Some dream of pocket combs

   
      I love stories about things made in Chicago, especially new products, such as this one:

      If you walk into the swank Gilbertson Clybourn Pens at 55 E. Chicago, you might be surprised to see, among the fine Waterman fountains and Parker ballpoints, a stainless steel comb produced by the Chicago Comb Company.

     And if you’re wondering why a comb is sold at a pen store, well, there’s a story there, one that says something of the intricate path businesses can take, the connections made as a product winds its way from idea to reality.

     The story could start in Downers Grove in the early 1980s, where John Litwinski met Tedd Strom at O’Neill Junior High School.

    They shared their dreams, as friends will; unlike most, however, those dreams involved industry.   

     “I’ve always been fascinated by manufacturing,” said Litwinski, 37, an attorney. “And I’ve always been bugged, even when I was a kid, by the whole Rust Belt thing. It always bugged me that high-end products are always made somewhere else, and not a low wage place — Germany, Japan. You always hear it’s too expensive to make things here. Why? Why isn’t that stuff made here? It always bugged me. I wanted to make something here before I knew what I wanted to make.”

     The two searched for something to manufacture. They looked at razors — wet shaving is a trend among young men. Germany already makes fine razors. Which led them to combs. Most combs are plastic.

     “They are so gray, so ugly, so cheap,” said Litwinski. “Just wrong on so many levels.”

     A comb is a fairly simple product “without a million different design steps,” he said.

     They tapped an industrial engineer friend to come up with design drawings. “Something clean, very modern, classic, timeless,” said Strom, a product manager. He sketched out Model No. 1, as they ambitiously called it, as if there would be many others, a clean look with a big round hole. The first prototype was aluminum, but that was too light. Steel was better— “an iconic Chicago metal — you see it on L cars — a very Chicago-y kind of material,” said Litwinski.

    The first batch was produced at a steel company in Ohio, but the two men really wanted to make their product in Chicago. They were promoting the combs at the 2011 Great Shave Event held by Merz Apothecary — the type of gathering that would draw high-end customer who would dole out $40 for a comb. One of the barbers at that event was Joe Wortell. He admired the comb, the two said they were looking for a place to manufacture it in Chicago. That’s funny, Joe said, because my parents own a metal finishing plant in Chicago, Triton Industries.

     It takes about 30 seconds for a 6,000 watt industrial CO2 laser to cut a small comb out of a 10-foot-long sheet stainless steel.

      “Smartest thing I ever bought,” said Brent Wortell, owner of Triton Industries, 1020 N. Kolmar, founded by his father in 1961. The bulk of his business is producing the innards of vending machines. “Lots of formed metal in a vending machine,” he said. But Triton’s claim to fame — if a small metal processing plant can be said to have a claim to fame — is that it is the largest producer of those diamond-shaped flip signs denoting hazardous cargo that are on the back of semi-trailer trucks.

     The comb is Model No. 2, a mustache-beard comb, which goes on sale Aug. 25. The laser quickly traces each of the comb’s 33 tines, sending out a spray of sparks.

     Model 2 will cost about $30. That might be seen as a hard sell to people used to buying a plastic comb for a buck.

     “We recognize there’s a little bit of a learning curve,” said Strom. “We emphasize quality, longevity.”

     Model No. 1 went on sale in late 2011, and sold 200 before the year ran out. A thousand more sold in 2012, and Chicago Comb hopes to sell 5,000 this year. Model No. 3 already is on the drawing board.

     A lot of Chicago companies have their fingers on this one little beard comb. Charter Industries buys rolled stainless steel from Kentucky and cuts it into the 10-foot sheets that Triton can put through its laser. The Chicago Paper Tube and Can Company makes the distinctive packaging the combs come in.

     “It’s neat to keep it close to home,” said Strom.

      The combs often are given as gifts, and Strom says the same sort of person who buys an expensive pen might pop for a pricy comb.

     Which is not, however, why the combs are sold at Gilbertson Clybourn pens.

     Gilbertson Clybourn pens is owned by the Clybourn Metal Finishing Company, which in the 1970s bought a company in Winnetka, Gilbertson Silversmiths, where wealthy families would bring their sterling silver tea sets to be buffed or refinishined.

     The silver tea set buffing business was not robust in the 1970s, so Clybourn Metal looked for something it could sell that would appeal to the sort of person who owned a silver tea set.

     “All these guys in Winnetka walked in, nice suits, nice watches, nice pens,” said Dan Collins, whose family owns both companies. “We finally decided pens were the way to go. Why not pens? No one was selling pens. We did very well for a very long time and we’re still around.”

     So Gilbertson Clybourn sells the Chicago Comb Company’s line because they help make them.

     “We do the finishing,” said Collins, whose father Frank started his metal finishing business 70 years ago. “They contacted us, and wanted Chicago-only people to do the polishing.”

      The rough combs cut at Triton go to Clybourn, where they are hand polished to either a mirror or matte finish, and some end up in the little store on Chicago Avenue, which is where I first noticed them. 

     Is this a great city, or what?

Let a cat guide you

    The question that struck me as I entered my office was not how the cat got into the keyboard drawer of my desk. Cats are nimble. No, the question was: how did Gizmo—that's his name—contrive to put the keyboard up on the desk, out of the way, so he could nap. It had been on the drawer when I left the room earlier. Now the cat was in its place. Cats aren't that nimble.
     I had a hunch, and asked my older son, who is very solicitous of the cat. He surprised me, rather than teasing me or stringing me along or being evasive, as he is fully capable of doing, by just saying outright what had happened: he was checking something on the computer, the cat jumped up on the drawer and pawed around, looking as if he wanted to make himself comfortable. To facilitate that, my boy whisked the wireless keyboard out of the way so that Gizmo could settle down—albeit in a hard place—for a brief nap. Which is where I found him.
    Making the cat comfortable reflects good values on his part, and it pleased me. I didn't want to spoil Gizmo's rest, even for something as important as this post. Which is why there will be nothing in-depth today. Far be it for me to disturb a sleeping cat who, truth be told, looks very comfortable, despite a piece of hard oak as a pillow. Cats have a genius for finding comfort in the most unpromising places. A skill we humans could learn from them. We do not want a wooden pillow, but if all we have is wood, then wood will do.


Oh, the telephone. The AT&T dial telephone. I figured people would notice that. Five bucks on eBay. I just wanted to have one. Iconic. Beautiful, in its own right. And yes, it works, though it's better for receiving calls than dialing them, since most times you need to push button your way through an automatic switchboard.

Notice this!

     I didn't even have to look at the envelope to see there was something special about it. Just holding it in my hands, walking away from the office mailboxes. The envelope had that rag paper feel. Nice. Hand-addressed. I glanced at the back. A return address in Paris -- Boulevard Raspail.
      Inside, nothing extraordinary. An 80-year-old Chicagoan, retired in Paris — nice — a lawyer, of course, had watched a continuing legal education video I made, years ago. He liked it and wanted to share a few comments.
      Writing him back, I thought how few actual letters I get, and how effective a way it is to cut through the communications clutter. It just takes a little extra time, a little postage. Everything arrives by email nowadays, or text, or a tweet, so anything that doesn't tends to stand out, and seems a little special. For instance, these notices on the bulletin board at the train station in Northbrook. People standing around, waiting for a train, idly glance over them, maybe even study one, which is more than they would do for ads about used cars and babysitting services that arrive via emails. I'm not arguing that sticking something up on the wall — a practice that goes back to Pompeii and beyond — is more efficient than email alerts and Twitter blasts. But people still do it. There must be a reason. Someone must think it works. More than that. They do work. When people wonder about the future of books — or newspapers — they should remember that people still communicate with posters. They still deliver speeches, just like Marc Anthony did. They still go into the street and talk to passersby, one-on-one. Sometimes they distribute handbills, the way they did 300 years ago. We always assume that whatever new technology we're in love with will wipe away everything that came before. And we're always wrong.

Carousel captures life's fleeting moments

     It's August. Already. Vacation time. It you have a young family, you'll probably be trooping together somewhere. The strains of the family vacation are well-known and commonly remarked-upon. The joys of family trips tend to be left unsaid, perhaps because they're more poignant and  subtler than the comic pitfalls. I took a stab at describing the bittersweet sense of time passing in this Aug. 13, 2000 column.

     PUT-IN-BAY, OHIO —Merry-go-rounds are so sad, so ineffably sad, sad in such a subtle way that you forget about it until you step upon one.
     That's how it is for me, at least. It's not that I don't love carousels. I do. How could you not love something so superfluous? So outmoded and nostalgic and beautiful. No one would ever come up with a merry-go-round today. They'd write a horse-riding computer program instead.
     And even if somebody wanted a spinning mechanical contraption, there would be no woodcarvers to fashion the horses and no public space willing to take a risk on such a loud, dangerous device.     
    These thoughts always fill my mind as I approach a carousel, particularly one as pretty as the one in this little island resort town, a 1917 model with not only horses, but chickens and dogs and dragons.
     Our hosts and their two daughters walked beside us.  
     "I have a picture of them holding hands, walking up to the carousel," their mom told me. "They don't hold hands anymore."
     Perhaps I could duplicate that picture. "Hold hands, boys," I called to my crew. But they didn't. Too late. At 3 and 4, too worldly for that. Or maybe too excited to get on the merry-go-round. They surged ahead.
     I stepped aboard the wooden platform, squiring the boys to their mounts. Then I began to feel it, a tingle. A certain unnamed sorrow. Maybe it was the music. Some unidentifiable 1890s anthem. Maybe it was the brightly painted animals, frozen in mid-stride. 
     The older boy wanted to sit on a dog -- he loves dogs. He tried to climb up himself, but couldn't do it. Too high. So I lifted him and set him on a spaniel. The younger boy was set upon the pug beside.
     I took up a defensive position behind them, though they really weren't at risk of sliding off. Not the way they were last year.
     Still, I placed a protective hand on the flank of the older boy's ride. He turned in his saddle and wordlessly brushed my hand away.
     The surprise lasted only a second. Of course he wouldn't want me hovering. He's nearly 5. Ready, at least in his own mind, to go it alone. (Ready, in his own mind, to drive a car.)
     Other children scrambled on. And then the carousel started up. I snapped a few photographs, then stopped, worried I was taking too many. ("My father was always in my face, snapping pictures," I imagined them saying someday. "I hated him for that.")
     Perhaps the spinning is the sad thing. Around and around. Like the hands of a clock, like the wheel of seasons. Time passing. The music repeats. The downtown flashes by -- the ice cream stand, the restaurant, the park, the marina, the ice cream stand, the restaurant, the park . . .
     The 10-year-old daughter of my friends rode with us. Her older sister sat with her parents. After all, she is almost 12. The girls used to have season passes, but don't anymore. They don't ride that much. 

The Steinbergs, Put-in-Bay, 2000

    

     I studied my boys' faces. Very serious, concentrating, as if somehow they understood that this was a significant occasion. And it is. There are not that many merry-go-round rides in a person's life, when you think about it. Carousels are uncommon, and cost money, and if you're on one a few times a year you're riding a lot. So maybe a few dozen rides, maybe 40, between the time you are first held on as an infant, and the time you are too ashamed to climb aboard the painted horse and instead go sit with the grown-ups.
     I remember being a young adult, riding for the last time, feeling large and conspicuous. I was young enough to still want to ride the carousel, rationalizing that I was doing so as a kick, and old enough to know that I was lingering at a party where I wasn't welcome anymore.
     Now my role is to stand close — for another year or two, until they can go on their own, for a few more years, when they won't go at all.
     I have not decided if being aware of the fleeting nature of events as they are unfolding is a good or a bad thing. On one hand, it makes me strain to fix the scene in my mind. My older boy, switching to a horse for the second ride, urging his steed forward, a slight smile on his face. The younger, who moved to the animal beside his big brother, looking so heartbreakingly solemn, perched aboard a gaily painted chicken.
     Yet memories fade no matter how hard you seize them, and the very act of trying conjures up loss, casts a shadow toward the darkness.
     Maybe it's unnecessary to try. Merry-go-rounds serve a function that counterbalances their melancholy. They are a festive frame for memories, a sacred space to enter occasionally. You remember them.
     Just like family vacations. I believe that the point is not to see any particular sight, but to escape forgettable routine, and give the mind unique, permanent hooks to hang memories upon. I don't care where we go, particularly, as long as we go there together.
     In fact, the most precious memory from this trip wasn't from the trip at all. We had just gotten home. The younger one was perched on his soft potty seat. I was making conversation to pass the time. "What," I asked, "was the best thing about the vacation?" The carousel? The campfire on the beach? The steam locomotive? The swimming pool?
      He turned his little monkey face up to me.
     "You dere," he said.

Renaissance Faire

     Sunday afternoon at the Renaissance Faire in Bristol, Wisconsin. Always a pleasant family activity, some low-key wandering amidst the booths and trees, crowds and commotion. We enjoyed what we always enjoy — the dollar sarsaparillas, the sauteed mushrooms, the ornate costumes, the well-made crafts for sale. We bought handmade soap, and howled at the exuberant, vaudeville fun of the Mud Show, the highlight, as always.
     Cool weather helped — not so much for us, dressed in our 21st century cotton dishabille. But it can be uncomfortable just watching hardcore Faire-goers sweating under all those layers of velvet and brocade and armor beneath a fierce summer sun. Not this time.
      My boys speculated on the historical accuracy of it all. Was this really the Renaissance? Northern or Italian Renaissance? Wouldn't it be closer to the Medieval? (I didn't reply "Medieval Times may have already been copyrighted." Nor did I point out the growing Steam Punk presence, which might be historically accurate, but historically accurate to 2116. What I did say is, "There's no such thing as a historically accurate elf.")

      I'm not one to quibble over someone else's fantasy. This is a carnival, not a textbook. Visitors are offered plenty of undraped bosoms and weaponry — really, what more could a guy ask for on a Sunday? There's also mystery at the bottom of the Renaissance Faire, something substantial to chew on. What is it about the past that is so appealing to these people? What is buried there that they would dig for it so energetically, making costumes and assuming roles and talking in accents? Is it just fashion? The chance to dress in feathers and silk and steel? To escape the comfortable if drab casual of today, with our cargo shorts and t-shirts and flip-flops?
    Or is it the sense of freedom suggested by a more disordered time? The idea that you can take your staff and your tankard and wander the forests of yore? And maybe score with some woodland sprite or garden gnome? Or is this what you do instead of having a sex life?
     Of course their view of the past as an enticing fable is a lie. Pardon my buzz kill, but the true stink and cruelty and disease of that era would send any of us shrieking back to the modern world for a shower and a slug of penicillin. But why be harsh? It's a lie, but a benign lie. An illusion that harms no one and seems to embroider the summer for many. (As for sex, well, one shouldn't speculate; it's probably more of an enhancement than a substitute). Nothing wrong with a thread of fantasy to help us grope through our lives. Maybe the allure is the new start that we like to repeatedly discover for ourselves, a fresh beginning in the past, a blank slate, a step away from our plain and ordinary, scrape and struggle workdays, to re-invent our personalities in some imagined superior past where we can finally get to be the kings and queens we know ourselves to be, if only for one golden afternoon.

Cook County Fail: Case Delays Costs County $80 million annually

     You have to chase Toni Preckwinkle. Anyone who has ever gone anywhere with the Cook County Board President knows that she doesn't waste time worrying about where you are. She hits the ground running, and if you don't want to lose sight of her, you better run too.  I've chased her several times through the Cook County Jail, on our way to bond court, and it's always an adventure.
     This story originated with Preckwinkle—she wanted people to know what a mess the Cook County Criminal Courts are in, particularly bond court, and it's too bad that such a complicated problem had to be squeezed into 1300 words, but I'm sure I'll return to it in the future. I also had to give space to Chief Judge Timothy Evans' view of the situation. He's a nice guy, but not, as far as I can tell, a dynamic agent for change in the legal system. Criminal court would be an enormous problem to address even if everybody were on board, and they're not—as usually happens in politics, some people care more about protecting their turf than about the bigger picture.
     Here's my story in Wednesday's Chicago Sun-Times:

     Time is money, the saying goes, and if you want to see a real life example of how days and weeks add up to some serious green — while endangering civil rights in the bargain — look no further than the Cook County criminal court system, whose bond court, through a combination of inefficiency, resistance to change and harsh prosecution, costs millions of dollar the county can’t spare.

     At least according to two top Cook County officials.

     How much money? Try about $80 million a year, which is spent housing prisoners who either should be let go pending trial or convicted and sent to state prison, but are stuck in Cook County Jail due to poor case management.

     “It takes us so long to dispose of serious cases that we save the state $70 million in prison time, but it costs us over $300 million because the jail is so much more expensive than prison,” said Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who has been trying to reform the criminal system, particularly bond court, where accused criminals are assigned a cash amount to allow them to go free from jail while their cases are pending.
     That $300 million figure represents the entire jail operating budget. To get a figure of how much of that spending is unnecessary, examine the head count at the jail, which has about 10,000 inmates a night, plus 2,500 on electronic home monitoring.

    Over the past six years, the average prisoner stay in the county jail has increased by more than a week.

     “In 2007 it was 49 days, now it’s 57 days,” said Juliana Stratton, executive director of the Cook County Justice Advisory Council, part of Preckwinkle’s office. “That is significant. If we had the same numbers back then in 2007, we would have 1,500 to 2,000 fewer people in the jail.”

     Using the accepted $143-a-day cost to house a prisoner, those 1,500 extra heads cost an extra $80 million a year. The reason: Prisoners are kept in jail who shouldn't be there, because cases take longer than they should.
     "Over the past six years there's been a dramatic increase in the length of time it takes to dispose of cases," said Preckinwkle. "You can look at how long it takes to dispose of a drug case. There's no case management in the circuit court. No case management at all. You don't know how long it takes individual judges. There's no way to hold anybody accountable."
     Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart echoes Preckwinkle's views.
     "Her and I are singing off the same page," he said. "We have one of the longest length of stay in the country. Longer than New York, longer than Los Angeles, and it's progressively getting worse."
     He said bond court hearings are the weak link in the system.
     "The average time in bond court is 20 seconds," said Dart. "How in God's name can you have a thoughtful discussion in 20 seconds? Other than finding guilt or innocence, what more significant part of the judicial process is there than a bond hearing, deciding whether someone will be in this delightful place or at home with family? What can be more significant? And you give it 20 seconds. That's just not right."
     Nor are bond court hearings so brief because of an enormous backlog of cases.
     "That's not true," Dart said. "It isn't like some poor judge earning $185,000 a year is in there for 12 hours. The bond hearing calls only last a few hours. That's where my frustration is so great. We're not asking judges to work eight, 10 hours. They go for two hours."
     Chief Judge Timothy Evans disputes Preckwinkle's and Dart's view of the court.
     "I guess they're running for re-election," he said. "But the facts spell a different story."
     For instance, Dart is "incorrect" about the 20-second average, Evans said, because judges prepare beforehand in their chambers. "Our judges look at those files before the cases are called," Evans said.
     Evans said the problem is the entire court system is starved for money, which causes some to cut corners.
     "The system is not adequately funded in order for justice to prevail," he said. "One of the major problems here is some would put a price tag on justice. That's a huge mistake."
     The fourth key official involved in this issue is Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez. Preckwinkle's office says her prosecutors request bonds that are inappropriately high.
     "We see young people with no priors arrested at 17 and given a bond of $75,000," said Rebecca Janowitz, special assistant for legal affairs for the Cook County Justice Advisory Council, noting that often the bonds are later adjusted downward. "They aren't able to get a decent bond when they first go up, but they follow the case, and a week later they file a motion to reconsider the bond, and we've been getting some very good success there."
     Alvarez's chief of staff, Dan Kirk, said prosecutors inform judges of three things: the facts of a case, the nature of a defendant's criminal history and any record of failing to appear in court. "It is judges who make the decisions about what kind of bond to set," said Kirk. "Seldom do assistant state's attorneys request a specific amount to the judge."
     Kirk said that Alvarez and Preckwinkle can't even agree on what a violent offender is.
     "The president's definition of a non-violent offender is someone who is non-violent in the present case," he said. "They completely ignore if that a person has a violent criminal history. The Cook County State's Attorney does not define that person as a non-violent offender just because they weren't violent in a specific case. You're creating a fiction. We cannot and won't abide by that."
     Thus—rightly or wrongly—suspects find themselves incarcerated, sometimes for months, for the inability to pay as little as a few hundred dollars.
     To have any hope of getting a low bond, defendants must be able to communicate their situation to a public defender, who has a handful of minutes to grasp their case before both go before a judge.
     "We see anywhere from 250 to 320 clients a day," said Parle Roe-Taylor, chief of the 1st Municipal Division of the Cook County Public Defender's office. With a staff of seven, that means about 50 cases per lawyer per day. Do the math. Judges sometimes never learn that a defendant is penniless.
     "We make every effort to see every client," said Roe-Taylor. "We don't control how much time we get. If a bond is $3,000, you have to come up with $300, you have family members trying to take up a collection even to get that little bit of money. We make an effort to learn that, but we don't always have family members in court. Sometimes that works out, most times it doesn't."
     Dart and Preckwinkle both have been advocating for an American University study calling for better management of time standards and case flow.
     "Everyone has the report," Dart said. "No one is using the report. It's so commonsensical. It basically says we should use differentiated case management. A murder case takes longer than a stolen car case."
     Standards for various case lengths should be established, he said, and judges who take too long for their cases would face pressure to improve.
     "Peer pressure forms that will move cases along," Dart said. "All of us are held accountable. Why should a group of people really have no accountability?"
     Evans points out that his judges participated in the AU study, but it's out-of-date, and they're currently involved with a new study.
     "That study is eight years old," Evans said. "We have embraced each one of those recommendations. We have a differentiated case management system now. We do train our judges."
     Evans said Preckwinkle and Dart are just trying to "divert one's attention" from their own failings, such as the sheriff not having enough deputies on hand to open certain courtrooms. "They're trying to save money at the expense of justice," he said.
     Why can't these officials work together? Is any of this personal?
     "I would hope not," Evans said. "Not on my part at all."

Trayvon Martin was a distraction from the real issues

     It's late, I know. All the pundits were opining on Trayvon Martin LAST week. But I don't like to jump in and yabber on cue. You're allowed to think about things, and if race was an issue last week, it's still an issue this week. It hasn't gone away yet.  I was looking at the after echoes of the case, and realized I had said nothing, and that maybe I should try to say what's on my mind.

     OK, I’ll bite.

     After reading the umpteenth post-verdict piece of punditry calling for a national conversation about race in America in the wake of vigilante George Zimmerman being exonerated for the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, I began to wonder if maybe it’s time to stop pressing my lips together and join in.

     After all, it has been well over a year since I’ve written about the case. And it’s been two weeks since the verdict. Time enough for passions to cool, maybe a little bit.

     No mystery as to the reluctance — race is not only the third rail in American politics, but in journalism too. Touch it at your peril.

     At least for white folks — say the wrong thing and you’re a racist. Time was, you used to have to actually spew racial hate to be a racist; nowadays, any opinion that somebody doesn’t like will do.

     When black pundits call for a conversation about race in America — and it seems to be primarily black pundits, plus, of course, the president — they seem to mean themselves. Whenever the rare white guy is emboldened enough to chime in, such as Roger Simon, or, I guess, now me, we’re invariably told it’s a Black Thing and we just wouldn’t understand. At least that’s what I hear from many quarters whenever I address race: You just don’t get it.
     Which seems a self-defeating notion, because if whites, by definition, can't under­stand and shouldn't express what they believe is true, because they'll never understand, then we're sort of off the hook, aren't we? Isn't that a formula for whites to shrug their shoulders and ignore the whole thing? Which is kinda what most of us want to do anyway. But that's too easy.
     So let's talk about race and Trayvon Martin, and why the case has become such a focal point and rallying cry. President Barack Obama, in his moving speech, talked of the experience of black men being followed in stores, of having white women cling more tightly to their purses in elevators.
     The implication is that white fear—or in Zimmerman's case, Hispanic fear—as reflected in the case, is an important problem in the black experience today.
     No question it is a problem. And not to diminish the badness of it. But being followed in stores is not really the crux of the challenge that blacks face, is it? Because if it is, we're already in the Promised Land. That's why the Trayvon Martin case puzzled whites, when we saw the emotion wrung over it. "We are at war!" a black Florida pastor declared. Well, yeah, a war being conducted by other young black men, not by white bigots or armed Hispanic vigilantes. Blacks make up 13 percent of the American population yet constitute 55 percent of the murder victims. They're killed 93 percent of the time by other blacks.
     To me, the Trayvon Martin case is so popular because it's a distraction from the hard truth, a chance to cast the problem not as something blacks must take the lead in fixing—to stop killing each other—but as something being done to them. The case is being clung to not because it represents something crucial, but because it's a chance to offload responsibility elsewhere.
     Last time I looked, the major problem facing African Americans was not white bigotry—not anymore—but the enormous zones of poverty, crime, drug use, despair and dysfunction that ring every city. Not totally; there's a struggling black middle class with its own concerns. But if we're talking about key black issues, we're talking about the inner city. Blacks didn't create the situation they're in; that's the undeniable product of several centuries of slavery plus 100 years of Jim Crow repression that ended last week, assuming it's actually ended. But that's that situation they have to come to grips with.
     What fixes it? Education, jobs, anti-drug programs, strengthening families, a complete overhaul of the criminal justice system, which wasn't designed as a Gulag to destroy the lives of young black men, but essentially functions that way.
     That's a tall order. It's easier to focus on Trayvon Martin than face the fact the average white family has six times the wealth of the average black family. Or that for every $1 earned by blacks, whites earn $2.
     Bigots tried to slur Trayvon Martin into some kind of thug, freely fictionalizing his image. Blacks erred in the other direction, trying to make him into a saint, an Emmett Till figure in an era when the kind of gross physical repression that Till suffered has all but vanished. Now racism is much more silent and subtle, much more worked into the entire system, which is rigged against a wide swath of black youth who aren't killed, but still never have a chance in life. It has nothing to do with racial profiling or Stand Your Ground laws or Trayvon Martin, but is something uglier and tougher to confront. I'm sorry to be the one who has to say it.