A question of forgiveness

     American are a punitive bunch. We love to punish people. Nearly 3 percent of American adults are in prison, jail, probation or parole, a figure far beyond any other industrialized nation.
     But that's only the beginning. We entertain ourselves with elaborate revenge fantasies on TV and in the movies, and of course arm ourselves in order to deliver swift justice to anybody who might cross us, changing the laws to better encourage each other to stand our ground.
     While vengeance feasts, forgiveness starves, which is part of what drew my interest to a thin new book—155 pages—by Jeanne Bishop titled Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy, and

Making Peace with My Sister's Killer (Westminster John Knox Press: $16).
      Chicagoans of a certain vintage will remember Bishop as the public defender whose sister and brother-in-law were murdered in their Winnetka townhome in 1990. For a while the FBI painted the crime as being involved with Bishop's work in Northern Ireland, until it was resolved that a disturbed 17-year-old whose parents knew Bishop's had committed the crime, basically, because he was a sociopath.
     It's the sort of book I might normally never touch—God-directed goodness gives me the fantods—but I had met Bishop. She was the public defender randomly assigned to me when I had my own legal troubles nearly 10 years ago, and I created something of a professional nightmare for her, aided by some sloppy reporting by the Tribune, after I implored her to continue as my counsel. Everyone had a good laugh at our expense, and the prudent thing for me to do would be to toss the book onto the slush pile and not bring any of this up. But that smelled like cowardice to me, and I figured, at least read the first line and then abandon the book with a clean conscience. It begins: "Gravel crunched under the tires of my car as I drove into the visitors lot at Pontiac Correctional Center on a cold Sunday morning."
      Not quite, "Reader, I married him," but enough to keep me going. She's at Pontiac visiting David Biro, the man who murdered her kin. Bishop pauses when filling out a form, wondering what to write for "Visitor's Relationship to Offender."
     "What was my relationship to the man whose name stung my lips?" she puzzles. "Until that moment I would have written this: Him, murderer. Me, murder victims' family member. That was where the relationship ended. But now I would have a different one, one in which we were not categories, but human beings. I would meet him face to face."
      In a world where you can find endless slo-mo payback, the idea of seeking out the man who wronged you to—do what exactly? -- propels the reader forward through this crisp, challenging book.
     The killer is convicted by page 40. What we get then is Bishop's gradual progress from standard, let-him-rot victimhood to recalibrating her Christian faith to draw the killer toward her, and reassess her view of the death penalty.
 

Jeanne Bishop

   Biro remains a shadowy figure, while Bishop moves from good ("I don't want to hate anyone" she announces to a room of no-doubt startled cops when the arrives at the Winnetka police station the day of the murders) to really good, making speeches, writing op-eds, appearing before panels, once testifying on the opposite side of her own mother .
     She's rescued from unbearable goody-goodyism when she tells the FBI to pound salt after it comes around, eager to use the murders as leverage to get her to squeal on her Irish contacts.
     And one moment made me think of A Clockwork Orange. Bishop starts visiting the killer and begins coaching Biro to grasp the enormity of what he's done, going so far as to give him Little Women to read, so he can understand the kind of sisterly affection he destroyed. An unforgiving sadist who set out to awaken Biro's comatose conscience and rub its face in his evil deeds and Bishop's God-sent-me mission of forgiveness might find themselves doing exactly the same thing.
     Some parts of the book made me squirm. As a public defender, she is relieved when she gets an innocent defendant freed, "other times, though, a guilty client goes free when the state drops the charges, or a judge grants my motion to quash arrest and suppress evidence, or a jury votes to acquit. What happens then feels less like justice and more like mercy."
     To her maybe. Maybe not so much to the terrified victims, but by this point they've been backseated to the felons, who in my mind were grinning broadly and high-fiving each other, welcoming Bishop over to their side of the moral fence.
     If that seems harsh, then Bishop lost me toward the end, when she contemplated the release of Biro, and people like him, and coldly speculated why some timid folk oppose sprinkling God's grace on felons and turning them loose.
     "We set up David Biro and then others as objects of fear. Let them out, we say, and they may come after us. Our lives will be in danger. I wonder now, though, whether what we are truly afraid of is not that they will never get better, but that they might."
     No, the David Biros of the world set themselves up as objects of fear by doing horrible things. We let them out, and sometimes they really do come after us, or somebody like us. Yes, we are too harsh, and make the road to redemption too narrow. People can change, and do. But by the end of Bishop's book, I was wondering whether the victims deserved a bit more of the compassion she lavishes over the perpetrators.

"It is a fool's life"

    One of the dozen mundane tasks that made Monday a sort of teeth-gritted, "Thirty-plus-years-of-doing-this-shit-and-here-I-am" kind of day, was tossing out all the brochures, catalogues, business cards—except for the one for the really cool story I'm going to follow up on—from my visit to the Housewares Show Saturday. Been there, done that. 
     Tossing out the samples was a little harder. Even though my wife had spurned the Click & Carry, it was a solid piece of well-poured plastic, a rich aqua, with a rubberized section to be kinder to your fingers. Somebody's dream made tangible. The Puritan father in me thought, "This could come in handy..."
     How? Should I tuck it into the back of the van, to rattle around with the flares we've never used and the mass of cloth bags because we're all so flippin' environmental? 
     It hit the copy of Home Furnishing News with a "whap."
     That felt right.  They should teach classes in throwing stuff out. We should practice, because eventually we're going to have to get good at it. My wife had a master class, in shutting down her parents home after her mother died. We both did, regarding all the material that two marketly unmaterialistic people had acquired. Nine roasters. Or was it 11? Or 13? Anyway, a lot of black enamel roasters with white specks. More than a human should have. 
     As if the hoarder TV shows aren't warning enough. Pitch stuff. I'm going to take time off work to spring clean this year, because I don't think I've done it right for about five years. 
     Henry Thoreau had it right. You don't own stuff, stuff owns you. 
     Standing up with a groan, and over to the bookshelf. Books are different. You need those.
     "The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost," Thoreau writes, in Walden. "By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before."
     To which I will add two observations. One, Thoreau's father owned a pencil factory. Thoreau's disdain for possessions was built on possessions, and connected pals like Emerson, who loaned him the axe he needed to build his cabin at Walden Pond which, Two,  was not an organic expression of his desire to live simply, but a book stunt, just like the book stunts today where people read the phone book and date 100 strangers and such.  It was designed to build the Thoreau brand, and it pretty much failed—he had to fall back on those pencils, thought at the time to be the best in America. 
     Not to slag Thoreau. The man could turn a phrase, and it takes the mind of a charlatan welded to the heart of a saint to get through life sometimes. And it helps to throw stuff out when you can. You never miss it.

This "broom" you're selling, tell me more

Matt Schipper, right, demonstrates the humane, Zen-ful Fly Swooper.

     If the violence inherent in fly swatters has always bothered you, rejoice; relief is at hand. The Fly Swooper, a funnel on a stick that, rather than smashing the living, sentient beings that you believe flies to be, nuzzling their young with a human-like affection, instead collects them safely in a small net.
     “And then what?” I asked Matt Schipper, demonstrating the product Saturday, opening day of the 2015 International Home + Housewares Show at McCormick Place, the four-day convention where all the makers of household devices from toasters to toothpick holders hook up with all the vendors who sell them or try to.
     “You release them outside,” he replied. “It’s more of a Zen-ful approach. We’ve done $1 million in sales in Malaysia.”
     That’s why I love the housewares show. You never know what you’re going to find.   

Robert Delaney and his brainchild

    Seven hours of increasingly footsore marching past exhibits barely scratches the surface: countless home care products from the utterly mundane — mops, brooms, sponges, cleaners — to the almost unbelievable, such as Bob’s Butt Wipes.   
     “The polish after the paper!” brand manager Kayla Ward chirped when I hurried over to regard the new product in drop-jawed wonder. 
     “We leave nothing behind, like the Marines,” added Robert Delaney — the “Bob” in “Bob’s Butt Wipes.” He explained that he is a builder in Louisiana, and noticed his contractors taking packs of baby wipes with them when they visit portable toilets...   


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Discuss among yourselves

Display at the 2015 Home + Housewares Show

     Killing time Sunday evening before going downtown to a dinner party at The Kitchen, thumbing through the March edition of Poetry. I checked the table of contents for a writer I recognize; the only one I saw was Tony Hoagland, whose poem, "Jet," is in the book that Sara Bader and I have coming out next year. 
     One line in Hoagland's "Bible Study" jumped out and slapped me around the head and neck:
     "What kind of idiot would even think he had a destiny?"
     That struck me as entirely true. What do you think? 

Sunday Puzzler No. 2

Last week's puzzler was too easy. This one is still kinda easy, but has a certain elegance to it that makes up for the fact. Since the Saturday Fun Activity displays a photograph and asks for a location, in today's Puzzler I offer a location, in the form of this riddle, and to answer correctly you have to name a location (I 'd prefer you post a photograph, but I don't think that can be done in comments, at least nobody ever has). 

As a prize ... hmmm ... tired of coffee, tired of my poster. How about a copy of my 2012 memoir, "You Were Never In Chicago"? Signed. Unless you'd prefer coffee or a poster. One of the three, to the person who solves this less-easy-than-last-week-though-still-kinda-easy conundrum. 

       
                                                 First the first dual integer
                                                 Second the number of seconds
                                                 Not in a day or an hour.
                                                 Third, A Cool Million
                                                 This place doth stand secure
                                                 amidst a falling world.
                   

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     This is a really long ramp. I've been down it—but not up it—a lot this past week, heading out to work on a story. I imagine a number of readers have been down it too. But you never know. sometimes the most obvious places can be the hardest to figure out. 
      Anyway, the first person to guess where this is will win one of my high quality collectible 2015 posters, such as this one, which was put up this week at Bookends & Beginnings in Evanston, the store that replaced the beloved Bookman's Alley when Roger Carlson retired. The new store is lovely in its own right, and I'm glad to see the tradition continue, with a modern twist. Co-owner Jeff Garrett put the poster up, and said it looked very fine against the weathered wood, resembling a "Wanted" poster from the Old West. Indeed it does. He has his; good luck winning yours. Place your guesses below.  

Bookends & Beginnings, 1712 Sherman Road, in the alley, Evanston.

Agonizingly slow and only in places

     The police dogs in Ferguson never bit a white person.
     Not once, in a damning Justice Department investigation of the St. Louis suburb released Wednesday. Two years of police dogs biting African-Americans, who comprised 67 percent of the town but just 11 percent in the police force, part of a jaw-dropping pattern of discrimination that isn't as unfamiliar as Americans elsewhere might like to pretend it is.
     The report details how police used the legal system as a cash machine, socking residents, almost exclusively black, with multiple expensive tickets, including for "manner of walking," whatever that might be.
     Over the period the feds examined, 93 percent of the arrests made in Ferguson were of black people; 95 percent of the jaywalking arrests were of blacks; 95 percent of the people who spent two days in jail were black.
     The killing last August of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was the spark that, eventually, illuminated this warped system. People elsewhere wondered — why these days of protest? What's all the fuss about? A single killing?
     Turns out, there was much more than that.
     Not that we should be too smug.
     Chicago can take some cold comfort at regarding a community whose police practices are even worse than our own. Years of lawsuits have nudged the number of African-Americans in the Chicago Police — about 29 percent — to a figure near the black population of the city — 32 percent. Not that black officers guarantee empathy. Cops aren’t black or white, they’re blue; their loyalty invariably is toward their fellow officers as opposed to the citizens they supposedly protect and defend.
     Then there’s Attorney General Eric Holder’s description of Ferguson: “A highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings, and spurred by years of illegal and misguided practices.” Well, that kind of rings a bell, doesn’t it? One reason many Chicagoans so easily swallowed the Guardian’s overblown story on Homan Square was it resonated with past practices.
     The real outrage of Ferguson is that it’s still true in much of urban America. If we look in the suburbs around Chicago, we easily see a number of Fergusons or at least potential Fergusons: Blue Island is 30 percent black, with a police force only 5 percent black. Merrillville, Ind. is 44 percent black, with 4 percent on its police force — a 10th of what it should be. And there’s no reason to limit the focus of concern just to blacks: Cicero is 87 percent Hispanic, with a police force only 28 percent Hispanic.
     In their defense, they’d argue that they have procedures, tests, and if blacks or Hispanics don’t apply, don’t pass the tests, there’s nothing they can do. Gang-bangers drive around in cars shooting people, thus cops have to pull lots of cars over and see what they find.
     But failure to hire minority officers is symptomatic of a culture of exclusion. Too many black kids don’t get enough education to be police officers and, based on their experiences with them, wouldn’t want to become one if they could.
     The report is both shocking and nothing new. Incarceration rates for blacks are seven times what they are for whites in the United States. This is in part because of a legal system stacked against them at every phase. Take drug crime. Blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate. But blacks are arrested more, charged more, convicted more, imprisoned more. The cheaper crack cocaine used in the inner city carries far greater penalties than the more expensive, powdered cocaine that white people use in their suburban homes. Blacks are 13 percent of the American population and 40 percent of the prison population.
     Whites are always eager to blame this on moral failure, to proclaim racism dead. We have a black president, it’s 2015, time for everyone to be responsible for his or own condition. Some people just pick their parents better, that’s all. If blacks are in jail, well, they’re criminals.
     Then shocks like this Justice Department report on Ferguson yank us out of that complacency, showing us how some blacks become criminals: by sitting in their cars. By standing on the street. By merely existing. The criminal justice system grabs them and then won’t let go. They have no high-priced lawyers to skip in and take care of everything.
     This report does, or should, remind us that, in some ways, the 13th Amendment ending slavery, whose 150th anniversary we just marked, was merely a change of tactics. Blacks went from being chattel property to being a powerless, rights-less serf class, a century of Jim Crow bondage.
     That supposedly stopped in the 1960s, when black people snared their supposed right as citizens to vote, plus the opportunity to sit in buses and use restrooms and other basics of human dignity that white people just assumed.
     But it didn’t really end there. We see the right to vote being eroded nationwide. And only a kind of self-admiring white exceptionalism could pretend it ever really ended. We live in a manifestly unfair, racist society. We don’t have to argue; the numbers speak for themselves. Until we recognize it, change will come as it has: agonizingly slow, and only in places.