How the story ends depends on how it begins

     A neighbor—older, meticulous, German—was explaining to me how he takes plastic bags of dog excrement and flings them over his well-tended hedge into the street.
     The street we both share. Our street.
     He was indignant, almost proud.
     Of course there was more to it. The conversation had been about dogs—mine was in tow—and he told me that some people hurl their poop bags into his yard. So he hurls it right back.
     I walked away thinking, "Framing." How you begin the story determines how it ends. You include the provocation, and the reaction seems justified. Leave it out, and he becomes the jerk, throwing dog shit into the street. Which is true? Maybe both.
     We see this constantly. In his mind, Micah Johnson wasn't firing blindly at innocent police officers, Instead—again in his own mind—he was reacting to the Black Lives Matter movement, which keeps its view tight on those jumpy videos of cops shooting innocent folks. The cops meanwhile widen the frame, to include the violent neighborhoods they patrol, and wonder why everyone else doesn't.
     "Why are we just focusing on the very very small percentage of all interactions with police officers that go bad?" a reader wrote Saturday. "Why don't we start a movement that focuses on all black lives that tragically end? Lets go to the Southside and Westside and protest the shooting of all those young blacks by mostly other blacks....Can a liberal Democrat answer this question please?"

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Create your own reality

     The headlines Sunday morning were filled with tales of anxiety. "AMERICA GRIEVES, TENSE AND WARY," the New York Times announced across its front page. 
     Maybe so. It seemed a good time to escape to the Chicago Botanic Garden where nature is, as always, just nature. We must not have been alone in this impulse, because it was about as crowded as we've ever seen it: part the perfect summer day, part the dire news, perhaps, part both a lily exhibit and a pepper festival going on at the same time.
    As always the Garden was a slice of heaven, and not just for the plants. People of all ages, races, languages. "I'm not sure what that is—Romanian?" I whispered to my wife as we passed some murmuring Eastern European tongue. Lots of Russian, of Japanese. Babies in carriages, old folks in wheelchairs. A white, grandfatherly sort with white hair put a loving arm around an African-American boy, maybe 12, in a bright green soccer uniform and they ambled, talking. My fingers itched to whip out my iPhone and take a picture, but I decided not to intrude. Maybe taking an hour like this, to get away, is just another example of White Privilege. If it is, so be it, it was my privilege to take it and I am not ashamed to do so. This is how the world should be for everyone, how it could be, if we'd only let it

"Red Hot" variety lily. 

The Tea Party's man feints to the Left.

     To be honest, I did not know former Congressman Joe Walsh had a radio show, and never would have thought of him again for the rest of my life had not he posted a particularly brainless tweet in the wake of the Dallas police shootings, seeming to threaten the president and declaring a state of "war." 
    I remembered vaguely meeting him in a coffee shop four years ago, and thought it would be diverting on a Sunday to dig that column out. My apologies if it's overkill — with the way the news is going, I'll have some new horror to react to by this afternoon.
    Until then, notice how he blames the abortion issue on liberals, as if the Right trying to strip away reproductive rights from women were a Democratic plot. The general sense of squishiness and blame-shifting should be reminiscent of another Republican flash-in-the-pan currently enjoying his moment on the stage. 

     Rep. Joe Walsh is a charming man. Big, handsome smile, generous (at least to me), Walsh (R-8th) insists on paying for our drinks at the Starbucks on Delaware.
     And he has moxie ­— after I wrote a column about breakfast with Sen. Dick Durbin, Walsh was the lone politician to suggest the same.
     I will admit, meeting the Tea Party's darling was not high on my agenda. What the Tea Party represents — tear down the government out of an exaggerated concern for the deficit, oppress immigrants under the fig leaf of illegality, and in general try to drag the country back to a past that wasn't all that great the first time — is anathema to me. But why not talk?
     "Awfully nice of you!" he exudes.
     The Tea Party movement . . .
     "Here's the deal. There's such a misunderstanding of the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party movement is a good thing only in that it has gotten the country talking again."
     Walsh talks fast, and it takes a moment for the "only" in the above to register.
     "No," he corrects himself. "I mean it's a better thing than that. The country is going through a revolution. What I mean by that is we're having a grand debate and an argument and a fight about our core principles."
     Reagan's epiphany was: Starve the government so we can cut these programs we hate that serve people we hate. That's what's happening.
     "What you and I both know is we've got 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day. And they're not living until they're 63, they're living until they're 93. Politicians in both parties have been scared to frickin' death about how to pay for all that health care."
     What would be a fair amount to pay? What would be fair for Joe Walsh to pay in taxes?
     "I wanna say 'Yes, we should pay something.' I want a safety net, especially when it comes to health care."
     The question is, who pays for it?
     "If we don't figure that out, we're sunk financially. Come home from Afghanistan tomorrow. Get rid of the oil subsidies. Do all this stuff that I want to do and liberals want to do and it won't solve the debt problem. The biggest, fastest-growing piece of our budget is health-care costs for our aging population. Democrats don't want to touch it. They're scared to death. So here come Republicans."
     When it comes to women, suddenly you want an active government prying into citizens' lives.
     "The Tea Party movement, all we talk about, all we've focused on is the growth of government, all this spending, all this debt, and to a smaller degree our loss of perceived freedoms. I don't think we've been asked four times in the past two years about abortion."
     But it keeps coming up.
     "The other side's bringing it up. It's how they succeed, they think."
     Does that explain immigration, too? Because I seem to recall a lot of immigration talk at rallies.
     "I don't want to have a discussion what to do with 12 to 14 million living here until the government does the one thing it should do: Secure the border. You gotta stop the spigot. Right now, it's illegal to come over the border. I'm a limited-government guy, but use every resource we've got."
     Is it worth it? You're expending resources trying to stop something that's good for the U.S.
     He chewed on that. "You probably want the government to do a bit more than I do," he finally said. "One thing I want the government to do is enforce its laws. If it's not going to enforce its laws, it should change its laws."
     But wouldn't that be "amnesty"?
     "I hear what you're saying. I don't want my government to incentivize behavior."
     Such as by permitting of gay marriage?
     "I don't want my society recognizing any forms of marriage except for heterosexual marriage. End of story."
     Why?
     "I want my government acknowledging the best, most unique way for kids to grow up is through a two-person heterosexual marriage."
     What's that based on? Studies?
     "God yes!" he said, poking my arm — he does that a lot, driving his point home. "A man and woman! There are studies that show, when it comes to crime, education, drug use . . ."
     What studies? That just isn't true.
     "I will feed you studies. But the Tea Party doesn't talk about this. I've talked about this twice. Nobody talks about abortion. The Tea Party is 99 percent focused on the economic."
     It's been a week and I'm still waiting for those studies, which don't exist. Walsh is very dynamic. He believes — using facts if they're there, emotion and sleight of hand if they're not.
     "There's this notion that the Tea Party, we're these crazy cave men," he said. "All I'm trying to do is get us back to what I think this country was founded upon."
     I think it was founded upon life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet some people's happiness doesn't seem to count for much.
                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times May 12, 2012

Joe Walsh is an idiot

    Is there any situation that Joe Walsh can't make worse? As the nation reeled from the murders of five policemen in Dallas Thursday night, Walsh popped up on Twitter, blaming Obama and urging that he be ... what exactly? "This is now war." Here's the Tweet. 

     He does know that Obama has already served out his two terms, mostly, and won't be running again? Maybe he doesn't. Speculating on what Joe Walsh does or doesn't know is an endless task. Like plumbing the depth of a bottomless well.

     I remembered having coffee with Walsh when he last ran in 2012—I actually try to be open to the other side and listen to what they have to say, talk about thankless tasks. I'll post that chestnut tomorrow. 

    In the meantime, as an appetizer, the last time Walsh appeared in my column, from November four years ago.  Note the helpful, ignored advice to the GOP in the second graph. They can't say they weren't warned about how to avoid their current disaster. Judging by the tone, the presidential ballots were still being counted, but it was clear that Walsh was toast. I was a little giddy, thinking we were rid of him. But like a bad penny, he keeps coming back:

     Maybe this is like one of those Christmas movies where everybody gets a second chance to relive their botched lives, doing it right this time. Maybe Barack Obama will pull it out, and get that shiny new second term he always wanted, a true holiday miracle, freed of the political fetters that hobbled him from doing all he said he dreamed to do for the country.
     Maybe the Republican Party will awake from its long night of obstruction and pandering to its radical fringe. Maybe they'll announce themselves changed men and give Bob Cratchit that big raise and realize the government is supposed to do more than provide grim workhouses to punish the poor.
     And Joe Walsh lost. That can't be stressed enough. Joe Walsh, Tea Party bigmouth, magically removed from the Illinois political scene, at least for now. Picture Walsh the size of a bundled baby, his howling face red, as Robbie Gould drop-kicks him into the oblivion he so richly deserves. Buh-bye Joe, say hello to Alan Keyes and Jim Oberweis for me when you get there.
     Cue the puffy snowflakes, up with jingling bells, cut to young Natalie Wood, home at last. Christmas came early this year.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 7, 2012

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

        When I was in junior high school, I was a member of the Roehm Junior High School fossil club, that had wonderful golden yellow sweatshirts emblazoned with one of these friendly fellows and the slogan, "Friends of the Trilobite." We would go fossil hunting at the shale fields in Sylvania, Ohio. I never found one—I remember digging up a pathetic fragment, that's it. As an adult, I broke down and bought one, which seemed a kind of surrender.
    I'm not sure of the allure. I imagine I thought they looked cool. I certainly was very proud of my Estwing fossil hammer.
    Trilobites—the great, great, great-great-great (add a few hundred more "greats" here and you'll still fall short) grandfather of horseshoe crabs.  They scooted around the bottom of the sea starting about 500 million years ago, in the Pre-Cambrian era, and not petering out until the mass extinction at the end of the Permian. So humanity is going to have to do a lot better if we hope to touch their record. 
     What was their secret? Difficult to say. I'd guess at no religion or weapons, but can't be certain. There are without question 17,000 known species of trilobites, so they were working the diversity thing, big time. Something we might want to think about. Organisms with only a single variety tend not to endure, and I don't mean that as a slam at ginkgo biloba trees, which as you know is alone in its own division, class, genus, order and species, yes somehow managed to hang around for the past 270 million years (going back coincidentally, to the time of the trilobites).
     But enough paleontology. I'll draw your attention to the tableau below. 
     Where is this singular place? A bit off the beaten track, but maybe you've been there.  I'll give you a hint: it's not in a museum, meaning those of you who guess, "Field Museum" will out yourselves for not reading thoroughly (or out me for having bored you with all this trilobite crap).
     Place your guesses below. The winner, as always, gets one of my blog posters—I'll let you chose the year. Please don't guess if you're already been successful before, Tate. Good luck.

Dallas

Brent Thompson, one of the officers slain in Dallas.

     In the 1980s, when such things were still possible, I spent a Christmas Eve riding along with two Chicago cops in the 2nd District—the area around 51st and Wentworth. The central memory of that night is that I was scared—particularly charging up the darkened stairway of a six-flat—and I was with two cops.
     Police have hard jobs—that doesn't get said enough, because it's obvious, and because it's beside the point in the steady drip-drip-drip of abuse-of-authority cases we see in Chicago and across the country. When innocent black people are being murdered on camera by police, the fact that most officers are doing their duty somewhere else isn't particularly relevant.
     The difficulties police face is a fact we only only acknowledge when something like Dallas happens, when officers are killed in the line of duty and suddenly their perspective snaps into view—it's a job that can get you killed if you're not careful and sometimes even when you are careful.
     It is a truly shocking crime, because it cuts at a basic assumption in American life: respect for the police. The officers themselves decry criticisms that are leveled them, with increasing volume and frequency, thanks to the undeniable evidence of cell phone video technology. They consider themselves misunderstood, victims. What they don't realize is that these criticisms stem from disappointment: we expect the police to be heroes, we want them to be heroes, to do the right thing. And they usually are. But they are also human, and mistakes happen. Even those police who are caught on camera shooting people without justification are not, I believe, acting out of racism so much as out of fear. They're trying to get home at the end of their shift, and they know—unlike the public, they don't have the luxury of being able to forget—that not everyone does. Or they're hopped up from whatever chase or scuffle happened before the camera was trained in their direction, and they do the wrong thing.
     Or, sometimes, they're poorly trained or aggressive jerks. There's that too. This tragedy does not erase the dire situation we have with police and minorities in this country. It only adds a new chapter.
     The situation is still the same. Police have more power and authority than other people—they enforce the law. More so, they embody it, and if they feel they are being held to a higher standard, they are. That's what they signed up for. What we need to understand is that we are all, cops and civilians, facing the same problem here: how to combat crime without hurting either innocent people or police officers. Right now, decency requires we honor these fallen officers and their grieving families—look at Brent Thompson's face. A father and grandfather, he just looks like a good guy, and deserved to go home Thursday night, not to the morgue. Think of him, and his four other slain brothers in blue, and remember the debt that society owes to its heroes. They died trying to keep their city safe. Our thorny law and order problems will be right where we left them, waiting for us, when we're through.   Already, the various factions are trying to twist this horror to their benefit, with union officials claiming, incorrectly, that this is an outgrowth of disrespect for police, while critics observe that the shoe is on the other foot. That helps no one. What would help, if we could muster the strength to do it, is if we could only realize that, police and civilians, black and white, are all in this together, bound by a common humanity and citizenship in this great country of ours. We will all succeed or fail, live or die, together. When will we understand that? Not anytime soon.

Now covering knitting and yarn crafts

     So the year is half over, and like me, you're wondering how the knitting vogues that were ballyhooed at the start of 2016 are faring. You remember when Skeinoblog laid out its "Knitting Trends 2016: What's Hot This Year"? Just how popular were these new "super-bulky yarns" anyway?
      "Hand-knitting follows the fashion industry," said Cindy Cooper, owner of Elemental Yarns in Plainfield. "Yeah, we have some super-bulkies. But a lot of the influence comes from television shows, like 'Game of Thrones.'"
     Then there's the issue of sustainability, which...
     Okay, so I can't really devote my entire column to knitting. Believe me, I was tempted. At least I had the thought: I could be the knitting reporter, covering the yarn arts beat. As the presidential campaign veers deeper into farce, a bone deep revulsion sets in at the prospect of reaching my hands into the mess and trying to arrange its gloppy, putrid contents into some kind of order. Knitting seems so pleasant by comparison.
     On Saturday, Donald Trump retweeted a white supremacist graphic that shows Hillary Clinton against a sea of money and a Jewish Star. He does that a lot—tweets neo-Nazi tropes to his 9.5 million followers. That's why they love him. Well that, and his slurs against racial and religious groups.

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