My fear is that a mob of armed evildoers will rush at my home, guns blazing.
Sure, I could fend them off with the substantial firepower of an assault rifle. But returning fire would expose me to their attack; it would be better, tactically, if I crouch on the second floor and lob grenades out the window instead.
An M67 fragmentation grenade would do the job nicely—pull the pin, count to two, out the window, hit the deck. Bad guys neutralized.
There is a problem with this plan. Civilian ownership of grenades is illegal under the National Firearms Act of 1934, which bans "destructive devices"such as grenades.
Now might be the moment to change that. In the wake of 49 people being murdered at a gay nightclub in Orlando last Sunday, Americans are crying for curtailing availability of so-called assault rifles like the weapon used in the shooting, as the minimum reaction of a once proud nation to these mass killings.
It'll never happen. If gun violence is an American folk illness—and no other industrial country comes close to our rate of armed carnage—than calls for gun control are the fever that breaks out in the post-massacre stage of the disease.....
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"Confirmation bias" is the inclination we all have toward believing things that mesh with our preconceptions. I saw a textbook example of that in my reporting Sunday morning, in the wake of the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando a few hours earlier.
Sifting through the Twitter cross-talk, I noticed some of the outrage directed against Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick for tweeting a Biblical verse, Galatians 6:7: "Do not be deceived. God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows."
While that seemed a particularly jaw-dropping example of Bible-based inhumanity, to blame the victims for calling their own deaths upon themselves by being gay, it was not out of keeping with my understanding of how religious zealots behave in general. As well as how elected officials behave in Texas in particular, the state that gave the world Ted Cruz.
Hiding behind the Bible, using it as a ventriloquist's dummy to express their seething hatreds, is sort of what some fundamentalists do. Didn't a Georgia state senator just use Psalms 108 to practically pray for Obama's death, asking that "his days be few," leaving out the part about his children being fatherless?
I mentioned the tweet in the draft of my Monday column that I turned into the paper.
My sharp-eyed editor, Bill Ruminski, however, flagged it, as he couldn't find the tweet. I went online and grabbed a story explaining that Patrick had deleted the tweet. But I noticed, at the bottom, that Patrick claimed the quote was scheduled days in advance and was more a case of what his spokesman called "unfortunate timing" than a joyous slide through the blood of the fallen.
That gave me pause. It was a plausible excuse. The power of coincidence is vastly underestimated, and given the unquestionable cruelties that can be laid at the feet of religious extremism, better to give them the benefit of the doubt, and not blame them when they happen to be innocent. The quote wasn't a hastily fired off tweet, but nicely laid out against the azure sky and wheat fields. The thought of Lt. Gov. Patrick getting the grim news, then hurrying to cite chapter and verse, well, it seemed excessive, even for the flinty spite of fundamentalists—Pat Roberston certainly gloried in the murders on the 700 Club, but then he always does that.
So I removed the quote, instead referring generically to the celebrations among neo-Nazi sorts which I am 100 percent certain were pin-balling around Twitter, if history is any judge.
Patrick posted a sincere explanation on his Facebook page, saying the Sunday quotes are set up on Thursdays. He went on at length, explaining that we all are sinners, straight and gay, making him one of the few Republican officials to mention that these victims were, largely, gay Americans, and quoting the entirety of the passage, which includes the phrase, "Bear one another's burdens."
See, that the thing about religion. There is good stuff in it, and some people focus on the good stuff, and do good things and that's, well, good. But there's also bad stuff, as Omar Mateen demonstrated in such horrific fashion, and those who embrace the awful, who use faith to try to justify their acts, neither justify those acts nor corrupt the faith, which is such a sprawling mess you can find rationalization for anything. Sure, you can pitch all religion out, and people do. But then they try to justify their misdeeds in other ways—for the good of the state!—and you're denied the poetry and the power that resides in all faiths.
Readers lined up to blame Islam and the Koran, for containing the same calls to violence that the Bible is stuffed with, and which Christians acted on with great gusto for a thousand years. But they got with modernism, mostly, Texas notwithstanding, at least the don't-kill-the-non-believers part. Muslims will get with the program too, and largely have. I truly believe that someday, ahead of automobiles or televisions or computers, the prying of religion's fingers off the public throat will be seen as the signal accomplishment of the modern age. But that day tarries, and much blood will be shed by the faithful before then.
Soon you'll be able to put a filter on your newsfeed to screen out these mass shootings. Then you won't be forced to feel the queasy chill of reading horrific news — such as 50 partiers slaughtered at a gay nightclub in Florida. The worst mass shooting in U.S. history. Your attention won't be wrenched away on a beautiful Sunday, the hot weather breaking into a delightful cool. You won't be left tapping your finger on your watch, waiting for officials to figure out exactly what — overwhelming hatred, religious insanity or just regular old psychosis? — motivated someone to throw away 50 innocent lives and his own poisoned existence.
As if the reason mattered.
Such a filter would certainly save me the discomfort of having to set aside a promising topic — how Donald Trump's pathological lying and Tourette's syndrome insults are not separate character flaws, as typically presented, but two sides of a coin, the latter an essential raspberry to blow off anyone who dares point out the former. I woke up eager to get at it.
Not today. Today we stare at the carnage in Orlando.
Or should I say, we stare at more carnage in Orlando. One day and four miles away from where a mope gunned down 22-year-old "The Voice" singer Christina Grimmie — no official reason for that yet, but I'll put my chips on what Hamlet calls "the pangs of disprized love" — a better-armed shooter walked into Pulse, a "high-energy gay dance club" and shot about 100 people, killing more than 50, as if in rebuke for our focusing on just one death.
Crying over one young person? Here's 50 more. Cry about that.
Hmmm, let's see . . . futility of even talking about sane gun control? Done it. Inhumanity of using other people's horrific tragedy for political ends? Been there. The day fast arriving when such atrocities become such a quotidian part of American life that we don't even....
History sends out odd ripples. A big wave of long ago will ripple past, unmistakably.
In the summer of 1966, Martin Luther King brought his open occupancy movement to Chicago. The City Council, in one of its lower moments, passed a resolution telling him to mind his own business: Mayor Daley had claimed progress had been made ending redlining. Was that not enough? "We want to see if they are serious," King replied, as hundreds of black associates went into real estate offices and asked to see home in white neighborhoods.
It was that August when, marching in Marquette Park, that King was hit in the head with a brick.
That thrown brick was why I found myself at the Glen-Gery brickworks last Monday. Because doing this story in March on the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, I saw the monument to King they're preparing—out of bricks, aptly—to be unveiled in Marquette Park on the anniversary. I asked the artist where they would find a kiln big enough to fire all those bricks, and he told me about Glen-Gery.
As if one King-related event weren't enough for a week, on Thursday I spoke with Michel Martin, the NPR host, who'll be in Chicago this Tuesday June 14 holding a special event in her "Going There" series: "The Chicago Freedom Movement, Then and Now.
The program revolves around King's move into a Chicago slum that summer to draw attention to segregated housing. Martin will be moderating an evening of performance, conversation and music centered around perhaps Chicago's central and most pervasive problems, segregation and housing.
She has done similar "Going There" events around the country: Fort Collins, Colorado to talk about water; Kansas City, Missouri to talk about food.
"We have no agenda," she said. "This is not a constitutional convention, not a recital. It is a community conversation, to talk about things people want to talk about. To talk about something of consequence, period."
All very high-minded, but I felt a sneer rising and I couldn't suppress it. Why? What's the point? Here in Chicago where we're so frozen; we can't even fund the public schools, never mind make them run well. Why talk about problems that Martin Luther King couldn't solve and, half a century on, is by all indications much worse now than it was then?
"What's the point of talking about it?" I said.
"I don't know how a person who lives by words can say that," she replied, which was about as sharp a slap in the face as I've received in a long time, because she was right. The downside of dealing with these intractable issues, year in and year out, is that you become cynical and hopeless, and don't even want to think about them, because it's all so frustrating and sad. I had forgotten that we can't ignore our way to a better world. If all we can manage to do right now is talk, is to focus on an issue, then let's talk about it and focus on it. Maybe something useful will come.
I hoped to go on Tuesday—it's being held at the Athenaeum Theatre on Southport. But I already told the kind people at the Kitchen Community that I would attend their 2nd Annual Learning Garden Leadership Awards dinner, and I don't want to let them down. Besides, "Going There" will be streamed live, and I intend to circle back and watch what transpired. Though it sounds like an something worth attending.
"My agenda is for people to come away feeling that it was worthwhile evening," said Martin. "That they met someone perhaps they wouldn't have met, were exposed to ideas, learned something important."
She said each event turns out differently.
"There's always some kind of cultural element: music, poetry, dance, theater," she said. "These events bring people together. It becomes powerful."
My chat with Martin was so interesting that I stopped being a reporter and just talked for a while, which was good for me, but bad for you, in that I stopped taking notes and can't convey more than a sense of our exchange. We were discussing a recent program in Pittsburgh, "The Reinvention of the American City."
"I'll just be honest," she said. "Tears were shed. It was not most comfortable conversation. People who have lived there along time felt this is a rare moment when people are talking with each other rather than at each other."
It felt that way talking to Martin. It was not the most comfortable conversation, particularly her "I don't know how a person who lives by words can say that." But I liked being challenged, and felt I came away better for it. If you want to experience something similar, you can learn more about the program by clicking here.
Saturday already? What a week of highs and lows, from my trip to Marseilles Monday to visit the Glen-Gery brick foundry (a high) to Donald Trump's ignore-that-bigot-behind-the-curtain-I'm-using-the-teleprompter-that-I-mocked-Hillary-for-using-yesterday speech Tuesday (low). There was Bernie Sanders performing the political version of the third act of "Tristan und Isolde" (one long death scene, much wailing and clutching the curtains), a visit from a pal at the Economist, in from London, to Thursday night MCing a charity dinner at the Museum of Contemporary Art and my birthday on Friday.
Busy, busy, busy.
I thought I would take a break and simply offer you the horrid spectacle of a sample of the Trump supporters I've heard from, making the case for why their man should be president of the United States. Hair-raising stuff.
But then one of the many readers who wished me well on Friday said he missed the Saturday Fun Activity and, well, that's good enough for me. Screw the Trump supporters, let their insane rantings vanish into the ether.
Particularly since I saw this photo and thought: "That would have stumped 'em."
Does it? There are some hints if you look hard. The winner gets one of my endless supply of blog posters, either 2014 or 2015, your choice (I'd say go with 2014; looks better).
That's it. Good luck. Have fun. Post your guesses below. And assuming this will be guessed a minute after it's posted, a question: should I continue the Fun Activity, or have this be a singular event? It might be fun to pick up again, for a while.
A reader requested that I return the Saturday Fun Activity and, being a full service columnist, I shrugged and thought, "Why not?" And if you recall, since people got frustrated with Night Owls solving the activity at 12:01 a.m., the Fun Activity posts at 7 a.m., to give folks who sleep in, sort of, a fighting chance. Please go to bed, and check back after 7.
Thank you.
Your amiable host.
Neil Steinberg
In September 1952, Elizabeth Michalicka, 23, left her job as a secretary for Commonwealth Edison. She had been there for six years and liked her work, but she was getting married to John Mocek, and married women were not welcome.
"You couldn't work there," she recalled. ComEd didn't fire her; they didn't have to. She was just expected to leave — and did.
Times change. On Tuesday, Mocek, now 87, watched television late into the night, holding hands with her daughter BettyAnn Mocek as Hillary Clinton announced that she is the Democratic Party nominee for president of the United States, the first woman to run for the White House representing a major political party.
"I think it's wonderful," said the elder Mocek. "Finally this country has come to their senses a little and seen that maybe a woman could run this country."
I met the pair because the younger Mocek phoned the newspaper the next day, aghast that Sen. Mark Kirk retracting his endorsement of Donald Trump was splashed across the front page Wednesday while Clinton's triumph was relegated to the inside pages....
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Postscript
And in case the opening vignette is not chilling enough, reader Nancy Perkovich shared this:
I worked as a stenographer in the Stock Transfer Dept. of Commonwealth Edison Co. from 1959 to 1962. I was impacted by 2 of their rules as follows: When I got married in 1961, I had to change my name from Nancy L. Parr to Nancy P. Perkovich. When I entered my 5th month of pregnancy in 1962, I had to bring a note from my doctor attesting to that fact, which was submitted to the Dean of Women's Affairs, at which time my employment was terminated.
