We can't kill our way out of our healthcare woes.

 

"The Gates of Hell," Auguste Rodin (Rodin Museum, Philadelphia)

     Last Wednesday, the same day UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in New York, an assistant pharmacist at Walgreens phoned me.
     The prescription for needles that fit my insulin pen, she said, can no longer be filled, because my insurance company, Aetna, is now insisting it must be done through the mail, in 90-day batches. I might be able to get an exception, but should call Aetna.
     No problem! Calling people is what I do for a living. I phoned the number on the back of my insurance card, jumping online — multi-tasking! — during the long delay to try their website.
     Online, a form to fill out and mail to Texas, along with my credit card number. I gazed at the form and tried to imagine it resulting in boxes of BD Nano 2nd Gen 4 mm Pen Needles showing up on my doorstep. Unlikely.
     Meanwhile, on the phone, I was passed along to several people whose mastery of English was sub-ideal. My suggestion of an exception meant nothing. Negotiations for obtaining the needles via the mail went nowhere. Eventually, what we worked out was that I should have my doctor call in a 90-day prescription to CVS — did I mention that CVS owns Aetna? It's true. My cost for three boxes — a 90-day supply — would be $78.
     Now I've liked CVS ever since Nicholson Baker published "The Mezzanine," a lapidary little novel about a man who breaks his shoelace and goes to CVS to buy a new one. Excellent, but not enough to snatch brand loyalty away from Walgreens, a venerable Chicago company that invented the malted milkshake. I can ride my bike to Walgreens. Plus I know people there, thanks to routine visits to secure the seven prescriptions I need every day so as not to die from diabetes.
     Social media exploded with joy at the slaying of Thompson. Many Americans are denied medical care, either because they can't navigate the insurance labyrinth or because companies say no to necessary treatment in some arbitrary fashion. Countless people have endured the agony of watching loved ones suffer and die because an unseen bean counter wouldn't check a box.
     Let me be clear. All killing is bad, but Thompson's slaying is especially bad because it was a targeted assassination. There are many countries in the world where helmeted assassins on mopeds routinely gun down executives on crowded city streets then roar away. We don't want to live in one of those countries — well, we already do, given last week's slaying. We don't want it to get worse.

To continue reading, click here. 

Grindstone Elementary

     I attended Fairwood Elementary School in Berea, Ohio. It was about a mile from my house — 1.1 miles I see now, from Google maps — and I walked every day, with my older sister, before she transitioned to the junior high for 7th grade, and my little brother when he began kindergarten when I was in 5th grade.
     I don't remember much about those walks — there was a bully, Trent Caruthers. There was a large weeping willow whose branches we'd break off, strip of their leaves and make into whips that would whistle through the air.
     After I left Berea, I went back to Fairwood a couple times on visits to my hometown. There was the same Winslow Homer reproduction of New England fishermen, the same brown and beige floor tiles. The place was  very small. To drink out of a water fountain, I had to fall to my knees, which is quite symbolic — the person you are now, humbled before the person you were then. 
     Then Fairwood school was gone. Berea was changing, populations shifting. When we went back on our way out east for Thanksgiving, there was a new school, huge — our host said seven former elementary school districts funnel into it. The name stunned me.
     "Grindstone Elementary School."
     I don't have to say anything more, right? It would be too obvious for Dickens. I suppose I should point out that Berea was known for sandstone — to this day, there is a Berea sandstone. The town's lakes — Baldwin Lake, Wallace Lake — started as sandstone quarries. The sandstone was made into paving stone, building stone, and grindstones, large circular discs, bigger than a manhole cover, used to grind grain. If you were a longstanding Berea family, you showed off with a grindstone in your front yard.

     Still. Grindstone Elementary? Really? 

     On the upside, the kids must have a field day with the name. 

Facebook bludgeons Norman Rockwell

     Now that X has become an odious sewer, fled by the feeling, is Facebook next?
     And really, it's amazing, once some sort of critical mass was reached on Bluesky, a few weeks ago, how quickly Elon Musk's hallelujah chorus of haters and nutjobs became unbearable. I visit it now the way you hurry down a darkened street lined with drug addicts and derelicts. 

     Now Facebook is ... threadbare. What was once a pleasant coffee klatsch of your friends and relatives showing off newborns, surgical scars and lunch has, become, for me at least, a dumptruck unleashing its load on my head every visit.
     The breaking point came for me Friday, when I realized I was being pelted with Normal Rockwell paintings, some not even by Rockwell.
     Don't get me wrong — I like Norman Rockwell, or did, before Facebook grabbed me by the nape of the neck and began rubbing my face in his work. For years he was underrated, as a kitschy booster of American small town values. Even though he's not only an incredible stylist, but also an artist with a strong moral sense. Yes, he painted nostalgic, patriotic tableaus; but he also produced jarring dispatches from the civil rights era. He was a dramatist. He told stories.
     In 2015, driving out of Boston, I made a point of stopping in his studio and museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Well worth a visit, particularly to see his almost invisible brushwork. He is America's Michelangelo.

     So maybe this is my fault. Maybe a few weeks ago I clicked on one of the histories that went along with a Rockwell painting that Facebook was serving up. Because suddenly I was getting them continually, every third post it seemed. I went to see who was sharing them, and found odd Facebook pages that didn't look like they were from actual people, but Korean kittens and oddly-named non-persons who only posted Rockwell's work. Some had the same Rockwell caption on various other paintings. Some ID'ed work of another artist as Rockwell.
     I started vigorously blocking  these AI Rockwell aficionados, requesting to see this kind of thing less. And it seemed to work, regarding Rockwell. But other artists, and old movies, and random historical facts, rain down. 
     Now Facebook seems like those slideshows before a movie — crude ads for used car lots and knick-knack boutiques. Many, many high end socks. All that trivia, all that capsule pop history. Enough already. Who needs to spend their life doing this? It's not interesting anymore. 

      In a way, I'm grateful, and sorry it took them this long to alienate me. Now I'm going to post my column every morning and scram, or try to. As I write that, there does seem a "two drinks is my limit" quality to saying that. Naive. I do like checking my memories on Facebook — 16 years of life served back at me. So one has to be careful, too, regarding sweeping pronouncements of that kind. Not a good idea to sign checks that you can't cash.

'There is a fear.' Students at Sullivan give thanks in gathering political gloom

Evelyn Levin

     Just because your family flees their home doesn't mean the usual griefs of adolescence give you a pass. Years in a refugee camp don't lessen the heartbreaks of youth. Walking for miles through hostile territory, dodging bandits, won't make school any easier when you finally get there. You can reach your goal, America, and yet feel out of place and alone. And then your father, whom you adore, dies.
     "My family had to move from Syria and go to Jordan when I was 4 years old because of the civil war," said Sebba Saad Allah, 16, standing before assembled classmates, teachers and community members Wednesday evening at Sullivan High School. "I was raised in Jordan for six years with my parents and my two brothers ... In 2019, I moved to the U.S. with my family and I was very unsure if I wanted to be here or not. I wasn't ready for new beginnings ... It was a hard year for my family and I ... I started learning English and helped my family, translating. When I was only 11 years old, COVID hits, and I stopped my education because I didn't know how to use technology to study; 2022, I was back to school, but it was the most challenging year for me because I lost one of the most important people in my life. I lost my father because of cancer. A truly remarkable person for my family and I, who touched the lives of everyone fortunate enough to know him. I miss listening to him saying the prayers before we break our fast..."
     Here the sophomore started crying. People clapped, encouragingly, calling out, "You've got this!" 

     Enfolding teens as they struggle to be who they are and become who they will be, moving from strangers in a strange land to seasoned Americans, has long been a specialty at Sullivan, in Rogers Park, famous as Chicago's immigrant high school. Two-thirds of Sullivan's 724 students are refugees, immigrants or enrolled in their "English Learners" program. As many as 10% live in unstable housing situations.
     Add to that an ever more threatening political climate. The event Sebba Saad Allah was speaking at was Sullivan High School's 8th Annual Thanksgiving Celebration, begun in 2016 after Donald Trump was first elected president on a wave of xenophobia. This year feels even more ominous.
     "There is a fear," said Evelyn Levin, the English language program teacher at Sullivan. "There's a lot that is unknown right now. There have been a number of students who just dropped out. There's no way of tracking them to see if they're still living in shelters."
     More parents are reluctant to tell the school where they live.
     "Being listed in any sort of database is frightening to them," Levin said.
     The school is trying to be proactive, to simultaneously assuage student fears while preparing them for whatever might occur next month — Trump has promised to begin deporting immigrants, including legal citizens, "on Day One."
     "We have given students and families information about legal services that are available," Levin said. "There was a legal clinic here right before Thanksgiving break."
     ‘Their resilience is unbelievable’
    As winter arrives, difficulties mount.
     "We have kids living on the train," said STLS advocate Cindra Hart. "I've got kids living on the street. When it first got cold outside, I had to get coats, boots, hats, gloves."
     How?
    "I'm begging," she said, adding that gift cards, such as from McDonald's, are helpful for impoverished students trying to get through Christmas break. "I need to be able to feed a kid while they're gone from me for two weeks, because I know they're going to eat while they're here."
     Hart said the city's aid to her students was abruptly shut off.

To continue reading, click here.

Sebba Saad Allah, left.

Flashback 2000: Comforts few, but it feels like home

     There can be odd resonances in this job, echoes over the decades. This column came up twice this past week. Once in upstate New York, on Thanksgiving Day, when I was chatting with my younger daughter-in-law's grandmother. Not a woman to mince words, she asked, in essence, "How can you do it? How can you write things that jar people's lives?" And I said, basically, that I try not to rattle folks unnecessarily, try to make sure my subjects understand they will be in a newspaper story that others will then read. 
     But the bottom line is, you can't predict how a piece of writing will affect others. This reader, in Yekaterinburg, Russia, was mentioned again in Tuesday's entry from the vault, and several readers expressed interest in learning more about my reader in Yekaterinburg. Read it now, and try to guess what very real repercussion this had in Chicago after it ran. I'll explain afterward.

     What does Rex Rickard miss most about Chicago, now that he's living deep in Russia?
     "Head lettuce," he wrote, "and corn on the cob."
     Of all the occasional correspondents I've accumulated over the years, via this column, one of the most distinctive is Rickard, 51, who got his start in St. John the Baptist Parish, around 50th and Halsted, but for the last two years has made his home in Yekaterinburg.
     His e-mails are filled with details of the daily triumphs and tragedies of life in that city, 900 miles east of Moscow, cradled in the Ural Mountains.
     "You could liken it to Denver," wrote Rickard.
     Well, not quite.
     "Last week at my tram stop there was a dead man lying in a pile of snow," he mentioned in a recent missive. "Apparently to keep his remains fresh while the cop radioed for pick-up service. Folks just took a passing glance at the corpse, if at all. Of course I was mildly shocked."
     It was the fourth corpse he's seen in public in the city, the largest in the Urals.
     Then there is the weather.
     "Winter snows begin in mid-September and I've seen the last snowfall on June 7," he wrote, quoting a local saying: "June isn't quite summer yet, and August isn't quite summer anymore."
     Between the bodies in the street, the snow, the shortages, the lines, the alcoholism and the air pollution ("they have no conception of catalytic converters") it sounded like a pretty grim existence to me, particularly as I pressed him for more things he misses about Chicago. Head lettuce and corn? There must be something else.
     "Of course, when the drinking water comes out of the tap BLACK on occasions, unless it has been `temporarily' shut off for some unknown reason for a week at a time, it gives a person pause," he wrote. "So I guess that I can say that I miss turning on the tap in Chicago and getting a sparkling clean and PURE glass of cold water equal to anything sold in a bottle."
     My God, I said. Why stay?
     "I've got loads of friends here, which I lacked in the U.S. They tend to stay friends for life here. The reason is that they don't move around the way we do. Once they are in a flat, that's it for several generations.
     "And holidays," he wrote. "My Lord do they have 'em! They say that the next holiday is only a bottle's throw away. The usual thing is to sit around a table and do the obligatory toasts to meeting; the holiday; to friends; to the ladies; and on and on till they get into the singing mode. And do Russians LOVE to sing!"
     He added that, as a gay man, he feels a lot more secure in Russia than he did back home.
     "I don't get called `faggot' or the other slurs that I was constantly getting in my beloved hometown," he wrote. "I don't walk down the street in mortal fear of my life."
     In fact, he said, it was the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard that inspired him to settle in Russia, which he had been visiting since the early 1970s.
     Rickard makes his living teaching English and, like teachers everywhere, is strapped for classroom materials. He asked if I knew of anybody who could pass along canceled stamps or stickers of any kind (he gives them out as prizes). His address is: P.O. Box 3, Yekaterinburg, 620151 Russia.
     And how are kids in Yekaterinburg?
     "Kids are the same everywhere," he wrote, with the universal world-weariness of a teacher. "Watch out for them starting at about age 11 or 12. Now I know WHY the Catholic nuns used to whack us!"
     While I find Rickard's messages invariably interesting, what really gnawed at me, as a person who yearned for Chicago bratwurst, even in the gilded comfort of Venice, was what he hankers for from home.
     "Oh yeah," he wrote, finally providing an entirely satisfactory answer. "I still do miss White Castle hamburgers."

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 30, 2000

     After it ran, Rex's brother phoned, quite angry. It seems his son attended a Catholic School, and of course had told his classmates about his Uncle Rex in Russia. What he hadn't said — perhaps didn't know — was that his uncle was gay. The kids learned of it from this column and tormented him mercilessly,. The father seemed to think it was my fault. I said I was sorry, but I'm not responsible for the actions of bullies. Still, the moment stuck with me, obviously, as a reminder that you never know how these things are going to resonate. It's hard not to feel a little bit guilty.

     My last email from Rickard was in 2015. I made inquiries, but have not yet found out any new information about him.

Brandon Johnson says he didn't know of Ronnie Reese harassment allegations. He should have.

 

     So Mayor Brandon Johnson, in that by-now-trademark fashion of his to deny everything he isn't taking credit for, says he first learned of the problems with his former communications director, Ronnie Reese, when allegations of bad behavior became public.
     Which leads me to this question. Did he ever talk to the man?
     Because I did, and was it memorable.
     I shouldn't bother going into this. You don't care about the inner workings of city government, do you? Because I tend to bypass the gritty details. To me, politics is like sports: The same thing happening over and over.
     But maybe I'm wrong. For instance, when our brittle mayor quietly jettisoned his communications director in October, I did notice. And set my hands on the keyboard. Then sighed, rolled my eyes and found another topic. It appeared to be just another spin of the revolving door in an administration that long ago assumed the quality of a crashing airplane in a Bugs Bunny cartoon: a higher and higher aerodynamic whine, leading to the inevitable splat.
     But now the mayor appears shocked, shocked to be told there was trouble in the communications office. Well, while I have no knowledge of the specific misdeeds Reese is accused of committing — bullying, sexual harassment and such — I do have experience with him, interacting firsthand.
     Return with me to the golden days of yesteryear — well, July anyway. Old Joe Biden finally permitted his fingers be pried off the steering wheel. Democratic hopes soared. The Democratic National Convention was coming up. I was tasked with writing an in-depth piece on how the event might affect the reputation of Chicago. It hadn't happened yet, and so we didn't know. Would it be a 1968-level disaster? A 1996-ish triumph?
     I had my own operating theory — that it didn't matter. The city's reputation, after being abused by every right-wing aggrievance junkie who could fog a mirror, couldn't become worse. That said, the city also didn't have anything to gain. The people most vigorously using the city as a dog whistle really weren't into the whole reevaluating their opinions based on new data thing.
     But I am, and didn't want to merely regurgitate my opinions. So I began contacting various Chicago boosters, PR pros and North Michigan Avenue Association sorts.
     I thought I'd better reach out to the city. I approached the mayor's press office the way a person tosses a coin into a wishing well, a time-honored ritual without much expectation of actual return. With nothing to lose, I figured, do it with a little panache. I sent the following email:

     Good morning! I'm writing a column on how the upcoming Democratic National Convention will affect the global reputation of the city. I'm assuming there is no one in your office who would offer comments for such a story, but want to ask anyway, just so I can, if I so desire, say I tried and got nothing. Thank you for considering my request, to the degree that you actually do.

To continue reading, click here.

 

Flashback 2000: What hath tech wrought? Dog photos

Office dogs at PCB Linear in Roscoe, Illinois

     I noticed this 2000 column while looking for something else, and had to share it, just because it reflects what all this communication felt like when it was fresh, almost a quarter century ago. Notice: a) the beginning is referring to actual mail, through the postal service, now so insignificant that since the Sun-Times moved to Navy Pier, they don't bother forwarding it and I never thought to ask; b) at the time I used a Dell computer, because their customer service was so good; c) since I was a decade away from owning a dog myself, I undervalued their importance.

     People occasionally send me pictures of their dogs. They read the column, they feel close, they write a letter and tuck in a photo of themselves or, sometimes, themselves and their dogs. Or just of their dogs.
     While I always appreciate this as a sincere gesture of affection, I nevertheless find myself throwing the pictures away. I am not — and this might sound cold — deeply interested in what their dogs look like.
     This is the sort of sentiment that would never struggle its way onto a printed page, were it not for the arrival of the new Dell computer catalog at my house yesterday. It shows off an expensive computer/video camera package and, in the bold color photography promoting it, illustrates a happy family documenting their dog holding a Frisbee in its mouth.
     The dog's image, fixed electronically, will supposedly be posted on Web sites and e-mailed to gigantic phone book lists of friends and associates. None of whom, it's a safe bet, are even remotely interested in seeing the dog.
     That sums up my view of our present moment in technology. Our capacity is expanding wildly. We can reach anybody anywhere at any time with anything — voice, text, pictures.
     But those messages are, inevitably, pictures of a dog holding a Frisbee or the equivalent: lists of jokes, chain letters, bawdy poems.
     We sit on the train, flip open our tiny cell phones, and say, loudly, "I'm on the train now. The train. I'll be home soon. If you look up and see somebody coming through the door in about 40 minutes, that person will be me. Right — the train. Yup. The same one I take every day. Yup yup. Bye."
     Nobody ever says, "The serum is arriving on the midnight plane! Have the dog team ready to rush it up to Point Barrow!"
     You have to ask who is the beneficiary of this communication. Traditionally, the recipient is supposed to be the one who receives an advantage. They learn a fact, or are entertained, or something.
     But I'm beginning to think that communication, due to all this technology, has taken on a new meaning, and now the sender is the one who gets the most out of it.
     Nearly every day, sometimes several times a day, a reader in Yekaterinburg, Russia, e-mails me with a long report documenting daily life in the Urals. I read it, usually, or at least skim it, in that hidebound belief that a person should read his mail.
     But to be honest — and I mean no offense, since I know you're reading, Rex — there are days when my heart doesn't exactly soar to see that the new report from Yekaterinburg is here.
     I don't want to make too big a deal over this change in communication because I also sincerely believe it will pass. When the Sony Walkman came out, people also went nuts with the possibility of music anywhere. For a while you couldn't ride the subway without half the passengers bobbing away to their private music halls, and it was sad to think that society would become unglued as we all retreated into our cocoons.
     Didn't happen. People got tired of them. You still see Walkmen, of course, but the tide has ebbed.
     Not that this present craze will pass soon. Just this morning, walking across the Loop from Union Station, I saw, for the very first time, a man strolling down the street, thumbing the little number pad of one of those digital e-mail pals.
     I stopped and watched him pass. He was young, 22, 24, with the longish sideburns young men are wearing now. He had on a flannel shirt and sneakers and that sort of rice planter's bag slung low across his hip.
     While I have no idea what he was communicating, my guess is something along the line of "Walking down Madison Street now. On way to Walgreens to pick up photos of my dog."
         — Originally published in the Sun-Times, September 28, 2000