchen, I reflected on Comet, the cleanser.
     When I was a child, my mother kept a green cardboard can of Comet under the sink. I would see her scrubbing various places that needed to be scrubbed.
     When I first heard the tea name, I heard, "Constant Comet." This was reinforced, I believe, by the unique smell of Constant Coment, which I didn't like. It's the spices. They make me think of vomit. Worse, it rhymes: Comet. Vomit.
     You would think, at some point, this bolus of memory would fade. And in general it has — I mean, it isn't as if it bubbles into mind every day. That would be awful. It's bad enough to reflect on sometimes. In a rare, but particular situation.
      The phrase "Constant Comet" punches a ticket, and a few seconds later the whole "Comet ... Vomit" mental train comes chugging out of its dark tunnel, down a track that was laid around 1965.

     I suppose there must be some kind of breathing, meditation trick to get rid of that. And while there are mnemonic devices to aid in memory, I have yet to find something that aids in forgetting. Well, bourbon, yes. But that train is long gone. Time, I suppose, also does the trick, or should. But when a certain memory has eluded being tackled by the ensuing years, you're pretty much stuck with it.
      Tolstoy used to say that he and his brother, as children, believed that they could have any wish they wanted if they could stand in a corner for five minutes and not think of a white bear. Which of course is impossible. Any child, taking up a position in the corner, excited about being so near to his heart's desire, would of course conjure up the forbidden pale bruin, ruining the scheme.
     So can I bury the Constant Comment/Comet connection? Only one way came to mind.

     "Honey," I found myself considering saying. "How would you feel if we stopped buying Constant Comment? Don't ask me why. There are other teas."

      No, that wasn't going to work. I'd have to explain it. Some things you just have to live with.

In today's English classes, kids often read just snippets of novels — and that's a shame

     Confession: I never read “The Grapes of Wrath.” Until now, that is. Most people are forced to read it in high school. In Berea High School it was taught in American Tradition, “AmTrad” we called it. I scorned the plebe English course, and took Honors AP Literature. We read “Great Expectations.”
     I might have never read “The Grapes of Wrath"— something about migrant farm workers in the 1930s; sounded dreary — without a prod from technology. I signed up for Audible, years ago, because I wanted to read all 21 volumes of Patrick O’Brian’s “Master and Commander” seafaring series. Listening to books is easy, especially when you walk a dog.
     But Audible is a stern taskmaster. You pay your $14.95 a month, permitting you to download one book. Those months snap by, particularly when you’re signing up for bricks like “Don Quixote.”
     Desperate to knock back a credit, I grabbed “The Grapes of Wrath” just because it seems like one of those books that a person such as myself ought to have read. Honestly, I came to it so unfamiliar, I thought William Faulkner had written it, until I saw that no, it was John Steinbeck. I come clean about that because a person who puts on airs the way I do, with my Dante and my big words, ought to bring himself down a notch or two, from time to time, on general principles.
      The book is almost 500 pages long — 30 hours of listening. The plot is simple. The good though poor Joad family loses their Oklahoma farm and goes on the road to California, where they expect to pluck oranges off the trees and enjoy life. Complications ensue. 

     While I was in the midst of this, in one of those moments where the news becomes a sort of Greek chorus, the New York Times reported on a survey of 2,000 parents, teachers and students, whose findings were neatly summed up in the headline: "Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class."
     "By the time teachers get through their required curriculums and prep students for exams, they often have little or no time left to guide classes through a whole book," the paper reported.
     Instead they read AI summaries —the modern version of Cliff's Notes — and selected slices.
     This is a shame because a great book is like trekking through a foreign land. A 15-minute segment just won't cut it. It's like looking at a postcard of a national park versus spending the day hiking there.

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Jan. 6, 2021 + Five

 

Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment,
by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (National Gallery of Art)

     It isn't as if nobody saw it coming.
     Just the opposite. You could see it a mile away. On Jan. 5, 2021, I jotted in my journal: "We're quite worried about tomorrow. Yes, Trump will probably fail. But there's always that chance. History has its thumb on the scale for tyrants."

     Does it ever. 

     The boys were home —schools closed for COVID  — watching the Congressional hearings on television. I joined them. Mitch McConnell gave a laudable speech, backing the orderly transition of democracy. At first. Then he slid into the partisanship ditch, as if by force of habit. Ted Cruz stood up and tried to use the suspicion he sowed as a reason to delay the outcome. 
      Then the mob that Trump had egged on stormed the Capitol. 
     My column in that day's Sun-Times, Jan. 6, 2021, ran under the headline, "The South shall fall again. And again. And again." It groped back to the previous enormous division in our country,  the Confederacy, and how it was doomed to lose. Why is the Civil War relevant now? Because...

      "It’s still unfolding. The Confederacy lost the war, but never gave up the fight — its baked-in bigotry, the proud ignorance required to consider another human being your property, marches on, from then to now. Manifesting itself plainly in the Trump era, his entire political philosophy being the slaveholder mentality decked out in new clothes, trying to pass in the 21st century. They even wave the same rebel flag. Kind of a giveaway, really.
     "The Lost Cause marches on, as we will see Wednesday, when Congress faces another ego-stoked rebellion: Donald Trump’s insistence that his clearly losing the 2020 presidential election in the chill world of fact can be set aside, since he won the race in the steamy delta swampland between his ears."

    I had no idea just how big that rebellion would be. A shocking moment of chaos and violence and absent leadership. Trump watched the disaster unfold, and smiled. 

     Nor could I have imagined its eventual success. How 1,600 wrongdoers would be pardoned without repercussions of any kind. The event itself vanishing in a swirl of lies and forgetfulness. Historians will pick over until the end of time is how, caught in such obvious sedition, Donald Trump could possibly be re-elected. How Americans could care so little for their country, its institutions and traditions, that they would blindly follow a liar, bully, fraud and traitor. 

     Yet they did. He won the 2024 election, fair and square. That's why I can never hate him — he didn't put himself in office. Half the country did. Or as I sometimes explain it, "If we elected a dog as president, would you hate the dog?"
      The structural damage done to our nation in Trump's second term will take years to grasp, never mind reverse. Harm to the rule of law. To the federal bureaucracy that millions of American depend upon. To our health care system. To our standing in the world. To the future of science. 

     Not that it can be reversed. We can't go back to what we were before. Honestly, given where it took us, I don't think we'd want to. The question now is: what new thing are we going to end up? Something better? That seems a long shot, particularly now, as we daily decay into something worse. As awful as 2025 was, I'm certain of this: we have not had the bad part yet. That's coming.

     In my Jan. 6, 2021 column I ended, as I often try to do, on an optimistic note: 

     "The fight continues. In the spring of 1861, the Tribune called the Southern secession 'the most senseless and causeless rebellion of all history.' Until now. We may have surpassed it with Trump’s frantic tearing at our democracy, supported by a cast of cowards and traitors, hailed by the eternally duped. And for what? Lower taxes? A wall? Their fetus friends? An embassy in Jerusalem? I will never understand it.
     "No matter. They’re losers. They lost in 1865, lost in 2020. Evil always loses, eventually. Since they continue to fight, desperate to go back to the plantations of their dreams, they’ll continue to lose. Not every battle. But their war against the future is futile, doomed. Drowned out by the swelling ranks of diverse, accepting Americans, facing actual problems with courage and candor, dedicated to helping our nation become what she is destined to be."

     Do I still believe that? Yes, I do. For one, as bad as our current situation is, it could be — and might yet be — far worse. Plus there is much to be positive about. Ordinary Americans stood up to the masked thugs of ICE. The courts beat back attempts to put the military in our streets as a dry run. Some of Trump's most devoted acolytes have bolted from him. It can be done.
     The second Trump term is worse than the first, and we have not yet reached the bottom. But we will. We will hit bottom, eventually. And then bounce back up, rise again. Until then, the only option is to watch, speak out, resist, hope, and wait. 

 

      

Edith Renfrow Smith, a 'memory keeper' and living link to history, dies at 111

 

Edith Renfrow Smith (photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin)

     In 2021, a former CPS teacher named Greg Lopatka asked me if I wanted to go with him to visit a former colleague who was about to turn 107. My reflexive response — "God no, why would I want to do that?" — immediately struck me as not exactly the path of the hero. If there is one truth in my business, it's "If you don't go, you never know." So I overcame inertia, and agreed to go. I did not expect much, and showed up at Edith Renfrow Smith's apartment without so much as Googling her name. Was I in for a surprise, almost a shock, as I asked my questions, and her extraordinary life unspooled.  I feel very blessed to have known this amazing woman.

   Edith Renfrow Smith was born in Iowa two weeks before the start of World War I. Her earliest memories involve the end of the war in 1918 and a neighbor who came home having lost both legs. She met aviator Amelia Earhart while an undergraduate at Grinnell College, where she became the first Black female graduate, class of 1937. After graduation, she came to Chicago to work at the YMCA and was living in the city Friday when her long, extraordinary life ended.
     Mrs. Smith was 111. She had celebrated Christmas with family but then stopped eating.
     "She felt it was time," said her daughter, Alice Frances Smith, 80. "She said she was tired."
     Mrs. Smith was one of perhaps a thousand "supercentenarians” — people who live to 110 — in the world, and a living link to history. She clearly remembered her grandparents, born in slavery, her memory so sharp she was included in the SuperAging Research Initiative at the University of Chicago, a similar study at Northwestern and a genetics study in Boston.
     Mrs. Smith was revered at Grinnell, honored as a pioneer and role model to young women.
     "To be in her presence was to travel through time and space because Miss Edith was a memory keeper," said Dr. Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, the chair in gender, women’s and sexuality studies at Grinnell. "With ease and pride, she recounted two centuries of her family’s history, dating back to the 1830s. ... We followed her meticulous recollections to explore her extended family’s deep Iowa roots, which were laid before the Civil War. She guided our knowledge of other Black families who called Grinnell home in the early 20th century, and she made visible the Rosenwald Scholars. This handful of Black men attended Grinnell in the 1920s and ate Sunday dinner at her family home. Although all of her five siblings were college educated, it is from the Rosenwald Scholars that Miss Edith first 'caught a vision' of attending Grinnell College specifically."
     Mrs. Smith was granted an honorary doctorate in 2019.
     “Grinnell has been my life," she told the audience.
     In 2022, a dorm was named after her — Renfrow Hall, a new facility designed to encourage interaction between students and community residents.
     "We have much to learn from her steadfastness and perseverance, her excellence and her belief that we can do better," Grinnell President Anne F. Harris said at the ceremony. "She has taught so many over generations. It is deeply meaningful and fitting that this building focused on students, their residential and learning experiences, and situated at the intersection of the town and the college, will bear her name,”
     She was born July 14, 1914, in Grinnell, the fifth of six children. Her father, Lee Renfrow, was a chef at the Monroe Hotel. Her mother, Eva Pearl, took in laundry.
     In 1940, she married Henry T. Smith, a milkman for the Borden Milk Company. They had two daughters, Edith Virginia and Alice Frances.
     The family moved to Bronzeville, where they lived across from Wayman Hancock, a meat inspector.

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Insults, spoiled food and no bedding — inside a Chicago landscaper’s ordeal with ICE in Broadview

 

Rey Estrada and Liz Soto

     “It was a little bit hard, the words they were saying...” began Rey Estrada, in Spanish, when asked about being seized by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Oct. 21 as he did landscaping work in Rogers Park, ticking off terms that hardly need translation: “Illegal. Gordo. Negro.” Illegal. Fat. Black.
     “That’s why they stopped me. My skin. “
     Estrada was one of about 4,000 Chicagoans swept off the street beginning in September under Operation Midway Blitz, the federal government deportation campaign targeting immigrants in the Chicago area. While labeling the people they were seizing as “the worst of the worst,” most of the immigrants arrested — more than 60% — had no criminal record whatsoever. Estrada never had so much as a parking ticket.
     He spent three hours in the back of an SUV, and was taken to ICE’s detention facility in west suburban Broadview. He spent the next 48 hours in a large room with 150 other men — in a room he was told was intended for 80 people. There were three metal toilets. The lights were always on.
     “They never turned it off,” he said. Estrada had no bed, no mattress, no blankets. He folded his jacket as a pillow. Sleep was impossible anyway — every half hour the door was opened and various names were screamed.
     It was also hot — the detainees begged the guards to keep a slot open for ventilation. They were fed Subway sandwiches that had spoiled — Estrada picked the black moldy meat off and ate the bun.
     He said the Spanish-speaking guards were harsher than the English speakers.
     “The guards yelled at us and called us pigs,” he said. “The guards who spoke English, I have nothing bad to say about them.”
     He was allowed to call home the afternoon he was detained.
     “We were worrying about him,” his wife, Liz Soto, said. “I was driving to go pick up the kids from school. He asked me, ‘How are you?’ and I asked him, ‘How do you want me to be?’”
     He told her they were offering him self-deportation money to go to Mexico.

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