Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Okay train fans—and you know who you are—if you're so good, then where exactly is this curved stretch of track located? Typically that would strike me as unfair—you've seen one set of tracks, you've seen 'em all.  But actually all the clues are there for you to pinpoint it precisely and, if not, well then I win, finally.
      The winner will receive one of my limited edition, signed and numbered blog posters, certain to become a collector's item someday.
       Okay, not certain. Nothing is certain. But I sure hope they might possible become a collector's item, and stranger things have happened. And if not, well, maybe you'll appreciate yours, a $21 value, should you place the scene above and win it. Remember to register your guesses below. Good luck. All aboard!

"The most difficult cuts I've ever seen"

     Illinois was 50th out of 50 before.
     Dead last, of the 50 states, behind Mississippi, behind Alabama, behind Texas, for services to help people with disabilities live independently.
    That was five years ago.
     Now dig a hole, because Illinois is going lower, as Gov. Bruce Rauner's new budget, unveiled Wednesday, chokes off help to Illinoisans struggling to get by.
     "It's going to be huge," said Gary Arnold, spokesman for Access Living, which supports independent living for those with disabilities. "Tens of thousands of people are in these programs."
     Sister Rosemary Connelly, the 83-year-old nun who founded and directs Misericordia, the North Side residence for people with cognitive challenges, did not mince words.

Sister Rosemary Connelly, and Terry Morrissey

     

     "The budget scares me very much," she said, "because they're trying to resolve a problem on the back of God's most vulnerable people. It's so unfair, if this is a society that really cares about people."
     In addition to community support, care for the emotionally disturbed, as always, gets hacked.
     "Mental health always seems to get cut first," said Tiffany Taft, a licensed clinical psychologist in Oak Park. "Because of the stigma associated with it. It's easier to sweep under the rug."
     Taft pointed out that, in Rauner's defense, this kind of budget is nothing new.
     "It's been ongoing; Quinn did it too," she said. "I think it's horrendous."
     Taft can't take Medicaid patients, so spends hours on the phone trying to find public clinics whose waiting lists aren't three months long.
     "They cut options to people in crisis," she said, "and then they wonder why people go on shooting rampages."
    Like many private charities, Misericordia, uses public funding, and when that falls short, must make it up the difference with private donations. Last year that meant finding $15 million in donations. With the new budget, that jumps to $21 million.
     "I don't know if I have that capacity," said Connelly. "We're worried about the future."
     And they're in a better position than most.
     "So many people scared silly by this budget," said Connelly. "Looking beyond Misericordia, looking at Catholic Charities."
     "It's hard to tell right now," said Monsignor Mike Boland, president of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago. "It'll affect a lot of our programs if fully implemented the way it is, it will greatly affect the most frail people in the state, especially frail seniors...The budget is balanced on the backs of every poor people. It'll affect all our early childhood centers. This has a negative impact, a very negative effect, upon all the populations we serve."
     Director of Catholic Charities for 15 years, Boland has seen austerity budgets. But never one like this.
     "This is probably the most difficult cuts I've ever seen," said Boland. "I never seen these kind of profound cuts proposed. It's just so incredibly challenging to all of us trying to care for people who oftentimes don't have anyone to speak on their behalf."
     For those long in the business of extracting funds from the government to help people, a common refrain is that the announced budget, dire though it is, isn't the end, but the beginning of the true battle.
     "We have a new administration; they've got a lot to learn," said Tony Paulauski, executive director of The Arc, the largest disability advocacy organization in Illinois. "We would like the opportunity to sit down with them and educate them of the importance of community living. This is the first step in a budget process that's going to go on four or five months."
     Access Living's Gary Arnold pointed out that one of the cruel ironies of the cuts is that since they dismantle programs that allow people to live on their own, they'll end up back in institutions.
     "You lose your independence and it costs more," he said."If the goal is saving money, we're going about it the wrong way. The right way is good strong programs that support people with disabilities in integrated communities and their own homes."
     Yes, Illinois is in a terrible financial hole. Cuts have to be made. But picking over the stories about Rauner's 2016 budget, all you see are programs for the poor, for children, for the homeless, for the mentally ill and physically challenged. If there is a cut that's going to hit businesses, that's going to affect rich people like Bruce Rauner, maybe encourage them to own five mansions instead of nine, I missed it. The pain is going to be felt by the sort of people who never show up at Rauner's cocktail parties.
     Sister Rosemary said she has to wonder what motivates the governor.
     "I think it's a real indictment of a philosophy of resentment [that] there are people who need more help and have to depend on the goodness of others," said Connelly. "What we're doing is important. I wish the governor would come and take a tour."
     Paulauski did mention a bit of good news: Illinois is no long the last state; it has climbed to 49th when it comes to providing community services to people with disabilities.
     "We're ahead of Mississippi," he said. "I remain optimistic."

Caution: Stupid Signs

    As if winter in Chicago weren't bad enough. Hard the heels of the bitter cold, the pelting snow, come these stupid signs set out everywhere.
    "Caution: Falling Ice."
    Caution? What does that mean? How is our caution supposed to manifest itself? What are pedestrians supposed to do? Look up, and get it in the face? As if looking up would give you enough time for anything more than "Oh shi...!" Turn around? As if you could navigate a route that doesn't include the signs, which are everywhere, so common that we barely notice them anymore. Cover your head? Veer off the sidewalk into the street, where the danger of falling ice is replaced by the greater danger of skidding traffic?
    What?
    Then again, the signs are not for pedestrians. They are attempts by building management to off-load responsibility for getting clobbered by an icicle from themselves to those walking by their buildings. And the signs seem to have some legal weight: building owners have an obligation to clear ice and warn pedestrians of hazards, and putting the signs out grimly informing you of falling ice are similar to the signs ordering you not to slip on  freshly mopped floors. Though why those signs don't serve, not as fair warning, but as proof the building owners knew of a potential hazard and did nothing, is a mystery to me, and I've quizzed legal sorts about it.  I addressed the subject last year, in a blog post about a man who was killed by a 100-pound block of ice walking into the Neiman Marcus department store on Michigan Avenue.
     This year seems to be the year that Chicagoans finally realized the idiocy of these signs, and started making fun of them. Over at the Wit hotel, the yellow and black falling ice signs contain a quip from Stephen Wright: "Every so often, I like to go to the window, look up, and smile for a satellite photo." I'm not sure how that applies to falling ice, but give them credit for trying.
    A cleverer sign is at the School of the Art Institute, as seen in this photo sent in by regular reader Tom Brashler. It injects a bit of whimsy into the otherwise obnoxious blend of threats of physical peril mixed with pallid cover-your-ass legalism. 
    I contacted the school to find out the back story behind the sign.

    "The signs were created by SAIC's Instructional Resources and Facilities Management team," said Bree Witt, a spokesperson for the SAIC. "We wanted to address the caution in a clever and playful manner, and also honor the fact that someone will inevitably deface the signage to form other words from "ice" as has happened in the past. And, let's be honest, in a city like Chicago, ice, mice, rice or dice very well could falling off the roofs of the buildings, so pedestrians should be aware of the possibilities. The signs have been well-received and it's great to see people taking photos and laughing as they walk down the street." 

    That must have been earlier in the week, when it was 25 degrees warmer. Right now I could have Jim Gaffigan walking on one side of me and Louis C.K. walking on the other, both telling jokes and tickling me as I rush through this frozen hellscape, and I wouldn't be laughing. But when the weather warms up and breaks, oh, 20 degrees, I'm sure I'll find my good humor again. 

Rock star

     It probably says something bad about Los Angeles, or me, or both, that when my wife asked if there were anything in particular I wanted to do in LA during our few days in the city, after visiting our son at college, the only thing I could think of was: "See the big rock at the Los Angeles art museum."
      Officially titled "Levitated Mass" —though I hope that Los Angelenos have the gumption to call it the "Big Rock," the way Chicagoans refer to our massive public sculpture, "Cloud Gate" as "The Bean." It's our God-given right to defy artistic pretense.
     I had seen a video of the 340-ton granite boulder's slow, well-planned 100-mile journey to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a rare unifying civic event in Los Angeles that doesn't involve earthquakes or riots, and something about the boulder's careful procession, greeted with exultation, tears and indifference, made me want to see the thing for myself.
     The mammoth stone is located above a concrete ditch and you walk under it, and my first thought was, "It's not so big." Perhaps the best way to encounter the work is unexpectedly, to see it on the horizon and wonder if your eyes are playing tricks on you. Which is hard to do when you go expecting it to be there.
     The Big Rock certainly isn't the communal experience that The Bean is; in Chicago, people crowd around, touching it, viewing their own reflection. This being LA, visitors approach at regular intervals, in small groups, encounter the thing, and leave. If somebody is having their picture taken by it, others hang back, at a polite distance, so as not to ruin their shot.

     Still, I was glad I went, glad that visitors are afforded the chance to pat Michael Heizer's $10 million sculpture (the rock itself was sold to the museum for $70,000, the rest was the cost of constructing a football field-sized transport rig, plus gas—15 gallons to the mile to run the carrier— plus the cost of crews snagging power lines, moving street lights, and generally clearing the way for the two-story tall, three-lane wide chunk of stone when it arrived in 2012.  Something makes you want to touch it, to register its solidity. (A shame the installation doesn't include a guard to shoo you away when you do touch it; that would be the perfect punchline. With art, grandiosity feasts while humor goes hungry).  And of course I had my picture taken next to it. You sort of have to.
     My wife, as always, not only read my thoughts but put them into comprehensible, concise form:
     "It's no Bean," she said. "I imagine the act of getting it here is better than the act of it being here." 
     Exactly. Or, put another way: the journey is the art. Without a story, it's just a big rock in an odd place. 

"A sea of misery"

In front of the Los Angeles Athletic Club

     My wife and I were walking across Pershing Square, a public space in Los Angeles which, like many parks and open areas here, has been occupied by the homeless.  She said she wasn't comfortable navigating this "sea of misery" and I didn't argue.  
     All things being equal, I would have preferred to stay by the ocean.
     But while planning the trip, my wife observed that we had stayed at Venice Beach a scant five years ago, plus a few days at Virginia Beach last summer, so we were practically soggy with ocean spray. I almost pointed out that half a decade is actually a longish time, and Virginia Beach was a different ocean -- facing right, at the Atlantic, instead of left, at the Pacific. But blue is blue, the salt water taffy's the same, I get that, and as she rightly points out, we are not beach people, though we are not step over the bodies on the way to the swish restaurant people either, which might make us oddities.
    The beach has its homeless people too. But not like this, to my memory.

Bradbury Building

      Like everyone else, we ignored them best we could. Our two days in Los Angeles were spent in the historic district, which, she is correct, is jammed with interesting Deco buildings that I did indeed enjoy, plus even earlier architectural marvels, such as the very Daniel Burnham-ish Bradbury Building, with its ornate ironwork, where key parts of "Blade Runner" were shot. There is a dynamic Central Market filled with food stores and eateries, the kind of vibrant place that Chicago's French Market tries and fails to be.
     We put in a lot of miles up and down Broadway—lots of Hispanic bridal and quinceanera stores, shop keepers who naturally hailed passersby in Spanish, stores buying gold to make into horrendous gold jewelry, apparently, a thriving business in phone cards and Disney towels and odd brand boom boxes.
     The place struck me as New York City in the 1970s, before gentrification took over. That's not praise, but a criticism. There were more homeless people per square foot than I've ever seen in New York, and we didn't even approach Skid Row-- I was all for marching over to personally inspect the armies of the homeless camped there, but my brother-in-law, who lives in the historic Eastern Columbia Building, assured me that was a Bad Idea. I only took one photo—the one above, as we were parking to check into the Athletic Club—but I could have taken 50 of the men scattered about, like corpses in a Matthew Brady photo of a Civil War battlefield, sprawled where they fell, eyes half crescents of white. But taking photos of them unconscious, in such a state of humiliatingly public abject ruin, seemed wrong, a final insult, and I felt so conflicted doing it once that I never could take another.
    About 10 percent of all the homeless in the nation live in Los Angeles County--more than 50,000 people, though the count is disputed. That contrasts to about 7,000 people homeless on a cold night in Chicago. The Los Angeles Times carried a story about advocates trying to change the laws so the homeless can more comfortably go about their business in public; my sympathies tend to be with the public, who deserve to have parks and benches for their use, too.
    The received wisdom about the homeless is that they are you or I without a paycheck or two, but the truth, with the Los Angeles homeless, is more they are you or I after being deprived of the anti-psychotic medicines we need for the next 10 years while being marinated in multiple addictions and some organic mental disorders tossed in for good measure. Seriously crazy people, too far gone to even beg effectively, snarling and staggering and sprawling everywhere. The narrowing of the middle class is much remarked on, but another result of the Republican War on Government is the hollowing out of social services, the results of which are only too clear here in Los Angeles. A humane society would treat its mentally ill; not being that society, we step around them while averting our eyes instead

Any time is Candy Crush Saga time!

    Most parents of seniors don't even attend mid-winter parents night at Glenbrook North High School. 
     The halls, thronged with middle-aged couples in the fall, are noticeably depopulated. Several teachers greeted us with a quasi-sincere, quasi- joking, "What are you doing here?!"
      Good question. And we have a good answer. We saw the first one off at a parents' night at Greenbrier Elementary, 14 years and change ago, and we might as well see the younger one through to the bitter end. We were glad we went, particularly when our boy's Chinese teacher started class with a video of him holding our heroic dog, giving a tour of our home in Chinese. The two other couples, both native Chinese, chuckled appreciatively, though I couldn't get out of them whether they were laughing at what he said or at the way he said it.
     The teachers, as always, were excellent—our older boy found college a breeze after Glenbrook North. I did notice this parent playing Candy Crush Saga on his cell phone. At least I think it was; I'm not an expert at hand-held games. Never played one. All these games look like little arrays of colorful dots to me. It could have been Fruit Smash, or Cupcake Chaos, or something.
     The important thing was dad was ignoring the teacher, passing the time in his kid's chemistry class by playing on his phone. To me, that's bad form, though I suppose the kids have to get it from somewhere. Still, we were only in each class about a dozen minutes.
     Not a big deal. Standards are so old-fashioned. I don't know which is worse form—him playing or me noticing. Our evolving etiquette seems to be that we ignore each other's phone habits. I can't hold him up to too much censure. At least he was there. Most parents didn't bother. They were happily playing Candy Crush Saga at home. So kudos for making the effort. I believe that a large part of success in parenting, like any other endeavor, is showing up. Though how you behave once you do show up does matter, a little, I like to think. 

Why care about El Salvador when we have problems at home?

Debra Gittler, in El Salvador

Altruism is something of a mystery to me. Here I am, hunched over, puffing frantically into the sails of my little bark of a career as it slowly settles into the water, while there are certain rare individuals who devote their lives to helping the downtrodden. I don't get it. Thus when I encounter one, I try to get at the mystery of why they are doing what they do. Plus, I don't have many readers in Central America, at least not who write in. So after I received a friendly note from Debra Gittler in El Salvador, and since I'm out of town, I asked her for a brief report about what Central America is like and why she's down there. This is what she wrote:

Hola from El Salvador!

My name is Debra Gittler. I’m the Founder and Executive Director of ConTextos, a literacy organization established in El Salvador, where I’m writing this letter, and also in Chicago, where I’m from and where I still call home.

I’m often asked, “Why should Chicagoans care about kids in Central America when we have the South and West sides to worry about?” 

Ironically, my two homes—ConTextos’ two homes—Chicago and El Salvador have a lot in common. Both are plagued by gang violence. El Salvador is now one of the most violent countries in the world with rampant gang violence that plagues kids in school and out. Experts say that if you were to superimpose El Salvador’s homicide rate upon New York City, it would be like 6,000 homicides per year.

So why would I choose to live in such a terrible place?

This is a land of contradictions. The gentle tropical breeze mixes with the third-world roar of broken mufflers. The air is vibrant with the scent of bright flowers and unregulated car exhaust. Massive digital screens advertising high-end goods loom over squatter communities that cook over firewood and have no access to water. You can get four homemade pupusas and a cup of coffee for a dollar at a local spot, or a $4 coffee at Starbucks.

El Salvador is also a stunningly beautiful country. My home in the city is only 30 minutes from the beach and an hour from the mountains. My patio looks over a volcano—one of 19 in the country—and yes, I leave my doors open to the outside all day and night, every day and night. The temperature never strays far from 85 degrees.

Right now is sugar cane harvest, and part of the process is burning the cane fields. At night, you can see the mountainside on fire. Ash floats on the air and settles everywhere. I like to pretend the ash is from the volcanoes…

Last week, Central America popped up in the international news when Vice President Joe Biden announced: A Plan for Central America: "As we were reminded last summer when thousands of unaccompanied children showed up on our southwestern border, the security and prosperity of Central America are inextricably linked with our own."

How so? I first moved to Central America eight years ago. After three years as a teacher in the South Bronx, I came here to work in education reform. You’d think that “first-world” and “third world” poverty would be so different. But in fact, I could see the connections that Biden refers to—the kids in my classroom in the States were the same that I served in Central America, the educational culture that I fought was the same in both places. I also noticed that traditional bi-lateral efforts for development just weren’t enough to make sustainable change. So I founded ConTextos to fill an obvious gap: provide books and training to schools.

Here in Central America many adults never had the opportunity to read. In schools today, kids lack access to books and learn via rote memorization, copy and dictation. ConTextos changes this paradigm. We establish school libraries and train teachers so that kids develop authentic literacy skills such as deep-thinking, analysis, interpretation and creativity. These are the skills not just to be a better reader, they’re the skills necessary to be a more active member of an effective society.

Whatever happens in US immigration reform, part of the solution must involve investing in education and the social sector in the countries of origin. That’s why ConTextos’ is seeking support to expand into Guatemala and Honduras. This region, now the most violent in the region, needs help. And ConTextos is helping.

While there are hundreds of people with profiles like mine working in Chicago and throughout the States to improve education, Central America has a terrible dearth of educational NGOs. And the best part: our work is incredibly affordable to donors and foundations. It costs just $5,000/year per school for us to create a school library and provide a year’s worth of training.

Neil, I hope you’ll reach out to your readers to help us raise awareness (and money) in Chicago. Investing in education as a tool to combat violence and create opportunity isn’t a question of either the West side or international; it means investing in both. And what better way than through a Chicago-based organization.

You can learn more about ConTextos at contextos.org and vimeo.com/contextos. ConTextos is a Chicago business making huge strides in one of the most fragile, volatile regions of the world. I hope you’ll let your readers know about us!