Horrors of the Holocaust help teach ethics to Chicago police recruits

     The morning began with bagels, coffee and activities — stand up if you've volunteered, that sort of thing. Then speaker Kelley Szany, director of education at the Illinois Holocaust Museum, drew the attention of 113 Chicago Police Department recruits to a large pad of paper at each table and asked them to draw a line down the middle and make a chart.
     "Left side, how you see yourselves as officers," she said. "Right side, how you think others see you."
     That took five minutes. Then she went around the room, asking one recruit from each table to stand and read what they had written.
     Cops see themselves as professional, fair, heroes, leaders, brave, respectful, loyal, sharp-looking, dedicated, motivated, honorable, helpful, caring, comical, authoritative, among other qualities.
     The public, however, sees them as aggressive, unfair, rude, selfish, power-hungry, robotic, corrupt, biased, lazy, bullies, violent, drunks, racist, killers, overweight . . . plus a few positive qualities, like courageous and trustworthy.
     It seemed an odd exercise, here at the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, a summer camp icebreaker, particularly when they were urged to "please use your police voices." Something soon forgotten in the grim journey the officers-to-be, all in their 20s and 30s, were about to take.
     But we would circle back to it during the "Law Enforcement & Democracy Initiative," a unique day of ethics training given to CPD recruits.
     Szany walked them through the role the police played in the German Republic becoming the Nazi Third Reich. She passed around photos of street scenes, of officers with dogs, of police publicly humiliating mixed-religion couples.
     "What sort of police functions do you see happening in these photographs?" she asked, explaining the process of eroding civil rights.
     "When we look at the Holocaust, when we look at genocide as a whole. . . . What we know is that genocide does not happen in a vacuum," Szany said. "Genocide always unfolds in almost an evolution, and in stages, and at every point in these stages . . . we as citizens can choose how we are going to respond. Individuals, organizations and governments can choose how they want to respond. . . . We are going to learn, even if you do not think it is possible to say 'No, I will not participate' it is possible."
     They toured the museum, opened in 2009, following a path that moved Europe's Jews from warm scenes of family life to being an ostracized, ghettoized, terrorized, then murdered minority.
     The recruits listened carefully and were obviously affected. At least one couldn't eat her box lunch.
     "They get why they're here," said a 28-year-old recruit. "The parallels are frightening."
     She was one of several Polish immigrant recruits. (The police department asked me not to use their names because they haven't been vetted as department spokespeople.)
     "I'm from Lublin," she said. "I would pass the Majdanek concentration camp every day on my way to school. [When the program began] I was thinking, 'What does this have to do with my police work?'"
     Then she made the connection.
     "It might happen, even here."
     In the afternoon, they heard a terrifying account from a Polish survivor, Aaron Elster, who lived for two years, hidden in a windowless tin attic. Perhaps the most unsettling moment was a 2009 "60 Minutes" report, "The Bad Samaritan," about David Cash, a college student who looked the other way while his best friend raped and murdered a 7-year-old in the restroom of a Las Vegas casino.
     Retired police Sgt. Diane Shaw connected the dots: the way the German police went along with inflicting horror and how police today go along with wrongs around them, making Chicago what one expert called "the capital of the Code of Silence."
     "How willing are we to lie for somebody, to protect them?" Shaw asked. "Or rationalize things to ourselves. [David Cash] had a code of silence. Do you think there were people who remained silent during the Holocaust? They didn't speak out, for any reason."
     "That was a huge surprise," said one recruit, a 38-year-old former bricklayer. "Now I see how they are tying it all in. It fits like a glove."
     To watch the 113 recruits—military disciplined, polite, attentive, smart, sincere, well-intentioned—inspires some hope for the future of our troubled department. But only some. They have another training ahead of them, the training of the street, even longer, more intensive, and you have to wonder if their day in Skokie will stay with them. The organizers pressed the cadets to retain that positive self-image, to always be the officer they saw when they looked at themselves that morning.
     "How you see yourselves, you were right on target," said Shaw, displaying a few charts. "You are proud. You should be. Honest and courageous. These are things you should continue to strive to be. Sometimes this gets tough. . . . You are the authority figure. [Hitler] used the uniform for the worst possible way. If he can use the uniform to the worst, how can you use your uniform for the best? The challenge is, what can you do to change your world? You're going to go to a district, to a watch, to a beat. When you get to those places, how are you going to change that part of the world for the better? How are you going to use your police uniform and your police powers for the better?"

Holocaust survivor Aaron Elster shares his experience with Chicago Police recruits.

Next they'll leave you a mop and a bucket

     We're used to clicking on buttons online. Sending emails, ordering products, answering questions. 
      And we're used to the on-line world intruding upon what is still thought of as Real Life—we all carry a smart phone and pull it out at idle moments and gape at it, as if we're expecting to find the answer to our unease there.
     But suddenly finding the on-line world's feedback buttons in tangible reality; this seemed something new. In a men's room in Navy Pier. The choices, in case you can't read the photo, are, if "The restroom is clean and properly supplied," press the green button. If "The restroom needs supplies," press the yellow button and, should "The restroom needs cleaning," press red.
     Initially charmed by novelty and the let's-pitch-in-and-put-on-a-show quality of the thing, and by the fact the new bathroom, with its cool grey tiles, was indeed clean and supplied, I pressed the green button. 
     Not realizing, first, that I was undoing the whole washing-hands thing by touching the green button. And second that I was also being dragooned into unpaid janitorial service. 
     Right now, the economic model is that an employee is hired to clean the restrooms, and part of that job is determining when the rest rooms need to be cleaned and re-stocked. This button system, cute though it may be, is like scanning your purchases at CVS or the Huffington Post gulling its readers to write the posts they then read. The first step into a new way where mops and buckets and rags and cleaner are stacked in the corner and if customers want a clean john at Navy Pier, they clean it themselves.
    The devices, by the way, are called "Smiley Boxes," are powered by batteries, and use low power radio waves to communicate with a central location. They're the creation of a Swiss firm called FeedbackNow, 16 years old with hundreds of customers. They're part of "The Internet of Things," keys that tell you where they are, refrigerators that order milk when it runs low, that sort of thing.
    There is something charming to that notion as well, a reminder that we are not atomized individuals, but part of a greater system and we can help out. If I had to summarize the cause of Donald Trump's advent in one sentence, I'd say, "Americans forgot they're all part of the same society." Thus they look to their own narrow interests, frame every problem as a matter of maximizing their own convenience and the rest can go hang. 
    But who are we helping by providing feedback to keep the bathrooms clean? Not the dwindling number of janitors. These buttons frame the bathroom problem this way: how can we know when the toilet paper is out without having an actual employee check? 
     The problem could be framed a different way. For instance: how can bathrooms be kept clean while employing the maximum number of people? Stated that way, we could look to how they do it in certain European countries, where you'd expect some elderly pensioner to be sitting stoically on a chair in the corner of the bathroom, keeping an eye on things, collecting centimes on a plate. Not the glamorous retired life we see in financial planning commercials, but it would solve a lot of problems for the idle, lonely elderly while raising the general condition of bathrooms. We could have clean bathrooms because every hour somebody on salary with health insurance and a pension comes by and cleans it. 
     Sadly, we don't seem to frame our problems in how to create the best advantage for the greatest number, but how to do what is necessary as cheaply as possible to that even more money can flow to fewer and fewer lucky individuals. And we see how well that is working.

Go see Frank Babbitt perform "A Christmas Carol" at 2 p.m.

   

     We met four friends Friday night at the Winnetka Community House to see Frank Babbitt perform a dramatic reading of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." It was a lovely evening, just like before — Edie and I saw him do it a couple years ago, and were keen to go back, and felt obligated to press others to go with us. 
     It's a natural reaction. After we heard Frank's powerful, thrilling performance, falling easily into the voices of Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, Marley's ghost, Tiny Tim, and all the other marvelous characters in the tale, punctuated by passages of carols and dances and tunes played on the viola—Frank is a violist at the Lyric Opera—Edie said exactly what she said last time, "He needs better publicity."
    It's not that the performance wasn't well-attended. It was. Thirty people or so, filling out the small, intimate space, more or less. But they could have had a few dozen more.  There should have been.
    Consider this. Tickets are $10. You don't have to haul downtown. You don't have to pay to park. You can buy tickets at the door. Ten bucks. They give you coffee and sweets. You hear a deathless classic tale—based on the 1868 reading copy written by Dickens himself— read by a masterful actor who is also a world class musician. You get to laugh—Dickens is very funny. And cry, over poor Tiny Tim. Oh, and it'll get you in the proper Christmas spirit and remind you that, even if you are not a Scrooge-caliber jerk, there is always time to be a better person. 
     Quite a lot, really. There really should be people hanging from the rafters when he does this—and Saturday afternoon, Dec. 17 at 2 p.m. is the last time he's doing it this year. I'm tempted to go and I saw it last night. 
     Anyway, whatever you're planning to do this afternoon, if you're within 25 miles of Winnetka, you won't have nearly as much memorable fun as if you decide, aw what the heck, you'll go hear Frank deliver "A Christmas Carol." You can't say you weren't told. You can find details about Saturday's performance at 2 p.m. by clicking here. Afterward, you can write to me about how much you loved it.

Eventually the truth sinks in. Doesn't it?

     What I remember most about the days after 9/11 was that nothing was funny. There was no joke to be made, no mitigating light remark to soothe the terror of such a sudden attack on such prominent landmarks—the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—resulting in 3,000 deaths of ordinary Americans going about their regular lives.
     And then the Onion came out, and offered the perfect story, under the delightfully deadpan headline, "Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell."
     With the dateline, "JAHANNEM, OUTER DARKNESS," it contained paragraphs like:

     "I was promised I would spend eternity in Paradise, being fed honeyed cakes by 67 virgins in a tree-lined garden, if only I would fly the airplane into one of the Twin Towers," said Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, between attempts to vomit up the wasps, hornets, and live coals infesting his stomach. "But instead, I am fed the boiling feces of traitors by malicious, laughing Ifrit. Is this to be my reward for destroying the enemies of my faith?"

     I did not — and God, it hurts me to have to say this directly, but we seem to have come to that place — believe I was reading an actual news report about the eschatological fate of the 9/11 hijackers. The Onion is humor, parody. Yes, occasionally certain tone-deaf dolts would wave an Onion story over their heads in sincere alarm—Chinese government agencies seemed to be particularly prone to this—but that was part of the fun. People fell for this. 
     It was only after the recent presidential election,  when the role of "fake news" in luring Americans to vote for the fraud and Russian puppet Donald Trump was being debated, did I pause to consider where The Onion and its ilk would fit in to this new landscape, with the deep credulity of our fellow citizens suddenly in all-too-clear relief. 
    Will The Onion be vetted as "fake news" and appropriately flagged so that readers who might think that Bill Clinton was actually dispatching vowels to the Bosnian cities of Sjlbvdnzv and Grzny, as the Onion reported in December, 1995, would not be led astray? 
    What a sad world that would be. How easily the perpetrators of fake news will either strip off the fake news designations or wrongly apply whatever little "IT'S REAL!!!" smily face that Facebook creates to reassure readers that what their reading has a relationship with reality. And what about the stretched, spurious, one-sided arguments that pundits — myself included, I am told — weave? Who decides?
    Here's a thought. Instead of vetting the facts, why not teach people to be more skeptical? To have a baseline knowledge of history, science and current events. To be particularly dubious about reports that tickle their own biases. So you don't show up at a suburban pizza parlor with a gun looking for the child sex ring you've been told that Hillary Clinton, whom you hate with the burning white hot passion of a thousand suns, runs there.  
   Journalists have been trained to do this. "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out" to quote the famous City News Bureau edict. We can train the public too. 
    Yes, incredible stuff does happen, and there's little harm in saying, "Really? Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature? Says who?" I remember when I was told that a suburban bank president had put a note praising Hitler into his bank's newsletter. "Suburban bank presidents don't praise Hitler in their bank newsletters," I said, drily, at first. But I checked it out anyway. Turns out, this one did.
     Consider the source. One reason fake news is thriving is that the Republicans, uncomfortable with the truth of their existence, have done such a good job of discrediting what is called with a sneer "the mainstream media." Even though that is the place most likely to reflect the living world. Which is why they hate it so. If there were a stranger sitting in your living room, and every day, as you came down the stairs to breakfast, he loudly announced, "You're ugly and on your way to do stupid things that will hurt your country," you'd hate him too, even if it were true. Especially if it were true. 
     That said, upon reflection, the idea of making people more skeptical is naive, because it is predicated on the notion—the flimsy notion—that people want to perceive the world as it actually is. When all evidence indicates the contrary: what they want is to dwell in whatever phantasm they find comfortable, and will not only decorate the walls with the baldest lies, but passionately defend their right to do so. 
     Where does that leave us? Carrying on as before, perhaps. Fake news has a value, as a parodic reflection of the world. It's fun. Last April 1, despairing of topping the previous year's announcement that "April is Puppetry Month," I considered not doing an April 1 post—besides, I was too tired of the blog. 
     Then I went with that thought, with a post headlined, "The End," announcing I was quitting. Every single since fact in the post was an outsized lie, from my claim to have 5,000 readers a day, to saying my column was praised by Carol Moseley-Braun, who despises me, to mentioning my column runs five days a week in the Sun-Times. 
     After it was posted, I heard from a number of colleagues I respect, giving their serious condolences, which surprised and horrified me. Including, the author of an important Illinois political blog, sniffing around in that I-smell-a-lie fashion we reporters have. Did I, he wondered, insinuatingly, really earn $10,000 a month from blog advertisements? I let him go on a bit.
     "So let me get this straight,"I finally said. "You're asking me about something in my April 1 blog post? You read something I posted on the First of April, and you want to know if that April 1 post is factually correct? Is that right?" I kept saying versions of this, and eventually the truth sank in.
     That's a beautiful phrase, isn't it? Eventually the truth sank in. If only we could hope that would happen with the American public. But it won't. Or at least it will take a long, long time. That is the truth here. A scary truth. Small wonder we're having such a hard time letting it sink in.

Bicyclists! If you want to live, blow that red light!

     For Mad Max messengers, tattooed, wrapped in chains and merino wool, riding their $2,000 titanium alloy bicycles painted matte black to deter thieves, a red light is not a command to stop so much as a gentle hint there might be traffic whizzing ahead, so they should put on a burst of speed when threading between the cars and trucks.
     I knew bike messengers did that. Turns out, most everybody else does too.
     At least according to "POLICIES FOR PEDALING: Managing the Tradeoff between Speed & Safety for Biking in Chicago," a new study by the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University.
     Turns out only 1 in 50 cyclists stop at stop signs if there's no traffic coming. A quarter don't stop when there is traffic. Red lights fare a bit better.
     Not only that, but the study gives the practice a big thumbs up.
     Which is a relief because, to be honest, even I roll through the stop signs and sometimes the lights.
     On my sky blue Divvy, huffing from Point A to Point B, I come to a red light, slow, and yes, I will jut a foot out and actually stop if there's cross traffic coming. If not, a quick glance left and right, a mental "So long, suckers!" tossed at the cars dutifully waiting, and onward across the street.
     Not only a way to conserve forward momentum — so important to tired 56-year-old legs pushing a 45-pound Divvy — but also as a safer way to ride.
     What might be dangerous, counterintuitively, is NOT blowing the red light.
     The DePaul paper cites a 2007 London study shows women are killed by large trucks at three times the rate of men, and they offer one of those Malcolm Gladwell-type explanations:
     “The Transport for London report posits that women are more vulnerable to truck collisions due to their tendency to be less likely to disobey red traffic signals than men. By going through a red traffic signal before it turns green, men are less likely to be caught in a truck driver’s blind spot. Instead, they get in front of the truck before it starts to enter the intersection.”
     I knew it felt right to blast out ahead of traffic before those trucks. The study also encourages the city to make such “Idaho Stops’ legal (so called because Idaho did just that in 1982 and bike accidents went down). Though I don’t imagine Chicago police are writing many tickets on rolling through red lights — about 1,300 tickets a year are written to Chicago bicyclists, the “vast majority” for riding on the sidewalk, illegal for those older than 12.
     The study also found what I already know — I love studies that do that: bikes are a better way around town. In 33 out of 45 matched trips between randomly chosen points in the city, biking is faster. And these were long trips — average seven miles. For trips of a mile or so, the bike wins hands down. Faster than a car or cab, which have to sit at lights remember.
     And cheaper. A yearly Divvy membership costs 30 cents a day. It costs $3.25 just to get in a cab, which I hardly ever do. I broke down and got in a cab last week, because it was 5 p.m. and I was at the Hilton on South Michigan and figured I’d race to Union Station and catch an earlier train. Big mistake. The ride cost $10 — well, that’s what I spent when I realized I could walk faster and get out. The only reason I took the cab, I realized grimly, was it had been so long I forgot what they are like.
     There is one hazard the study doesn’t mention. We are a country that, it is increasingly clear, is built on disregard for social order and on generalized envy. If bicycles are officially allowed to blow through red lights, will it be long before cars start doing the same? Leading to the kind of chaotic free-for-all that makes traffic such an ordeal in Third World countries. We do seem to be drifting in that direction, if not pedaling hard in that direction.

The Typo Department

 

     You know what I hate? I hate when somebody finds an error, a typo, a factual slip, in my copy, and then waves it over their head as a general indictment of myself and my writing.
     I hate that.
     As a writer.
    However, as a reader, it is a different story.
     Sometimes I'm reading along, reading, happy as a clam, and I stub my toe on somebody else's mistake. It stops me dead. Such as what happened Wednesday, reading "POLICIES FOR PEDALING: Managing the Tradeoff between Speed & Safety for Biking in Chicago," the new report by the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University. Friday's column is going to revolve around it.

     I appreciate the well-designed cover. Admire the lay-out of the "Study Team" page with its four authors and three designers. I enjoy the concision of its executive summary. 

    Then on page two, the first section, "I. POLICIES AND REGULATIONS GOVERNING BIKING IN CHICAGO."This paragraph:

     Although Chicago has received national attention recently for its bike-friendliness, it is often overlooked that the city has embraced and encouraged this mode for many decades. The city has a long tradition of investing in biking infrastructure, starting in earnest with Mayor Calvin Harrison, who created a bike path from the Edgewater neighborhood to Evanston and made bicycling a prominent part of the 1897 mayoral campaign. Between the 1960s and early 2000s, both Richard J. Daley and Richard M. Daley also demonstrated a commitment to cycling improvements, including off-street trails and protected bike lanes.

    Did anything leap out at you in that paragraph?
    Maybe "Mayor Calvin Harrison." No? Because it sure popped me in the nose. Based on the year, they mean Mayor Carter Harrison. One of the most famous mayors in Chicago history not named Daley.
    Yes, I know, to write is to err. Yes, I know I am capable of making the same kind of mistake and worse.
    But still....
    Calvin Harrison. Perhaps because it's in the very beginning of an academic report with four authors. Perhaps because it's such a famous mayor — really, it's like citing Mayor Harvey Washington.
    I sympathize with those behind the study — which I found useful and interesting and write about on Friday. But c'mon guys. A thing like that calls the rest into question. And at the very beginning. If you're going to drop hair in your food, at least have it in the dessert and not the appetizer.
    Writing is a learning experience, and I've learned, from this, just how vexing those mistakes are, to a reader. Next time someone plucks a Calvin Harrison out of my copy, I plan to be less testy, less defensive, and more sincerely aghast. It really undercuts all your hard work. 

The Russians taking us over was once a college joke

     Growing up in the 1970s, I often heard Ohioans mutter darkly about the Russians "taking us over." Which, even as a green Buckeye bean, struck me as insane. The United States was so big and powerful. What were the Russians going to do, occupy us?
     A reminder that Donald Trump didn't invent projecting your own flaws onto others. We feared and hated the Soviets as aggressors, even though we were the ones who tried to strangle them in the cradle. How many Americans know that, in late 1918, U.S. Army Gen. John J. Pershing invaded Siberia with 5,000 American soldiers? A daft attempt to overthrow the Russian Revolution. Of course they'd be suspicious of us after that. We were indeed out to get them, and had already tried once.
     How our country, so fearful of Russia, could turn around in 2016 and unilaterally surrender to Moscow, is a mystery. How could it elect this panting fanboy of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin? Then nod grinning as people do in nightmares, as he staffs his Cabinet with Russian flunkies like Putin pal, wearer of the Russian "Order of Friendship" and our next secretary of state, apparently, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson.      

     This is the stuff of jokes, of bad undergraduate humor. Junior year of college I wrote a brief graphic novel for the school humor magazine called "Let's Capitulate to the Russians," illustrated by future New Yorker cartoonist Robert Leighton.
     In it, the United States preemptively surrenders to the Reds. Suddenly the culture that can't produce a toaster that anyone would buy except at the point of a bayonet finds itself masters of what was once America. 

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