Divvy Diary: Safety in numbers

     Education is a process, not an act. One of my favorite aspects of writing a column is I get to build off things I've written earlier. Such as finally understanding the seeming paradox that more amateurs without helmets careening on bicycles in city traffic somehow makes the city safer and leads to fewer head injuries.

     A friend is feeling unwell, and I recommended she nurse herself back to health with the rich gingery soup from Ajida, a Japanese grill on Wells Street.

      As she isn’t able to go out, I gallantly offered to convey the miso udon to her, of course hopping on a Divvy to rush the soothing broth to her place in Greektown.

     As there are no Divvy stations immediately around the restaurant, I meant to pick up a cable lock, to secure the bike while I ran inside to collect the carry out. I considered leaving the bike unattended in the street. But I did that once, buying cookies at D’Amato’s Bakery on Grand, and it was a nerve-wracking experience, with one eye on the goodies slowly being placed into a box by the clerk, one eye fixed on the defenseless blue Divvy bike parked in front, poised at any moment to have to bolt out to rescue it.

     Never again. Too stressful. But I didn’t get around to buying the lock, so instead I walked to Ajida, accepted our soup, then hot-footed it to Franklin and Madison to grab a bike west to Halsted.

     Memo to self: buy cable lock.

     In fact, if you have other unsanctioned tricks and unrecommended strategies regarding maximizing the bike share system, let me know and I’ll include them in a future column tentatively titled, “Pimp My Divvy.”

     Yes, I wore my helmet. I’m trying to be more scrupulous about that, a) because it’s safer and b) toting the helmet gives me a cachet of cool, if only in my own mind.

     Speaking of helmets . . .
     When last we addressed Divvy helmets, in July, the American Journal of Public Health had printed a study claiming that in cities launching ride-share programs, the percentage of head injuries among bicycle-related injuries went up. I used it as the basis for a general plea for more helmet use and called on the city to do more to promote helmets, which of course had no effect.
     This week Andres Salomon, a Seattle bicycle activist, sent me a pair of follow-up letters from the Sept. 11 journal of public health that revisit the issue, pointing out that while the percentage of head injuries has gone up in 10 cities with ride-share programs, totals went down,
     The study “misinterpreted the injury data,” Salomon and his colleagues write. “Although the proportion of injuries that were head injuries increased . . . the authors fail to mention that the total number of head injuries declined by 14.4% in bicycle share cities, compared with a decline of only 3.9% in control cities. . . . The total number of nonhead injuries declined even more sharply — by 37.8% in bike share cities, compared with a 6.2% increase in control cities. . . . The data suggests that bicycle share programs were in fact associated with reduction in bicycle injuries, even though none of the programs provided helmets.”
     The letter suggests that Vancouver, which is delaying its rideshare program until a system of helmet rental can be established, is endangering bicyclists by doing so, while Dallas, which suspended a helmet law to encourage its program, is helping them.
     That seems counterintuitive; how can filling busy city streets with inexperienced, unhelmeted bicyclists, often unused to urban biking, often tourists who might not have ridden a bike in years, somehow cause accidents to go down? What’s happening?
     The letters allude to the “potentially protective effect of bicycle share programs” without speculating what those effects might be. It doesn’t take an academic to understand what’s happened in downtown Chicago. Any frequent cyclist can tell you.
     “It’s a critical mass,” said Diane Dillon, who regularly rides her bike from West Rogers Park to her job at the Newberry Library on Walton. “The critical mass of cyclists has made everyone, drivers as well as pedestrians, more aware of bicyclists and the need to share the road.”
     “The ‘protective effect’ is another way of saying ‘safety in numbers,’ ” Divvy spokesman Elliot Greenberger agreed. “We’ve added thousands of big blue bikes on the street. You bet that means that Chicago is noticing and getting more comfortable with bike riders. With that kind of shift, you typically see motorists, cyclists and pedestrians become more aware.”
     Dillon has noticed motorists are less blithe about weaving into bike lanes, cutting off cyclists or laying on the horn needlessly.
     “When bike lanes were first introduced, drivers routinely violated the space,” she said. “Now they are cutting people off less and driving more respectfully. I get fewer anxious and annoyed honks — they would see a bicyclist and just honk for the sake of honking. Now they’re more respectful.”

Judaism isn't easy, but it has its rewards

     Yom Kippur begins tonight at sundown, and as the only newspaper columnist in the country, I believe, who regularly comments on being Jewish—it's part of my life, and I never got the memo reminding me that I'm supposed to be vaguely embarrassed—I feel as if I should say something.
     Only I took the nation's temperature, Jewish-wise, on Sunday, for Rosh Hashana. And frankly, I feel like I said everything I have to say about Yom Kippur in a pair of columns more than a decade ago. True, few readers are going to read an argument and think, "Heyyyy, didn't he take this tack back in 2003?" But I have my pride. So rather than regurgitate the same old thoughts, I'm going to draw these Yom Kippur chestnuts out of the vault, for your holiday entertainment. 
     This first one is notable because, after it ran, I got a phone call from my rabbi saying, in essence, "How can we help you feel better about your religion?" And I had to tell him that I feel just fine about it—well, a little squeamish that my rabbi is calling me up, giving me grief at the office—but otherwise doing okay, faith-wise. Just a tad unconventional, that's all. 

     It's Yom Kippur time, again. Starting Sunday night, for those keeping score. And since most readers are probably only dimly aware of what Yom Kippur actually is (don't feel bad; I didn't know the Easter story until I saw "Jesus Christ Superstar'' as a teenager), I probably should explain. It's the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, a holiday noted primarily for three things: 1) repentance; 2) fasting and 3) the uncharacteristic flocking, like swallows to Capistrano, of assimilated Jews back to their neglected synagogues.

     Much press attention was given to that third point this year in the wake of a study showing that population growth among Jews in this country has been stagnant for the past decade, mainly due to a 40 percent intermarriage rate.

     No wonder Jews are drifting away, if Yom Kippur is the only holiday they show up for. That's like missing the football game but stopping by for the snarl in the parking lot. I'm not sure what the logic is — maybe fooling God into inscribing them in the book of life for another year ("No, no, I've been here all along Lord, really . . . ").

     If I had to pick just one holiday to go to temple for, I'd pick almost any other; Simcha Torah, for example. There's dancing, and waving flags, and kissing torah scrolls. It's basically a big party for a book, and as a bookish type, I like that.

     But Yom Kippur? First, you're looking at about five hours in the synagogue, what with Kol Nidre Sunday night and services all day Monday. It's actually closer to 10 hours, but between arriving the traditional 45 minutes late and sneaking off in midafternoon, five is more like it. That's a lot of time to pray. I don't want to blaspheme, but if God were as quick as He's supposed to be, then why do we have to keep restating the same praise and contrition, in various ways and languages? You'd think it could be like a pollution emission check — a quick peek into the sooty chambers of our hearts, a few checkmarks on the form, and we're on our way again.

     Not that I don't enjoy the prayers. The tunes are beautiful, the thoughts, lofty. Though I admit getting hung up on the gender equality infecting the lower rungs of Judaism. A central part of religion is nostalgia — you're doing what you did as a kid. But in our synagogue, we can't invoke the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, without including the matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. I'm not against equality — if I were, my wife would kill me with a brick while I slept. But when you whip in the matriarchy, it no longer is the same prayer as when I was a kid, and it jars. Imagine, at the ballpark, if whenever they sang "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," every time they got to "buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks" they added "and apples and celery and healthful snacks" as a nod to smart eating.

     There is also a considerable amount of chest-thumping at Yom Kippur. You stand, and beat your chest, and declare your sins — not specifically. Nobody says, "I goldbricked at work and cheated on my wife and hit my kids." Rather, in the safety of numbers, we thump our fists over our hearts and declare a laundry list of generic sins — "We have harmed others. We have wrought injustice. We have zealously transgressed."

     I like the thumping. But I find myself — and I know this is not the point of the thing, but being a guy one tends to be competitive — keeping score during this solemn litany, thinking "Yup, did that one. Did that one. Didn't do that one. Sorta did that one."

     A final note about Yom Kippur: Perhaps unique among the holidays of the world's faiths, it has almost completely defied our society's steady march toward commercialization. Yom Kippur is devoid of trappings — no decorations, no gifts, almost no cards. Of the thousands of types of greeting cards that Hallmark sells — even they are unsure how many — the company offers exactly one style of Yom Kippur card.

     "Wishing you the peace that comes with forgiveness," it reads. "Hope that comes with new resolve and joy that comes with making new blessings and the dawn of a whole new year."

     That's sweet, actually, though I hope they stop there. It's too easy to imagine the Atonement Line, with all sorts of syrupy "To My Neglected Mother" or "Greetings To My Traduced Friend" cards.

     Perhaps that it is coming. I can also see the beer companies getting involved, the way they shanghaied Halloween from the candy companies. People do throw break-the-fast parties (we tried setting one up with friends, but they insisted on waiting until twilight). Perhaps someday soon we'll have "Slam a Bud at Sundown!" displays in the supermarket (assuming, of course, we beat the gathering demographic doom. Nobody markets to the Shakers).

     My general sense is that Yom Kippur is like jogging — something whose value is greatly enhanced by the wonderful sense of fulfillment that washes over you when you're done. Myself, I'm looking forward to the holiday on deck, Sukkoth — a harvest festival. Not nearly as holy, true, but you get to sit in a booth of corn husks and pine sprigs in your backyard and drink with your friends. Judaism can be a taxing religion, particularly at this time of year, but it is not without its compensations.

                                             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 3, 2003

Tracy Morgan and the Eggshell Skull Rule

     The law gets a bad rap, but has its fascinations.
     For instance, TV comedian Tracy Morgan and five other passengers were in a Mercedes limousine that slowed because of traffic congestion on the New Jersey Turnpike June 7 and was rear-ended by a Walmart truck.  Morgan's friend, James McNair was killed, and Morgan, who starred on NBC's Saturday Night LIve and 30 Rock, was badly injured.
     Before rear-ending the limo, the driver of the Walmart truck, Kevin Roper, made several mistakes: he was traveling at 20 miles per hour over the speed limit, according to the National Transportation Safety Board's investigation. He ignored warning signs. And he had been driving for nearly 14 hours, the federal limit.
     The driver faces several criminal charges, including vehicular homicide and Morgan of course filed a civil suit. 
     A layman might be forgiven for assuming Walmart would just hand Morgan a blank check at this point. But that isn't how it works. The law is a battle. Parties clearly in the wrong—particularly giant corporations in the wrong—must mount a defense, and it should be no surprise that Walmart lawyers are seeking to pin the blame on Morgan, saying his injuries were  "caused, in whole or in part, by plaintiffs' failure to properly wear an appropriate available seat belt restraint device"and so, by not wearing a seatbelt "acted unreasonably and in disregard of (their) own best interests."
     News reports focused on Morgan's incredulous response.
     But I was more interested in what the law says. 
     At first blush, it would seem an 0pen-and-shut case.
     There is a queasily-named principle in law called "The Eggshell Skull Rule" that says, in essence, that a person who does wrong is responsible for any harm done to a person, even if that person is in an unexpectedly precarious state. "A defendant takes a plaintiff as he finds him," is the way it's usually phrased; meaning that you are on the hook for the injuries you inflict, even if they could not be foreseen. Morgan's carelessly being in a vulnerable, seatbeltless position shouldn't matter. Heck, if every evening I bathe in a tub filled with gasoline, and you malicious toss a lit cigarette into my open bathroom window, assuming the tub is filled with water, you are responsible for my horrific burns. That bathing in gasoline is stupid doesn't enter into it (the "eggshell skull" comes from another hypothetical. If I push you down, and your skull shatters because it's an eggshell, I've murdered you. The argument that a person with such a skull shouldn't go around without a helmet doesn't score many points in court).
     Unless it does. Walmart has to offer some defense, and in making the motion pinning the blame on Morgan, it shows that it is not going to roll over and pay whatever staggering, eight-figure settlement the TV star is hoping for. Walmart has deep pockets, and part of any lawsuit such as this is the filing of endless motions and continuances, the displaying of the legal fleet, as it were, to try to instill fear and expense, grind down the other side and reduce their expectations. 
     As with any situation involving law, it gets more complicated than that. Different rules come into play, and it is up to a judge and jury to decide which ones apply. For instance, there is a concept known as comparative fault, which is the new term applied to what was once called "contributory negligence" (in essence,the idea that if you've somehow done something to contribute to your injury, like not worn a seatbelt, you can't collect damages). 
    Only four states adhere to the idea of contributory negligence, and New Jersey isn't one of them. New Jersey does have a rule about comparative fault—the "51 Percent Bar Rule" that says if a plaintiff is more than half at fault in a situation, then he can't collect. 
    Which means that Walmart has to convince a jury that an exhausted, speeding, heedless truck driver is less at fault for Morgan's injuries than the comedian himself is, for not wearing a seatbelt in the back of his limo.
    A tall order. It isn't quite saying that you're at fault for not wearing a bulletproof vest when I shot you, but in the same ballpark. Or at least that's what I would argue, were I Morgan's lawyer (or, more likely, lawyers). 
    But wait. It gets even more complicated. Bathing in gasoline or having an eggshell skull are not crimes. But riding in a car without wearing a seatbelt is.  In 2010, New Jersey passed a law that all passengers, front and back, must wear seatbelts. A Walmart lawyer could argue that Morgan's commission of a crime, minor though it is, reduces the damages he could expect. He is like a burglar who breaks into somebody's house and then drowns in the whirlpool tub. Even if a jury decides that the fault is 10 percent Morgan's, that's 10 percent shaved off the top of a judgment certain to be in the millions. A Hail Mary pass worth trying. 
       Then again, speeding is also a crime, as is vehicular homicide.
       You get the point. It's all moot anyway because Walmart, shying away from the continuing bad publicity involved with its reckless employee injuring a popular entertainer, will no doubt, after showing  the stick of its legal muscle, choose the carrot of  some never-to-be-disclosed settlement. Morgan, tired of the whole ordeal and eager to get on with his life, will no doubt take the money.  Still, it's interesting to think about. At least I hope it is.
        Then again, I'm not a lawyer, and I know many readers of this are. Am I missing something here? 
     

Beheading wasn't invented by ISIS

     Humans are social animals, traveling like wolves in packs that became families, clans, communities, nations.
     As such, we have a tendency to mimic each other, and generally this is a good thing. Ogg wraps himself in a bearskin, we all wrap ourselves in bearskins, and find that doing so offers protection against the arctic cold. And so civilization advances.
     But sometimes it is not good. News this week told of a fired nursing home employee in Oklahoma who threatened to come back and behead his former coworkers, inspired no doubt by the atrocity that happened days earlier and 20 miles away.
     Is this going to be a trend?
     You could argue it already is. Three times makes a trend in the newspaper business, and so cutting off heads must be in vogue, what with ISIS beheading two freelance journalists and posting the videos, the horror leaping the globe to pop up in Oklahoma, of all places (or maybe that should be, “pop up in Oklahoma, of course” that state having established itself in 1995 with the Murrah Federal Building bombing as a sort of port of entry for foreign terror techniques).
     Not that it’s anything new. Beheading holds a special place of horror in our culture, as cold-blooded murder and desecration of the body paired in one awful act.
     Which is ironic, because when history picks up on decapitation—”caput” is Latin for head, it’s also where “capital” comes from—it was the kinder form of execution, compared to crucifixion, which took longer.
     Those hot to tar Islam with any brush available will leap to cast beheading as a particularly Muslim practice. The Q’uran certainly endorses it at several points, such as verse 8:12: “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”
     And history is rife with Islamic beheadings. Legendary Muslim warrior Saladin ordered the beheading of 230 Knights Templar in 1187; Turkish invaders beheading 800 Catholic martyrs in Otranto, Italy in 1480.
     Saudi Arabia still allows beheading and had a surge of such executions in August.
     But in order to consider decapitation an Islamic atrocity, we have to ignore a solid thousand years of other history; England kept its headsmen busy for centuries, even managing to behead its king, Charles I, on Jan. 30, 1649 (a groan went up from the crowd when the ax fell, but onlookers still lined up to dip handkerchiefs in the royal blood, as mementoes, a 17th-century version of the selfie).
     No Muslim nation embraced decapitation with the zeal shown by those arbiters of Western culture, the French, who invented the guillotine and then kept it busy on what is now the Place de la Concorde, using it to kill as many as 40,000 French citizens. Beheadings became entertainment, with programs sold listing the condemned for that day, and Parisians brought their children to watch. The French continued using the guillotine; the last official beheading in France was in 1977. England beheaded a trio of would-be traitors in 1817, though they were hanged before their heads were displayed.
      Nor should we be too smug in the United States. True, legal decapitation was never in vogue here (briefly on the books in Utah, never used). But that doesn't make our history free of the practice.
      In 1623, Myles Standish, of Pilgrim fame, cut off the head of an Indian chief and impaled it on a spike outside his fort, only two years after the first Thanksgiving. "That's the part we typically omit from our Thanksgiving myth," NYU history professor Jonathan Zimmerman dryly notes in his account of the incident.
      Given the number of protracted, botched executions by lethal injection, it could be argued that a swift decapitation is more merciful. No matter. Beheading is seen as repulsive, evoking visceral horror, shocking enough that a nation that had just extracted itself from the bloody quicksand of Iraq would go galumphing back.
      Murder is murder, and the dead are dead. While cutting someone's head off shows far greater zeal on the part of the killer than, say, shooting someone, we should by now be finally adjusting ourselves to the notion that the Middle East is an area where passions run high.
     I hope this doesn't become a true trend, that the news isn't filled with moments-before footage, and heads don't start being impaled on the wrought-iron fence around the White House. Because we've been there before. And the sad thing is, we'd get used to it. Again.
  

"They are the effect and not the cause"

Library exhibit, Vanderbilt University

    The benefit, and drawback, of writing for publication in a newspaper is that you have a finite space. About 800 words, of late. Thats good because it encourages brevity. You make your point in 1000 words, and then cut 20 percent which, when you're done, usually makes the column better, sharper. 
     But it is a detriment as well, in that you can only say so much. For instance, in yesterday's post about Simone de Beauvoir's views on race in the United States, I really could only introduce her, talk about her visit to Harlem which I found so illuminating, then wrap it up. Time to move on. 
    But thankfully, a number of readers stuck their feet in the door before I could close it.  I wanted to stride off to a new topic, but they yanked me back.  Joe Schiele, of Ravenswood, struck the archetypical tone—and truly, each is almost identical ("They don't have to conspire," as Gay Talese once said of the rich, "because they all think alike"): 

Hi Neil,      Great column today!!! You as a white Jew from Northbrook, and me as a white Roman Catholic from Glenview, how about we take our wive's and children on a nice weekend stroll around 49th and State. I hear it's especially nice around midnight :-)     Wish Madame Bouvier(sp?) could join us, but since she's long gone and obviously unaware how much Harlem and the AA (generally) demographic has de-volved in our country, I'm not quite sure what the point of your column was.       I can't leave Mr. Schiele dangling in uncertainty, and Beauvoir addresses this very point, at a length that I could only allude to in the paper.        But here, online, we can let her build her argument to help illuminate Mr. Schiele. And though it will certainly be lost on him, we can still benefit:        "The black problem,' Beauvoir writes, "is first of all a white problem. To understand it, you must start there. It was whites who brought black slaves to America (around four hundred thousand of them in 1802, when the slave trade was legal and nearly as many—illegally—between 1808 and 1860). It was whites who fought each other to decide whether to maintain or abolish slavery. Today, there are thirteen million blacks, but they possess only a tiny portion of the country's economic wealth, and they have almost no political influence. It is whites who assign them their place: their way of life is a secondary reaction to the situation created by the white majority."       Of course she wrote this in 1947, and things have changed. Now there are 40 million African Americans, and a black president, but otherwise what she said about wealth and political power hold true. There has been a struggle for Civil Rights and things are different. But they are not—as Mr. Schiele's comments reflect—really that different, and in some ways they are worse, as it is easy for people such as my complaining readers to dismiss the current situation of African Americans are entirely their fault.        Even though, as Beauvoir continues:      "No one claims that their conditions or opportunities are equal to those of whites..."      Inferior schools, lack of capital, lack of access to jobs, uneven law enforcement, judicial system stacked against them, all of these are shrugged off—how else otherwise could we see a return to voting restrictions? Not quite the cynical poll taxes and "grandfather clauses" which Beauvoir details, but close enough. None of this keeps my readers such as Mr. Schiele from mockingly washing their hands. That too is part of a long tradition.     "But many racists, ignoring the rigors of science, insist on declaring that even if the physiological reasons haven't been established, that fact is that blacks are inferior to whites"—the term Schiele uses is "de-volved"—"You only have to travel through America to be convinced of it. But what does the verb 'to be' mean? Does it define an immutable substance, like oxygen? Or does it describe a moment in a situaton that has evolved, like every human situation? The best answer to this accusation was provided by Jefferson, speaking of white Americans, who had been put down by Old World Europeans for lacking a historical past or any constructive force, for not having produced any outstanding figures in the arts or sciences. "We have not yet had our opportunities," he essentially said. "First let us exist; then we can be asked to prove ourselves."       That in essence is my view of the situation of blacks today. Not enough time has passed since the enormous wrongs visited upon them. The little change we've managed, at enormous effect, makes us fancy that much has changed, and it hasn't.       She goes on, but my newspaper training tells me it is time to draw to a close. You really should read the book. But a final thought, addressing my reader's sneer at crime in black areas—all of which I have spent time in, with no ill effect, doing my job. (And yes, brought my wife and kids, after dark, to no ill effect).      "Their crime rate is a little higher than that of whites in part because they are treated with unequal severity, in part because their poverty allows them neither legal nor illegal defense against the arbitrariness of the police, and in part because they almost all have a wretched standard of living and a social status that makes them view the white legal system as merely a detested constraint," Beauvoir writes. "Finally, if in the big cities so many blacks are found in the lower depths of society, it's because there are so few economic outlets open to them that they're forced to live by their wits. The faults and defects attributed to blacks really are created by the terrible handicaps of segregation and discrimination; they are the effect and not the cause of the white attitude toward black people."      "They are the effect and not the cause of the white attitude toward black people." If that, if the entire final paragraph, is not as true today as it was in 1947 well, then maybe Mr. Schiele or one of his identical soulmates can write a second time and explain to me why it isn't.             Photo atop blog: Vanderbilt Library, Nashville, Tennessee.

Beauvoir's thoughts on race echo today

Simone de Beauvoir, 1948 (photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson)

     Every night I go to bed with a French woman. My wife doesn’t mind, because the French woman is dead.
     So I’m not climbing under the covers with Simone de Beauvoir, herself, alas, but with her book, “America Day by Day,” an account of her visit to the United States for a four-month lecture tour in 1947.
     To be honest, I was only vaguely familiar with Beauvoir: some kind of existentialist, lover of Jean-Paul Sartre, pioneering feminist author of “The Second Sex” — still more than most know (“She’s related to Jackie Kennedy, right?” a friend asked). I can’t put on airs; I hadn’t read a word of hers. But my co-author, Sara Bader, has, and in checking sources for our upcoming book, I called up “America Day by Day” on Google. I started to read around the lines we quote and was hooked. I married a really smart woman, but Beauvoir is a really, really smart woman.
     Off to the library I trotted. And they say you can’t find books serendipitously online.
     At first I thought the book’s charm would be her quirky Gallic views on American life, such as her delight at drinking scotch, which she calls “one of the keys to America,” or her baffled rejection of ear muffs:
     “Men remain bareheaded. But many of the young people stick fur puffs over their ears fixed to a half-circle of plastic that sits on their hair like a ribbon ­— it’s hideous.”
     Her timing is excellent. She finds Los Angeles in the grip of the Black Dahlia murders. She can’t turn around without bumping into someone famous, whether touring Madison Street dives with Nelson Algren, who heard her voice on the phone and hung up the first two times Beauvoir called — she had been given his number by a friend. She called back again, and they became lovers.
     But that isn’t why I’m writing about her.
     Barely two weeks in this country and she’s at New York’s Abyssinian Baptist Church with her pal, Richard Wright, listening to Adam Clayton Powell preach.
     “I’m struck by the social aspect of his sermon,” she writes. “It seems less like a religious gathering than a political meeting.”
     That’s the first of easily 10 solid pages of observation and comments on race relations in America in 1947, and what really struck me, reading them, was how spot-on they were then and how sadly apt they are today.
     I can’t even summarize all she says, but her solo visit to Harlem must be shared. First she catalogs the various warnings she received: “Never go on foot” and “Avoid all side streets” and promises that whites venturing there risk the next morning being “found in the gutter with their throats cut.”
     Beauvoir walks alone into Harlem, noting “a force pulls me back, a force that emanates from the borders of the black city and drive me back — fear. Not mine but that of others — the fear of all those whites who never take the risk of going to Harlem.”
     Shaking that force off, she sees children playing, adults sitting or strolling. “There is nothing frightening in all this,” she notes. “I even feel a new kind of relaxed gaiety.”
     As far as her being attacked, “No one seems to pay attention to me,” Beauvoir writes. “It’s the same scenery as on the avenues of [downtown] Manhattan.”
     As she walks, she realizes something.
     “There must be some strange orgies going on in the heads of right-thinking people. For me, this broad, peaceful, cheerful boulevard does not encourage my imagination. I glance at the small side streets; just a few children, turning on their roller skates. … They don’t look dangerous.”
     Then it occurs to her what her white New York friends had really been afraid of.
     “The average American, so concerned with being in harmony with the world and himself, knows that beyond these borders he takes on the hated face of the oppressor, the enemy,” Beauvoir writes. “It’s this face that frightens him. He feels hated, he knows he is hateful. This thorn in his conciliatory heart is more intolerable than a specific external danger. …It’s themselves they’re afraid to meet on the street corners. And because I’m white, whatever I think and say and do, this curse weighs on me as well. I dare not smile at the children in the squares; I don’t feel I have the right.”
     Throughout the book she returns to black topics and areas, heartbreakingly in Savannah, where she and a friend do get angry glares and children running ahead of them, shouting, “Enemies! Enemies!”
     I thought, “I’ve got to tuck this away for Black History Month.” But that’s half a year away. Besides, one of the criticisms is that it’s wrong to consign black history to a single month. It should be year-round. Quite true. It can pop up anywhere. Even in late September in a French woman’s memoirs.

  

Hope is the thumb you suck waiting for things get worse

    Sharp-eyed readers noticed (okay, they didn't notice, or at least didn't mention noticing, but a guy can dream, can't he?) that I had two columns in the paper Friday. The first was about Rahm's ill-advised bragging about the busyness of O'Hare—proved all too true that day, when the place was shut down by a lunatic who set fire to the air traffic control center causing thousands of flights to be cancelled. Very busy airport, in a bad way.

     But there was a second column, that I wrote earlier in the morning, on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. I thought the airport column would replace it, but both ended up running.

     I didn't want this column to be overlooked, as I think it makes some good points, and am particularly pleased with the hope-is-the-thumb-you-suck line at the end. 

     Happy 5775, for those of you who celebrate Jewish New Year, if “happy” is the proper word to describe this particular, anxious moment in Jewish life.

     (“Really, the Jews are anxious?” quips the potato-nosed wisenheimer in my head. “As opposed to their usual tranquil state?”)

     Shhh, I say. I’m trying to be serious here.

     (“Oh, a Jew is being serious. Now we’ve really sailed off into uncharted waters ...”)

      Ignore him. Anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe. Jewish stores burn, Jews are killed in the street, Jewish centers attacked. Maybe not that much on historical terms, or compared to the massive horrors currently being inflicted in, oh, Syria, or South Sudan.

     But alarm can’t be written off to reflexive catastrophization either; ignoring deteriorating world conditions is not a survival mechanism for the Jewish people. To make sure it wasn’t just me being jumpy, I checked in with Richard Hirschhaut, founding executive director of the Illinois Holocaust Museum.

     “This is a moment of deep and lingering anxiety and frustration,” he agreed. “This was an ugly and sad summer. The world has gotten uglier in the past year.”

     Why now? That’s easy, no expert needed. The war in Gaza. Its leaders, the terror group Hamas, fired rockets into Israel, and Israel blasted them back, killing lots of civilians, to the shock of the world, which then let the beast of anti-Semitism off its chain.

     The logic appears to be, well, if Jews are going to attack people in the Middle East, well, we’re going to attack some Jews right here, give ’em a taste of their own medicine. Nuts, but there you go. Remember, to a bigot every member of the hated group is fungible, interchangeable, and if you can’t lash out at the bad Jews in Israel, well, this Jew walking down the street will suffice.
     Israel's actions are no more the cause of anti-Semitism today than a black person failing to doff his hat to a Southerner in 1935 was the cause of his being lynched. It might be the spark that touches off an explosion of hate, but the poisonous gas had to already be there, and for the Jews—spoiler alert—it's always there. A hundred years ago, when there was no Israel and Jews were isolated in villages in Eastern Europe (and, remember, in Palestine) that didn't keep the world from assigning world control to them, and cooking up blood libels and mad plots to rationalize hatred. What makes Gaza bloodshed unique is that it actually happened.
      The Palestinian tragedy isn't a cause of anti-Semitism; it's a result. If Israel's neighbors had not tried to destroy it in 1948, or in 1956, or in 1967, there would be no occupied West Bank and Gaza. Israel's neighbors didn't turn upon it because it was a new nation formed by the withdrawal of British forces (just like Iran, Iraq and Jordan, which somehow seem to be OK). It was because it was a nation of Jews.
     The sad irony of course is that Jews are deeply divided over Israel. No pro-Palestinian rally is complete without a contingent of "Not in My Name" Jewish traitors denouncing Israel for behaving like any country would. ("We're bombing the heck out of Syria right now, going after our enemies," the voice wonders. "Hitting any schools?") They remind me that in the late 1940s some Jews still found a way to stand with Stalin.
     The Palestinian conflict will end when the Palestinians are ready to form a country and live at peace. Don't hold your breath.
     "Hatred is so much easier than reconciliation," Lawrence Wright notes in his new book, "Thirteen Days in September." "No sacrifices or compromises are required."
     Thus the problem will come roaring back, if not in 5775, then 5776 or 5777...
     "Thankfully, this is a period of relative quiet now, but I don't think this is so much a day after as a moment in-between," Hirshhaut said. "The hostilities by all indications may come back, until the stranglehold Hamas has over Gaza is somehow changed. This does not mean there ought not be a cause of hope. There are moderate voices. We need to encourage them to make right choices."
     Sounds like something you'd say to a bunch of kindergartners, right?
     I told Hirshhaut that both ends of the Jewish spectrum—knee-jerk praise for Israel and dismissal of Palestinian suffering on one side, embrace of their cause and nullification of Israel on the other—mystify me.
     "You have to see the humanity," Hirshhaut agreed. "When seeing that humanity in the other takes hold and manifests itself, and begins to have traction in our daily lives, then I think there's hope."
     ("Hope," sneered the little smart-aleck voice, "is the thumb you suck when you realize things are about to get much worse.")