Cruelty to immigrants a game all can play — even immigrants

"La Soldadera" by Enrique Alferez (National Museum of Mexican Art)

     Since you're here, I assume you are a regular reader of newspapers, just like me. I get the Sun-Times and New York Times delivered at home, going through each pretty much cover to cover. I also subscribe to the Washington Post online. And the Tribune, though I don't always get to it.
     Many, many news stories. Most, you glance at the headline and move on. Others, you read a few paragraphs and quit. A few are worth finishing. Most are forgotten forever two minutes later.
     But every now and then, you read a news story, something clicks and you think: "That's it!" And you know the story will linger with you for a long, long time.
     I had that thought reading Emmanuel Camarillo's story (headline: "Ring of Ire") in Wednesday's paper. A story well summarized in the first sentence. "Advocates say the owners of a building across from a Pilsen migrant shelter have installed a loud noisemaker to deter shelter residents from gathering outside."
     But that isn't the really interesting part. The really interesting part is conveyed by two salient facts lower down. Two facts that might be missed.
     First, the building with the high-pitched noise device on the roof is used for storage but mostly vacant. So it's not an apartment building, where the baby can't sleep because the migrants are blasting merengue music.
     Elaborate spite projected against a notional harm that isn't actually being experienced by the aggrieved party — how much current American life can be explained by that? The desperate refugees arriving at our border are damned as "an invasion." No, what they are is an inconvenience. A logistical problem. A temporary challenge and permanent boon.
     Let's use a metaphor. One night trucks start pulling up in front of your house, offloading building supplies: stacks of lumber, bags of cement, boxes of nails, metal bracing, rolls of insulation. The stuff piles up and is unsightly. You can't give it back, so you grumble and hire trucks and rent warehouses and store it all, which is expensive and and bothersome. Until time passes and you start using it to build houses and make money.
     That's immigration. Raw material that built our country in the past and will continue to build our country in the future, unless we go crazy and seal the borders. Which lots of people want to do, even though it would be national suicide.

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A bullet to the leg put Chicago police officer on the path to the suburbs

Off. Angelo Wells touches the back of a car he has stopped for a traffic violation, a police
tradition designed to put a fingerprint on the back of a vehicle. (Photo by Ashlee Rezin).

    For years, I've been asking the Chicago Police Department to let me write something about what happens to an officer after being shot. Nothing. Silence. Then I met Angelo Wells. The Northbrook Police Department invited Ashlee Rezin and myself in, allowed us to sit in on roll calls, go on ride alongs, and were completely proud, open and candid. Meanwhile, the CPD couldn't even issue a comment, or put me in touch with someone in the department who could talk about what wounded officers go through. Transparency is a value in any organization. The results speak for themselves. 

    "I am God!" the big man screamed out the window of an apartment in the 1300 block of South Lawndale Avenue. "I am the man!"
     Then he started singing.
     What the Chicago Police Department calls a "domestic disturbance." A particularly dangerous situation for police to walk into, accounting for nearly a quarter of the murders in Chicago.

     Officer Angelo Wells Jr. and his partner had just come off a call and were leaving the District 10 station. They headed to the scene. Four more officers arrived. It was just after 3 a.m., Aug. 5, 2020.
     "Why don't you come down and talk to us?" Wells called up, framing the 33-year-old man in his flashlight beam. The man, on PCP, stopped singing, and started spitting at them.
     "Are you guys going to come up and help me?" a woman yelled from somewhere inside the apartment. A Chicago Fire Department ambulance arrived. Wells walked over to brief the paramedics on the situation.
     Five shots, in quick succession. Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. Wells took cover behind the ambulance.
     "Get down," he yelled, "Get out. Go go go." So the ambulance did, toward Douglas, leaving Wells exposed. Thirteen more shots were squeezed off. In two years on the force, Wells had previously been exposed to gunfire six times. The seventh proved unlucky — as he ran for cover, one bullet entered his right thigh and shattered his femur.
     "I'm hit," Wells shouted.
     Making him one of the 2,587 Chicagoans shot but not killed that year — including 10 police officers -- and changing the direction of his life.

Rebuilding a leg, and a life

     About 25 miles and a world away from District 10 lies the leafy suburb of Northbrook, where the police department is holding 5:30 p.m. roll call for five uniformed officers, Wells is one of them. The events of the past 24 hours — a beautiful early June day in 2024 — are reviewed. A woman locked out of her house. A man who thought people were following him committed himself to a mental hospital. An iPad disappeared from an office. A car blocking a driveway.
      How did Wells get here?
     "After the incident happened I had to figure out what my purpose was," he said. "I had to reevaluate a lot of things with my life, especially with my oldest two kids. Because they were old enough at that time to realize what happened to me. My son, my 11-year-old, was 8 at the time. To hear him crying over the phone, thinking something was going to happen to me. My son didn't want me to do this anymore. I told him to trust my decision."

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Off. Angelo Wells at the 5:30 p.m. roll call at the Northbrook Police Department (photo by NS)

Flashback 2006: Reparations can't fix problems of the past

Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment Memorial (National Gallery of Art)

     Mayor Brandon Johnson has established a task force to look into the city reversing the wrongs of slavery. Good luck with that. The obvious retort is that Chicago can barely run the present, never mind repair the past. Evanston does have a reparations program, which seems more high-minded boondoggle than anything else. I wrote a column for today — on the Northbrook police — but it was held for tomorrow for reasons of space. So, this being Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the freeing of enslaved Americans, I thought I would share this 18-year-old column — which back then ran 1100 words and filled a page. I have kept the various subheads, and the joke at the end.

OPENING SHOT

     Are you a victim of history? Or a beneficiary? Do the crimes of the past echo in your head? Or do you see farther, to paraphrase Newton, because you stand on the shoulders of giants?
     How you answer depends, I believe, less on your station in life than on your outlook.
     Though generally glum, I consider myself a beneficiary of the past, beholden to countless individuals who have gone before, from the Founding Fathers to Alexander Fleming to my ancestors to the guy who invented indoor plumbing.
     Their suffering and struggle turned sweet for me. I'll give you an example. Anti-Semitism was a terrible thing in Europe in the 1930s. But it got my grandfather on that boat.* If things were better then, maybe he wouldn't have gone, and I'd be writing this in Polish or, more likely, not writing anything at all.
     Their loss; my gain.

TO TAKE ANOTHER EXAMPLE

     In many ways, black people -- as a group -- get a raw deal in this country, compared with other Americans. Their salaries are lower. They go to prison more. Their health care is worse, and their lives are shorter.
     But if you compare them with Africans living in Africa, all that changes. Their lives are far, far better, by every measure.
     My guess is that the average African, scraping out a living in Uganda, would leap at the chance to change places with the most humble resident of the West Side of Chicago.
     Thus the slavery reparations struggle is a mystery to me. While slaves certainly suffered, terribly, their descendants benefit, tremendously, by being here and not being back in Africa. Why focus on the harm of the past and not the benefit?
     Bottom line: The reparations effort will fail, and that is a good thing. It both would not solve the difficulties of black America — it might make them worse — and would set a terrible legal precedent, inspiring other ethnic Americans to wander back into the past and lay claims based on historical grievances. Why couldn't Chinese Americans sue the railroads for their undercompensated labor? Or descendants of socialists deported in 1919 sue the steamship companies that bore them into unjust exile? The possibilities are endless.

NO NEED TO WRITE . . .

     Whenever I address reparations, a few readers triumphantly bring up the reparations pried out of Germany and German companies for World War II atrocities. Their assumption is that, being Jewish, I would support such payments.
     I don't. Rather, I find them unseemly — a kind of extortion, just like slavery reparations.
     Yes, there are elderly people living in poverty who once, say, worked as slaves in a BMW factory, and if some cash can be coerced out of the company to help them, great. And if Germany wants to soothe its eternal shame by giving cash to Israel, that's great, too.
     But don't be fooled. Nothing is repaired. The damage of the past is not undone, not by an inch.
     Similarly, slavery was too great a wrong, its damage too pervasive and — I believe — lingering for a lawsuit against a few banks and insurance companies to do anything. Ironically, those backing reparations minimize the very tragedy that inspires them, by suggesting that a check might fix things. It won't. We can't correct the past; we can only move forward.
     Being a slave meant that someone else was responsible for your well-being. Being a free person means that you, yourself are responsible, no matter the past. That is hard responsibility for some to accept. It's easier to sue somebody.

ABOARD THE 8:16

     I look up from my newspaper and lock eyes with a silver-haired lawyer who also rides my train. I flash him my standard, tight, I've-got-no-people-skills smile and am halfway back to the news when I realize he isn't just gazing at me, but also pointing and saying something.
     "Write a column about that!" he hisses in a half whisper, half shout, trying to communicate with me while not tipping somebody off. I look to where he is indicating: a heavy man in a blue jacket jabbering into a cell phone.
     "It's going to be a good week, a good week, we're going to see the football game Sunday, so that is good. . . ."
     I cup my hand over my mouth and do the same whisper/shout back to the lawyer: "I already wrote that one."
     Then I try to go back to my reading. But the guy on the phone has one of those voices — a certain timbre, like a heavily rosined bow — that just cuts through your head. I didn't notice him before. But now I can't tune him out.
     "Stotis is just like us," he says. "He's just like us. He's a good guy to have on our side. Un-huh, yeah. We'll have to concentrate on the meeting. We'll have to get that over to Near North. Who's his partner? I never met him. . . ."
     Why is it, I wonder, that people never say anything interesting into their cell phones? It's always what's-for-dinner and I'm-on-the-train. Why not . . . and here I slip into reverie:
     "Look, I simply must have more tritium! Un-huh. Tell Og to dial it up to 90 million volts and open all the valves and see if that helps. . . . Right, the magnospectrometer. . . ."
     Or,
     "But I am naughty, a naughty little kitten, and naughty little kittens must be spanked. . . ."
     Or,
     "I want him dead! I want his head, in a bowling bag, on my desk first thing tomorrow morning, and Reginald, try not to leave the hacksaw behind this time, OK?"
     By now I'm chuckling to myself, having completely forgotten about and tuned out the cell phone guy. A reminder: Annoyance with public cell phone yammering is a temporary cultural phenomenon, based on the technology's newness. We will, in time, learn to ignore it. I hope.

It's alive!!!

     This column passes under no fewer than four pairs of eyes, in an attempt to make me seem less flawed than I actually am, and to avoid lawsuits.
     Since I see such oversight as completely necessary, you'd think I would avoid public utterances that are not carefully screened.
     But I don't. The latest folly begins at 9:04 a.m. today, when I and other journalistic luminaries join Steve Edwards on WBEZ-FM (91.5) to discuss September's blast of alarming news. **

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     Humor is fragile, and trying to analyze it proves inevitably futile, like trying to study clouds by catching them in mayonnaise jars.
      Only Joking, a new book by British wits Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves (Gotham Books: $25), is an exception to that rule, not only commenting thoughtfully on the nature of humor, but passing on some really, really funny jokes.
     This one, by Carr, stands out, for its loopy simplicity:
     Throwing acid is wrong, in some people's eyes.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 29, 2006

* This was showing ignorance of my own family history. My grandfather came to this country in 1924.

** While not having much value now, I kept this in as a reminder that, once upon a time, I regularly was a guest on WBEZ. 

"It was a wild time"

     Both my sons came in town for the older boy's bachelor party, at a friend's lake house in Michigan. My concern immediately crystalized around the water — guys getting drunk, going boating, drowning. It happens. 

     A typical dad concern. I wasn't eager to mention it. Shutting up is an art form, one I struggle to master. Like all parents everywhere, I worry, and there is a talismanic quality to expressing that worry by delivering warnings about specific dangers. If you mention them, they go away or, at least lessen, and maybe even absolve you from blame, a little. I warned the younger boy: you're the best man. It's your job to make sure nothing goes awry. The point of a bachelor party is to set the stage for a wedding, not derail it.
     They left Friday. A cone of silence. "I hope they're having fun in Michigan..." I'd say to my wife, wanly, several times. Like trying to light wet kindling, but the topic died out there. Then both returned Sunday afternoon. At first reluctant to say what had happened. But eventually my wife and I drew it out of them. Jet skis. Fishing. Pickleball. Poker. And something called "Hand & Brain Chess."
     Despite a lifetime of playing chess, I had never heard of Hand & Brain Chess. It's a way for four people to play a game, two teams of two. On each side, one player is the Brain. The Brain announces which of the six varieties of pieces will move next: rook, knight, bishop, queen, king or pawn. Then the Hand makes the move by selecting one of the named pieces — a bishop, say — and deciding where it should go.
     Later, my older son was describing the weekend over the phone to his fiance back in New Jersey. He was sprawled on the sofa in our living room, so I didn't feel guilty listening in.
     "We opened to E4/C6," he said. The Caro Kann Defense. "Then D4,D5. There were isolated tripled pawns. We played to a draw. It was a wild time."
     I smiled, repeating that phrase to myself. "It was a wild time." So good to have the boys home, even briefly. I missed having their lives going on around me, and was silly to have  worried.

Let's all play 'Sit in Judgment of Ed Burke'

     No, I didn't write a letter about former Ald. Ed Burke to the judge in advance of his June 24 sentencing for corruption. He doesn't need me. Hundreds spoke up, asking for leniency. (Does anyone write in and say, "Throw the book at him, your honor!" I imagine so. Though people know these letters become public record.)
     Frankly, this seems a situation where, to coin a phrase, less is more. Two hundred letters. Quite a lot really. I'm not sure whether that is mitigation of undue influence, or dramatization of it. No City Council meeting was complete without Burke firehosing official declarations and honors in all directions. Of course, some would leap to return the favor. Manus manum lavat, as the Romans said. One hand washes the other.
     Though I imagine I could write a good one. First, I'd ask U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall to set aside Burke's personality. Being arrogant isn't a crime. Just as wearing $2,000 chalk pinstripe suits that make you look like an extra in "Guys and Dolls" isn't a crime. Maybe it should be.
     I can see the temptation to send Burke to prison on general principles. While Burke seems more shell-shocked than smug in recent photos, he is a known quantity to anyone on the Chicago scene: Burke strode about in a haze of haughtiness you could cut with a knife. The insider's insider. When Richard J. Daley died in 1976, it was Burke who commandeered the late mayor's office on the fifth floor and huddled with a few others to decide who should be the next mayor of Chicago.
     He was found guilty of 13 counts of racketeering, bribery and attempted extortion. In his defense, I would observe that Burke tried to stay on the right side of the law. The Better Government Association said Burke recused himself from 464 council votes over his last eight years in office, four times as much as the other 49 alderoids put together.
     So he tried not to commit crimes, or not be caught committing crimes anyway, which is almost as good. Burke dwelled in a hazy realm of near criminality, of lawyers dancing a hair's breadth over the line. That's really what we should focus on — it's the legal stuff that is truly unacceptable, not the occasional Ed Burke or Michael Madigan who gets careless in their old age and puts the squeeze on into a federal wiretap. Burke was like a guy who goes to Costco regularly to load up on free coconut shrimp and then, aghast one day to find himself there when free coconut shrimp isn't being doled out, simply shoplifts a couple boxes. Habit has made him blind to the key distinction; in his mind, it's all his shrimp.
     Prison sentences are supposed to be a deterrent — the idea that horse thieves are hanged, not because stealing horses is such a bad crime, but in order for horses not to be stolen. That's weak. You know what would be a strong deterrent? Give city council members raises, then forbid them to work other jobs. The highest paid alderperson pulls down $142,000 a year; not bad for you or me, but peanuts for a slick lawyer. We expect them to work side hustles, then flutter our hands in shock when they trip over the fine line between you're-my-client-and-this-is-your-zoning-request-to-be-judged-purely-on-its-merits and hire-my-firm-or-I-won't-support-your-variance.

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Flashback 2008: Father's Day

     I took a stab at writing something about the big stretch that the concept of fatherhood is undergoing for me this Father's Day, from tending to the shell of my own father, to twisting streamers and blowing up balloons, metaphorically, as father of my two sons whose weddings are rushing toward us. 
     But the essay was stillborn and, wrapping it in newspaper and tucking it into a dumpster, I instead fled into the past looking for something I'd written for Father's Day. This, from 2008, seems worth sharing.

FATHER'S DAY

     Coffee at sunrise is a ritual for me — hot, strong and black. One morning last year my son Ross popped up and asked for a cup. I poured him one; I didn't see the harm — caffeine stunting children's growth is an old wives' tale from the era when frugal parents would substitute coffee for milk.
     For a few days he joined me, and it was wonderful to sit there together in the kitchen, to clink coffee cups and silently sip, reading the newspapers.
     When he asked for a second cup, I said no. One cup is plenty for a little boy. OK then, he ventured, would I sign a note so he can drink some of the coffee that his teacher brings? Or could he take his own thermos to school, so he could drink coffee at lunch?
     "I need it," he said.
     They never teach you in rehab about what to tell your children about being an alcoholic, and I'm sure plenty of drunks and addicts struggle with what to say. The tempting route is silence. While overcoming an addiction is some of the hardest work you will ever do — I think of Virgil's line about fleeing hell: "But to retrace one's steps and escape to the upper air; that is toil; that is labor" — it is not the sort of achievement you typically brag about to your kids.
     Silence might be most comfortable for the adults, but it doesn't help children, who are invariably dealing with their own concerns and fears. But what do you tell them? Rehab stresses honesty, and that seems the best approach. Answer the questions your kids may have. While addiction is thought to be partially genetic, and the risk for children of alcoholics is certainly greater, it is not a preordained doom, and you can use your understanding of your situation to guide your kids. My boys haven't reached high school, the age where problems typically begin. But at least I know where to go if they need help; they won't have to wait 25 years before they take a hard look at themselves. I'm planning to tell them that while alcohol is a joy of life, drinking alcohol is no fun if you have to.
     Nor is drinking coffee. My boy's words in the kitchen startled me. "I need it." I took a deep breath and gazed intently at him, carefully framing my reply.
     "You know what happened last year," I began. "And the problem that I have."
     He nodded.
     "Well, if I've learned one thing being an . . . alcoholic, it's this: if you need something, you can't have it. So if you can drink a cup of coffee with me and then stop, then you can have one. But if you are going to have to drink more and more coffee, because you need it, then you can't have any at all."
     He seemed to understand, and stopped asking for coffee. I filed away that chilling phrase — "I need it" — and moved on. Father's Day is supposed to be about passing along traditions — fishing and football, golf and gardening. But not every tradition is a happy one. The key is to not be angry or ashamed, and approach the difficult family legacies with the same love, thought and care that you bring to the joyous ones.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 15, 2008

You be the ethicist

 

     Things happen. Unanticipated events — acts of nature, accidents, problems, confusion. Which is why we have legal and moral precepts. To help guide us when things go wrong. But they don't always offer a clear direction.
     Maybe it's best to just say what happened.

     Blufish is an excellent Glenview restaurant, on Willow Road. Good food, good service, good prices. A definite Manhattan vibe to the room, with its high ceiling and chandeliers. My boys love it. I do too, and go there whenever I can. Twice this week, to celebrate their being home. The first time, Wednesday, with the older boy. We both ordered chirashi bowls — raw fish over rice and daikon. I ordered an extra piece of tobiko — fish eggs — and he asked for an ebi, or sweet shrimp. One ebi. Tuck that thought aside.
     Friday I was back with my wife and the younger boy. I got the chirashi, again — I really like the chirashi. He got a salad with chicken, and ordered a sweet shrimp. The boys love sweet shrimp.
     The meals came — the waitress apologized that the sweet shrimp was on the way. When it arrived, it was not a sweet shrimp, singular, but eight sweet shrimp. We all looked at the plate, and immediately explained we hadn't ordered eight.
     "But I checked with you!" she said. I instantly realized what had happened. My son had asked for "a sweet shrimp" and she had asked back, "eight sweet shrimp?" Say it out loud. "A sweet shrimp." "Eight sweet shrimp." Sounds almost the same, particularly in a loud restaurant.
      She hurried away. We ate in silence. The plate of sweet shrimp sat there, untouched. Then she returned, said it was no problem, we should enjoy the extra seven shrimp, adding, "I'll have to pay for it." That brought us all up short. It didn't seem right. But we didn't know what else to do. I suggested she take the platter of food — $42 worth of sweet shrimp — for herself. No. But we didn't want seven extra sweet shrimp, especially not paid for by this young lady. We had plenty of food. I don't even like sweet shrimp. We left it on the table.
      I pondered what to do "Do you want me to talk to your manager?" I asked her. I figured, explain, ooze some charm, get the waitress off the hook. She said no. I asked my wife — maybe we should split the cost with her? Both parties are to blame. She thought not — we had ordered plainly enough. The fault wasn't ours. I decided to pretend it hadn't happened, paid the bill — after checking that we had been charged for one sweet shrimp, not eight — adding the typical 20 percent tip. She had apologized at the end, which counts for a lot in my book. But I left with a gnawing sense of unease. The meal felt mitigated, reduced. The misunderstanding might have been hers, but we participated in it, albeit unwittingly. Maybe we should have split the cost of the wasted meal. At home, I had to stiff-arm the urge to go back, slip her a $20. I'd never miss it and it might help her. But I shook that notion off. Maybe the experience would inspire her to get the order right next time. What do you think? Did I do the right thing?