Change is hard

 

     My younger boy is moving to Virginia, and in my capacity as a full-service dad, Friday I helped him close up the apartment that, last September, I had helped him move into.
      Not that difficult. Drag some furniture to the van.  Not much. A desk. A chair. A lamp. A coffee table. The new bed will be delivered there. 
     Carefully fit it all in, add boxes and laundry baskets and assorted piles of blankets and coats. The starter set for possessions to come. What someday trucks and squads of burly moving men will do—gather up his possessions to drag them from Point A to Point B—took us two an hour. 
     When I tried to convey this to him, he scoffed. He's never going to own a bunch of stuff. No need to add the contemptuous, "Like you." It was implied. Prudent investments instead.
     "Smart," I said.
    Afterward, upstairs, while he touched up a scuff on a wall, I grabbed a broom and swept. Something spiritual about sweeping, fine dust across a dark floor.
    "You know," I thought to say, but didn't. "I once spent five days cleaning the basement. When I went into rehab. The basement was dirty and it just seemed the thing to do. Almost like being in a monastery, sweeping that black dust across the grey concrete floor."
     But I didn't say that. Shutting up is an art form.
     What I did say was this. I had noticed some coins scattered across his floor. A few quarters, some dimes and nickels. 
     I swept them toward the dust pan.
     "You've got some change on the floor," I said aloud. "Do you want it?" 
    "No," he said. "I don't like change."
    "Nobody does," I replied. A joke. I glanced over for reaction. None. 
     So here was my dilemma. Does dad hoover up the money? At first it felt like a petty, peasant thing to do. Scrabble the coins out of the filth. It was his money, not mine (of course, all his money is my money at this point; might as well get a little back). 
     Still, his dwelling, he's the guy in charge. Do I pluck up the quarters?
     If, in a few years, when he's at a big law firm, pulling down the elephant dollars, how will he look upon this memory, his old father, in his laughable baggy cargo shorts, carefully lifting coins out of the dirt and scraps of the dust pan? With contempt, right? Rich people feel enough contempt as it is for those negligent enough to spend their lives doing what they love but never getting rich at it. Careless of them. Add to that the dubious light that falls upon almost anything your parents do. The losers back in Loserville, losing.
     Is that the message I want to leave to him, as he embarks on this new phase of his life? Leaving and most likely never coming back, except to visit. Dad scrounging change out of the trash? 
    I lift the dustpan to tip it into the garbage. And paused.
    I'm a frugal guy, Alinea notwithstanding. If he weren't there, I'd certainly sky up the coins. A buck's a buck. I did insist he start work at 16. Maybe letting money slip by out of pride is also a message worth delivering. Every quarter counts. If he's going to feel contempt, might as well be for this. 
     He seemed focused on dabbing paint on the wall. Decision time.
     I knotted the big black trash bag and dragged it downstairs and out to the loading dock. 
    "That's it," I said, coming back into the apartment. "Ready?"
     He walked to the door.
    "Don't you want to do some sort of ritual?" I traced a cross of benediction over the room with two fingers, held high. "Your first apartment?"
     He walked wordlessly out onto the street, I followed, letting the door slam behind me. In my pants pocket, the coins jingled. 
     $1.50, not bad for a few seconds' work.
     That evening, in line to order dinner at Once Upon a Grill, I held the stack of coins up between my thumb and forefinger and showed them off to him.
     "Your change," I said, dropping the money into the white plastic tip bucket. "They'll appreciate it."
     He smiled. 
    
    

Despite what Republicans say, they're fine with CERTAIN babies dying ...

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     When Republicans natter on about being pro-life and wanting to save babies, they're really referring to undeveloped fetuses. The dewy smokescreen of theoretical babies is designed to hide, to themselves if no one else, what they are actually doing: trying to impose their 16th century sexual mores on the unwilling, using American law to force religious dogma upon women who vigorously reject it.
     Regarding actual babies in the living world, however, they don't mind if our government contributes to the death of babies, particularly babies who are darker skinned and in nations other than our own.
     At first, the United States balking at joining an international effort to encourage breast-feeding seems like just more Trump administration water-carrying for the short-term interests of large corporations, long-term implications be damned.
     The ghastly situation was outlined Monday in a front page story in the New York Times: World Health Assembly officials were stunned when the U.S. tried to water down a resolution encouraging breast-feeding.
     But look more closely, and you realize this is not an abstract, economic issue. Just as cigarette companies, faced with shrinking American markets, turn to the less-informed abroad, so infant formula companies push their products in poor countries, where it is often mixed with polluted water.
     Tens of thousands of real babies die every year because of infant formula marketing now being boosted by the United States.
     The story was so damning that our president hurried to dispatch his usual deceptive tweet.

The failing NY Times Fake News story today about breast feeding must be called out. The U.S. strongly supports breast feeding but we don’t believe women should be denied access to formula. Many women need this option because of malnutrition and poverty.

     Nobody suggests women be denied formula. And needless to say, Trump has the rest backward. Few, not many, women are so malnourished they're unable to breastfeed.

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I love wordplay as much as the next guy. However...

 

    And people think "every goddamn day" is edgy...
    Wednesday I was leaving the Department of Motor Vehicles—after a more than two hour wait for a simple driver's license renewal; get on the stick, Jesse White. 
     There it was, in the parking lot. I raced over, pulling out my iPhone.
    But clicking a few pictures was not enough.
    I had to know. 
    "Why are you asking?" said the voice that answered the number a few hours later. 
     I explained.
     "It happened in a bar," owner Ross Reed began. "Forty years ago."
    "Seandell's," he continued, a bar in Lincolnshire, at Milwaukee Avenue and 22, now long gone. "As red neck as red neck gets."
     He was in the tree business, understand. Sold a lot of firewood. Firewood goes in fireplaces. Creating smoke, that billows up chimneys and, eventually, over time, dirties them. 
     "So many people were asking who I knew in the cleaning business," said Reed. The tree business cools down the in fall, just when the chimney-cleaning business heats up. 
     "One night I was out with the boys in 1980, and I said, 'I kinda like sitting in a nice warm living room instead of being up a tree in a blizzard,'" Reed said.
    He started the business with a landscaper friend, Kevin Winkler. A business needs a name. Names were discussed. A certain sooty pun was unspooled. 
    "They said 'No way' and I said, 'watch me' and it's been Ash Wipe ever since."
     Officialdom didn't blink. 
    "Oh hell, I'm incorporated with the state, my own trademark," he said. "If the government can accept it...."
    So can the chimney-owning residents of the tony North Shore? So does the name attract customers? Or drive them away?
    "A little of both." 
    But between the two, business booms.
    "It's crazy," said Reed, 59. "Here it is, middle of July, I'm absolutely slammed. I don't advertise."
    With that truck you don't have to.
   Ever find any interesting stuff clogging up chimneys?
    "Lots of times you find animals," Reed said. "The coolest thing I found is a letter to Santa Claus written by a girl named Sarah. The family in the house had been there 25 years and didn't have a Sarah. They knew the people they bought the house from: no Sarah. I could tell from the dolls and toys she asked for, the letter was from 1910, 1915, discolored from time. It had gotten stuck up behind the damper. The lady from the house wanted it; I would have framed it, hung it up. I hope she kept it. That's one of the cooler things. I've been waiting to find the box of diamonds that grandpa hid up a chimney, but it hasn't happened yet."

    We talked for a long time. Sadly, some of the more interesting things he made me promise not to repeat here, and I'm a man of my word. These rich people and their fireplaces...

     While on the subject. How do you clean a chimney?
    "Brushes," Reed said. "You send 'em up. "You do it from the bottom up, because if you do it from the top up you got no control. You push the brush up, with a vacuum running, to catch it before it gets out of hand. In some of those mansions in Lake Forest: white carpet, white furniture, white dog, white wife... you get one speck of it in there and you're in trouble."
     No doubt. I did not envy the man his clientele. 
     A cleaning costs $150 to $200, "depending on how far I have to drive." A mansion can have five fireplaces. Or more. He's cleaned the fireplaces of homes about to be torn down. He's cleaned the chimneys for artificial fireplaces.
     "You really don't got to clean 'em with gas logs," he said. "I tell 'em that. They say, 'Well, I'll feel better if you do it.' My honesty only goes so far. 'You got seven fireplaces. You want me to pretend like I cleaned 'em? Okay...'"
    Then, out of the blue.
    "I don't wear my top hat anymore. It's in a drawer, but I don't wear them."
    But you did?
    I started in '79. I have hats as old as I am. The real McCoy. I bought it because that's what chimney sweeps wear. If you see someone up there in blue jeans ..." 
     He paused, to let the thought sink in. "But if they're up there in a top hat, you know immediately what they're doing."
      He said that chimney cleaning began in Germany 800 or 900 years ago, and the top hat tradition began with undertakers throwing away their top hats and tails and chimney sweeps taking them. 
     We talked a long time, and I hung up with reluctance, wishing I had a fireplace.


  




     

What's something that women in prison just can't get enough of? Books

Perimeter fence, Cook County Jail

     Among the hardships of prison — bars, noise, other prisoners — there is the trouble with books.

     Prison libraries tend to be small, their books old, dated and falling apart from use. And in a penal version of the old joke about the food at a Catskills resort being lousy and in such small portions, use of these small, out-of-date, battered prison libraries tends to be heavily restricted.
     “Sometimes a woman or man might have access for half an hour every two months,” said Vicki White, a volunteer at Chicago Books to Women in Prison, a group that does just what its name implies.
     White contacted me because she saw that “Out of the Wreck I Rise,” the literary recovery book I wrote with Sara Bader, had come out in paperback — the only person in the wide world who noticed, as far as I can tell. Would I consider, she wondered, donating 20 copies for female inmates, who often struggle with addiction.     

Vicki White

 

    “Right,” I thought. “Like that’s going to happen.”
     Still, I was curious about the group. The paperback publication is significant to them because they can’t send hardback books.
     “Many prisons require paperback only — security issues,” White said.
     When CBWP was founded in 2002 it originally shipped books to prisons in bulk, where the boxes would sit in mailrooms, unopened. So the founders assembled a library — about 8,000 volumes now — and began filling specific requests from prisoners.

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'No doubt'

Thomas Hobbes

     "Scientia potentia est," Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan. "Knowledge itself is power." 
     Which is why this particular era in our nation's checkered history can be thought of as The Great Abdication of American Power, since we are in full retreat from what we know to be true, racing willy-nilly to embrace what our leaders wish were true.

     Accusations of the president colluding with Russia? A "witch hunt." Again and again, drilled into us. Before a charge is leveled or evidence shown. 
    Is the president a traitor? Half the country doesn't know and doesn't care and never will.
    The respected lawman conducting the investigation? Hopelessly compromised. The media? Fake. Except for news flattering Trump. That always seems on-the-level. 
    Does this contradiction bother millions of Americans? No.

    We act like what we don't know won't hurt us. When it can and does and will. Consider climate change. 
     The weather ratchets warmer, day by day, year by year, gradually, on average. It's hotter than it's ever been. That warm weather drives storms, fires. We see it all around us. 
     The nations of the world gathered, agreed to do something with the Paris climate agreement. It wasn't a lot, but it was a start.
    Then Trump was elected. And our country crawled before industry, in general, and the coal industry in particular, naming a paid lobbyist, Scott Pruitt, as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, a government body he used to regularly sue.

     Being a shill of the coal industry—a paid lobbyist who continued to hoover up favors as EPA head—did not end Scott Pruitt's career with the federal government last Thursday, when the president accepted his resignation.
     Trump knew what they were getting. Pruitt was chosen because he was a shill. Pruitt was Oklahoma attorney general and a hireling for the coal industry. Since the complexity of that phrase might elude some readers, I should elaborate: the fossil fuel industry paid him hundred of thousands of dollars to encourage the use of coal.
     Of course Pruitt kept that gravy train rolling even after Trump made him administrator of the EPA, while he also vigorously began trying to dismantle the environmental regulations put in place to keep the country from being polluted and the world from burning up, and urged Trump to pull out of the Paris accords, where the nations of the world had banded together trying to reverse climate change—the process by which carbon dioxide, created by burning coal and oil, collects in the atmosphere and causes the climate to become warmer . 
     There is no question this is happening. Unless you sell the stuff causing it to happen, or are in the employ of people selling the stuff causing this to happen. Knowing the truth, we could have done something, were trying to do something. Almost did something.
     Now we're just blinding ourselves to the problem, in order to maximum our short term gain. It's like burning your home's floorboards in the furnace on a cold day.

     As scary as this is, even scarier to see how it is perceived.

     I used to think it was just Fox News. But looking at the reaction to Pruitt's resignation, I happened across a Wall Street Journal editorial that begins: 

   Chalk one up for the swamp. The permanent progressive state finally ran Scott Pruitt out of the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, and the tragedy is that Mr. Pruitt gave his enemies so much ammunition.
     President Trump announced on Twitter Thursday afternoon that he had accepted Mr. Pruitt’s resignation. Mr. Pruitt cited the “unrelenting attacks on me personally” and his family that have “taken a sizable toll on us all.” He’s right about unrelenting. Dozens of reporters have examined every furl of Mr. Pruitt’s forehead since he started the job.

     Dozens! Oh my! As if scrutiny is a bad thing. The editorial mentions a few of Pruitt's more minor abuses and then lets loose with this startling sentence: "Mr. Pruitt says most of this was false or exaggerated, and no doubt much of it was."
     "No doubt." Could you summarize the requirement to be admirer of the current administration better in two words? You cannot doubt what he says, no matter how obviously incorrect, or contradictory, or petty. Easier to imagine a Deep State bogeyman—I suppose we should be grateful it isn't the Jews, yet, because when you're imagining a shadowy presence to blame for your own faults, it usually falls to them. Maybe that's coming.
    So Pruitt had to go, not for corruption, not for tearing down regulations but—as the New York Times reported—because he was coveting Jeff Sessions' job and Trump got tired of reading about his daily excesses and petty grifts.
    The Journal faults Pruitt, not for viewing his office as a personal dole, but for appearing to do so. He isn't responsible for what he did—that's the Deep State, the "collaborationist press" and the "left's environmental agenda." Not because he was terrible, but because it looked terrible.
     These people have "no doubt" their pieties are true, because it is in the financial interest of a few, who put out a lie, that their supporters slavishly believe, contrary to their interests. I wish I had the knowledge why, but I don't. Talk about powerless. 

The first 100 questions about Rev. Pfleger's Dan Ryan protest

     Rev. Michael Pfleger's anti-gun violence march shutting down the Dan Ryan was the big Chicago story over the weekend. It raised a lot of questions. Here are the first 100:

1. Who were the protests for?
2. Does anybody not know about the problem at this point?
3. If so, will they learn about it from this?
4. Or were the protests supposed to jar those already aware into action?
5. What should those people do?
6. Aren't those inconvenienced by closing the Dan Ryan the ones whose attention the protest is trying to snag?
7. Are they now more sympathetic?
8. Or less?
9. Did the mayor really suggest the march might deter shooters?
10. What dream world is he living in?
11. Is this crisis even a matter of caring?
12. Can we care the problem away?
13. Don't officials care more about the Dan Ryan being shut down than Chicagoans being killed?
14. How screwed up is that?
15. Did you answer "totally?"
16. How does awareness help, anyway?
17. Aren't residents of violence-plagued neighborhoods plenty aware?
18. What should they do?
19. Start jobs programs?
20. Is the march mainly for their benefit?
21. Ever notice how personal responsibility is rarely mentioned?
22. Is that blaming the victims?
23. Why do protests insist affected communities don't control their own lives?
24. Do they?
25. Aren't protests appealing to some higher power to fix everything?
26. Isn't that what priests do every Sunday?
27. Is question No. 21 a sign of white privilege?
28. Should this column have been written by a black pundit?
29. Would it offer different questions?
30. What are those?
31. Would those questions have more validity?
32. Why?
33. Or why not?

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Why do buried lives become important?

      Am I the only one seeing the ghost of Floyd Collins?
     He flickered into mind after those boys were trapped in a cave in Thailand, a dozen soccer players and their coach. 
    When the search was going on, as each day passed, hope dwindled. Then they were found but, in a cruel twist, getting them out was neither immediate nor perhaps even possible. It involved a six hour dive, in near total darkness, for children who could not swim. Found but not safe.
     Collins was the Kentucky cave explorer, on Jan. 30, 1925, he became trapped 55 feet underground, while trying to find a new entrance to the Crystal Cave. He too could be seen but not rescued.
     The next two weeks became an early American media circus, as primitive radio stations set up, barkers sold food and souvenirs. A reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, William Burke Miller, began wriggling into the cave to interview Collins, and sent out breathless dispatches: 

     CAVE CITY, Kentucky, Feb. 2—Floyd Collins is suffering torture almost beyond description, but he is still hopeful he will be taken out alive, he told me at 6:20 o`clock last night on my last visit to him.
     Until I went inside myself I could not understand exactly what the situation was. I wondered why someone couldn't do something quick, but I found out why.      "I was lowered by my heels into the entrance of Sand Cave. The passageway is about five feet in diameter. After reaching the end of an 80-foot drop I reached fairly level ground for a moment. From here on in I had to squirm like a snake. Water covers almost every inch of the ground, and after the first few feet I was wet through and through. Every moment it got colder. It seemed that I would crawl forever, but after going about 90 feet I reached a very small compartment, slightly larger than the remainder of the channel.
     This afforded a breathing spell before I started again on toward the prisoner. The dirty water splashed in my face and numbed my body, but I couldn't stop. Finally I slid down an eight-foot drop and, a moment later, saw Collins and called to him. He mumbled an answer.
     My flashlight revealed a face on which is written suffering of many long hours, because Collins has been in agony every conscious moment since he was trapped at 10 o`clock Friday morning.
     I saw the purple of his lips, the pallor on his face, and realized that something must be done before long if this man is to live.

     Miller won the Pulitzer Prize. Collins died of exposure after two weeks, days before a shaft sunk trying to reach it would have broken through. The fates of those boys are still in the balance.
      Why do such stories resonate? Collins would be followed by a number of others—Baby Jessica McClure, the 18-month old girl who fell into a well in Midland Texas in 1987 comes to mind. When children are involved, world attention is even more transfixed.
     Maybe it's the optimist in me, but these stories touch on something precious. They remind us of the value of every life. Experts from half a dozen countries, including the United States, which sent Navy divers, rushed to Thailand. It was breathless, front page news. The same children who would be turned away from our borders with a sneer of mocking derision were suddenly of enormous value—suddenly, I would suggest, be given the enormous value they deserve. 
      I hope that the boys are rescued, all safe, and reunited with the parents. And moreover, I hope that the world, relieved, sees the contours of a lesson in this. Why do people only become important when buried alive? Why are the lives of others precious only when they are put in peril? Something to think about.