Street medicine brings health care to the homeless

Night Ministry medical case manager Tiffany Green talks to a homeless man on Lower Wacker Drive.

     You can't always tell if it is a person in there, or if that person is alive or dead.
     "Night Ministry!" Jeff Ayoub calls out, approaching a human-shaped pile of blankets on Lower Wacker Drive. "Night Ministry!"
     The Night Ministry is the last strand of our fraying safety net. Despite "ministry" in its name, it is not a religious group, except in the sense that all religions have scripture about helping the downtrodden, edicts generally ignored by the faithful but the linchpin of this 40-year-old Chicago organization, which runs a shelter and a medical clinic on a bus that offers health care, counseling and life necessities to Chicago's homeless.
     I tagged along Thursday because, one year ago, the Night Ministry began a program, where nurses carry backpacks filled with medical gear seek out the homeless under viaducts, in fields, and other odd places where they hide.
     "We were restricted with what we could do with the bus," said David Wywialowski, director health outreach.    

Smoking crack cocaine. 

     The Night Ministry was inspired by Dr. Jim Withers and his Street Medicine Institute in Pittsburgh. So last year they visited him, observed his operation, and brought it here.
     Homeless people are prone to asthma — one complained of the dust raised by cars blasting by. They have allergies from the rat feces scattered inches from their heads, difficulty filling prescriptions, early onset arthritis and undiagnosed diabetes. Not to mention the woes of addiction that cause many to fall off the grid in the first place.
     As we moved from one encampment to another, handing out bottles of water, food, Christmas gift bags of toiletries and sweets, it struck me that homeless people do not gather randomly. They might live on the street, but they separate out into communities that reflect society. Thus you have African Americans along one stretch of Lower Wacker Drive, while around the corner is a neighborhood of young white IV drug users.
     Guatemalans live under an overpass near Chinatown, where some have jobs in nearby restaurants. And the neatly tented people living under Lake Shore Drive at Wilson and Lawrence tend to be the de-institutionalized mentally ill.
     Just as in the society they've tumbled from, different groups scorn one another.
     "They really do," said Matthew Sorenson, 54, a nurse practitioner at the Night Ministry. "There's definitely an elitism among substance abusers. They separate themselves from other groups, have their own identities. The alcoholics will speak badly of the heroin users; the heroin users hate the meth addicts — everyone hates the meth addicts."
     Though they had invited me to see the medical program in action, on Thursday there wasn't a nurse with us — I interviewed Sorenson later, by phone. Requests for inhalers and other treatment requests by the dozens of homeless people we met had to be deferred.
     The big difference between what the Night Ministry is doing in Chicago and Pittsburgh's program is the lack of a Dr. Jim Withers. Their street medicine team started going out only one day a week, saw the enormous need, and now goes out five, but staffing and funding is still an issue.
     They are hoping to hire a part-time nurse, What they could really use are a bunch of medical volunteers — nurse practitioners who want to give back to the city, and maybe get some experience treating trench foot and scabies that they might never get at some shiny suburban hospital. Christmas is over, but the need remains, and one truth of helping such people is that the person you end up helping is yourself.

From the Economist: "A curfew tolls..."

    Yesterday's blog post was pretty dark for Christmas. Apologies. To be honest, I had something lighter and more fun in mind, the post below. But when it came time to actually set it down, I forgot, and so instead unloaded my random, almost unfiltered thoughts on the closing out of 2016. Yes, I realized it wasn't Christmasy, but I had just done that with "Mr. Tanner" the day before and, besides, it's really not my holiday. 
    But we're still in the post-Christmas lull; a day off for most people. Actually, now that I think of it, Dec. 26 is an even more apt—it's better to be lucky than good—since it's Boxing Day in Britain, the post-Christmas bank holiday. The perfect day for me to make up for my Debbie Downer Day yesterday, which people did complain about, with the belated delivery of the present of Christmas whimsy I meant to share yesterday.

     The Economist is one of those rare endeavors that is so well done, it makes you proud to be a human being. Reading it regularly is like having an extra brain. The magazine's key leap of faith is to assume its readers are as smart as the publication. Thus it doesn't pander, doesn't talk down, doesn't trivialize. Its "Holiday Double Issue" steps back from the clatter of news affairs and offers a smorgasbord of intelligence—an essay on the economic ramifications of the Norman conquest of 1066, something on silence, on clothespins. 
    And the obituary. The back page obituaries in the Economist are so consistently excellent that often I start reading the issue from the back, and I'm sure I'm not alone there. The new issue obituary is a rarity, in that it is not about a person, but a business—the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the oldest manufacturing firm in Britain, an institution stretching back some 500 years—no one is sure when it began, but it forged both Big Ben and the Liberty Bell (insisting that the famous crack was caused by rough handling by the rebels, not due to any flaw in manufacture). Whitechapel announced Dec. 2 that it would be closing, and the Economist's page about it chimes in celebration of its existence while tolling its passing. I had never heard of it, and assume most readers hadn't. Reading of its demise reminded me of G.K. Chesterton's famed summation that "Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive." That always sounded negative, a slur on both the trade and its readers in a single stroke. But learning of Whitechapel's existence and demise in the same breath felt like an enormous benefit, and I wanted to share it with you here, as a kind of belated Christmas gift.

2016 was a good year, in that we were alive. Otherwise....

     The year is winding down, and I noticed people online making a point of listing some of the good things that happened this past year, lest 2016 be remembered solely as the year that a brittle, angry, unfit fraud told America he would make their dreams come true, and 60 million people fell for it. 
      To be honest, I was tempted to join in. And it was a good year for me—the new book did well, I traveled, from Joshua Tree National Park to Washington, D.C. to rural Japan. The boys kept hitting it out of the park, rounding the bases of college with an easy, casual grace.
     And really, considering the 14 billion years of void that come before we wink into consciousness, and the untold billions more of darkness and oblivion to come, any year on the sunny side of the grass is a good year.  It beats the alternative.
     But it feels wrong to pin a few lacy highlights on 2016, hoping they'll obscure the gathering disaster. It isn't just Trump's election, but a worldwide retreat from the modern, interconnected, tolerant, intelligent, caring, scientific approach that got us to this world of smart phones and flatscreen TVs and CT scans. We've gone off the rails, from Britain and Brexit to the Philippines and Dutarte, with God knows what's to come. The dice are tumbling, the world is tumbling, bobbing along in the rushing sewer of events that flows through the ditch we've fallen into. If we're going to be at war with China in a year, or watching boxcars of Mexicans rumble south, I don't want to have history catch me showing slides of my as-yet-unruined life up until the moment the whole thing goes to hell. 
    One of the many reasons 2016 was a good year is because 2017 is going to be worse. I'm fairly certain of that. Oh sure, Trump is erratic, and can renege on an insane promise as easily as he can make one. But again, there is a global context here. It isn't just us. And if it were, the prelude is so ghastly and horrifying we already have begun to re-jigger down our standards of exactly what ghastly and horrifying means. Donald Trump sent out one tweet recently that, while no worse than dozens if not hundreds of others, seems to me to show just what a pickle this country has put itself in. 
     As you probably know, the inauguration looms, and the usual A list of stars is balking at the idea of performing for this awful man. So far he has a few corporate entertainers -- the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Rockettes, though not without individual dancers raising a howl of protest. Some child, 16, who obviously doesn't know better, will sing the National Anthem. 
     If you or I were in Trump's situation, we'd nod, and wonder if perhaps we weren't conducting ourselves in an ideal manner, given that all professional entertainment was shunning us. Or we'd lose ourselves in the million important details of putting together an administration.
    Not Donald Trump. Not pettiness incarnate. Here's the tweet:

      The first sentence is an obvious lie. Donald Trump's entire life has been one long genuflection at the gilded void of celebrity, in himself and others. The idea that he would reject any mildly famous person is laughable. Then he somehow twists that into a barb at Hillary Clinton -- these celebrities failed to elect her, so he doesn't want them. He wants "the PEOPLE!" The vox populi who elected him. The lumpen proletariat -- and I sincerely feel for them. It blows not to have a job, an industry, to be so hateful that you look at our departing First Family and see only apes, their elegance and intelligence and dignity for eight years unperceived, meaning nothing to you. That's a level of narrowness and crazy I can only squint my eyes and imagine.
    And it blows to be in that precarious position and be duped, to place your trust in a con-man, and only realize after the bank account is drained that the Nigerian Prince who promised to share his fortune with you, provided you put up some earnest money, was not real after all. Not that I expect them to grasp that, soon or ever. You become invested in the deceit you fall for. Better to be cheated than a fool. 
    We've turned our country over to this man and these people. That's an enormous pile of shit that will counterbalance all the individual personal good we could possibly heap on the other tray of the 2016 scale. 
    Not that I am despairing, I'm not. Life has become more complicated and difficult and awful for millions of Americans than it would have been had Hillary Clinton won, while millions of others are ululating over good that will never come their way, except through shared delusion. I am confident good will come from this — after years of suffering, certainly. But it will come. It's coming now. Each ghastly day of jaw-dropping revelation will be one day, one step toward reaching -- and we assume eventually passing through and then, please God, putting behind us -- whatever cataclysm the world is heading toward. 
     It would not help anybody to  suggest that my buying a snowblower somehow slightly mitigates the year America was brought low, garlanded with shame, and drop-kicked into a nightmarish hall of mirrors hell the dimensions of which we can only guess at for now. I won't do it.

"Music was his life, it was not his livelihood."

      While I don't want to become one of those guys who can't stop working, one challenge I have is the intersection between what I find fun and interesting and what I consider work. Wondering about "O Holy Night" on Wednesday got me thinking it might be a good Christmas Eve post, if only to share that Jennifer Nettles video, which everyone should listen to. But digging into why I like the song brought me to Harry Chapin and Martin Tubridy, the discovery of whom prompted me to polish up this blog post and offer it to the newspaper, where it's running as a front page column Saturday. I'm posting it here in longer version—I have to tuck in under 700 words at the paper—because I wrote it on my day off. While Tubridy was identified on a Harry Chapin fan site in 2004, and in Wikipedia, it hasn't, to my knowledge, been in any newspaper outside of Weston, Connecticut. Making it news, of a sort, in my eyes. Anyway, It seemed worth pulling together in time for Christmas.

     Saturday night is Christmas Eve, and while I don't usually write a column for Saturdays, this fell in my lap late in the week. It isn't quite a Christmas miracle, more of a Christmas wonder, as you'll see if you can bear with me to the end.
     On Wednesday, an acquaintance asked if I were doing anything for Christmas. Yes, I replied, as always, on Christmas Eve, I'll play R&B singer Tevin Campbell's version of "O Holy Night."
     "It isn't celebrating Christmas, like having a tree," I explained. "It's just a pretty song."
     If you like that, my acquaintance said, you should hear Jennifer Nettles sing it. He sent me a link.
     Wow. Tevin Campbell has been topped.

     As I listened, I wondered: there are lots of carols, many quite beautiful. Why "O Holy Night"? Kinda religious for me, with all that falling on one's knees and nights divine. A French carol, incidentally, composed in 1847, the familiar English lyrics written in 1855 by a Unitarian minister, John Sullivan Dwight.
    I pulled at the thread, and immediately realized: Harry Chapin.

Harry Chapin

     When I was a teenager, I was a big fan of his songs about sad, thwarted people. Many dismissed them as sentimental, but to me they were moving. He had a couple hits—"Cats in the Cradle," "Taxi." I liked him enough to go see him twice in 1978, at Blossom Music Center outside Cleveland, and at Pick-Staiger Hall in Evanston. At both concerts he did something I had never seen a performer do, before or since. After the Blossom show, he stood amongst the fans, signing his "Every Year is World Hunger Year" t-shirt. I bought one and he signed it. 
     And at the Evanston show, he was running late coming straight from the airport. A student with a guitar was pressed into service, as an impromptu warm-up to distract the crowd until he arrived, and after he did, he not only thanked the kid, but had him sing a little with him. Later in the show, Chapin stepped around the microphone and sang, acappello and unamplified. He had a powerful voice.
    Of all his catalogue of songs, about small people and their frustrated dreams, the one that really got to me was "Mr. Tanner," the story of a mediocre talent from Ohio that begins:

Mister Tanner was a cleaner from a town in the Midwest.
And of all the cleaning shops around he'd made his the best.
But he also was a baritone who sang while hanging clothes.
He practiced scales while pressing tails and sang at local shows.

    But the joy music brought to him wasn't enough—fame beckoned.  His friends urge him to do something with his talent. Mr. Tanner gives in, goes to New York to try to grab the brass ring. He holds a recital.  In the song, Chapin recites the scathing review: 

     Mr. Martin Tanner, baritone, of Dayton Ohio, made his town hall debut last night. He came well prepared, but unfortunately his presentation was not up to contemporary professional standards. His voice lacks the range of tonal color necessary for it to be consistently interesting....

     Tanner returns to Dayton and never sings again, except late at night, softly to himself, sorting through the clothes.
      At several points in the song, Chapin bassist Big John Wallace sings the refrain of "O Holy Night," a soaring counter-melody.
    "Fallllll on your knees, hearrrrr the angels' voices..."
     So that's where "O Holy Night" came from, pressed into my mind by Mr. Tanner.
     But why is "O Holy Night" in the middle of a pop song about a cleaner from Dayton? That was trickier. Harry Chapin died in a fiery car accident in 1981—in a VW Golf, if I remember correctly, something that kept me from ever wanting to drive in small cars.
      I tried his surviving brother Tom, put in a call to the Harry Chapin Foundation, which carried on his work to fight world hunger. 
     The answer was waiting in an obscure interview in a Chapin fan publication from 2004, where Wallace is asked that exact question. He replied: "It was spliced together because it was operatic, and Harry knew it from Grace Church. It came from a review he read about Martin Tubridy and is the actual review."
     Tubridy was an ad man, not a cleaner. He was from Astoria, Queens, not Dayton, Ohio. But he really was a baritone who sang at local shows, good enough, at least in his own mind, that he rented Carnegie Hall and put on a performance. The New York Times sent a music critic. Its single paragraph backhand March 28, 1971 on page 63:
     "Martin Tubridy, a New York bass‐baritone, made his local debut in Carnegie Recital Hall on Friday night with Mitchell Andrews at the piano. His performance of two Purcell songs and Schumann's 'Liederkreis' cycle was not up to professional standards, lacking tonal steadiness and adequate phrasing...."
     That's what inspired Chapin to write the song, which appears on his 1974 album, "Short Stories." After Wallace outed him, people began calling Tubridy, asking: was he Mr. Tanner? Was he from Dayton? 
     So Tubridy was a little frosty when I phoned. But once he realized I wasn't one of those people, he warmed.
     No, he hadn't been a Chapin fan, he said, or had any idea he was the inspiration of the song until a decade ago. 
     "I fell in love with his music once I found out about him," he said.
     Unlike Mr. Tanner, Tubridy did not quit. He kept singing, despite the negative reviews—there were more to come—and a good thing, too. He met his wife, Marlane, while both were performing in an off-Broadway production of Guys & Dolls. For a long time, he didn't want to be associated with Mr. Tanner.
     "I knew about this, but just wanted to push it out of the back of my life," Tubridy said. "Only when Howie Fields called did I realize what it means to people."
     Fields is the drummer of the Chapin family band, which kept performing after Harry Chapin's death, headed by brothers Tom and Steve. Fields called over the summer, wanting to know if Tubridy, now in his 70s, would perform the 'O Holy Night' part in "Mr. Tanner" at a concert last month raising money for the Harry Chapin Foundation.
     "The man just gave and gave and gave," said Tubridy. "I decided to do the performance with the band."

Martin Tubridy (left) and Howie Fields before the Nov. 12 concert
 (Photograph by Peter A. Blacksberg © 2016)

     You can see the Nov. 12 performance on YouTube.
     "It was surreal," Tubridy said. "It doesn't seem like this could actually happen. A standing ovation. Incredible, really."
     There really is only one thing left to say:
      Mr. Martin Tubridy, baritone, of Weston, Connecticut, sang the 'O Holy Night' counter melody in 'Mr. Tanner' with a fullness, strength and conviction which, while at one point hard to hear over the audience cheering, was consistently interesting.
     Particularly, at the very end, when the lyrics are, "He did not know how well he sang, it just made him whole," but you hear Tubridy shift to, "it just made me whole."
     Music will do that. Critics pan and the years pass. But if you stick with your dreams long enough, keep singing, and are very lucky, maybe, just maybe, you'll get to do your stuff for people who cheer and critics who rave. Or even if you never do—the usual result—just the trying will make you whole. Merry Christmas.

A taste of heaven

     I visited a slice of heaven and a glimpse into hell Thursday, all within the span of a couple hours.
     Heaven might be overstating the case. But it was very white, and lovely. Which came as I surprise, because I was driving east along Lawrence Avenue, one of the more unlovely streets in Chicago. It was getting on 9 a.m., I had not had my coffee, and I was looking for a place, anyplace, to get a cup before I arrived at my destination. I pulled over at a Greek bakery, Hella's Pastry Shop, 2627 W. Lawrence -- only now, as I type it, does the name seem ironic.
    "Do you have coffee?" I asked, and as Gus, who has worked there 30 years, poured it, I looked around. Usually a bakery has a wide variety of offerings, but this place had one, predominantly. Tray after tray of kourabies—to use the bakery's spelling—a Greek Christmas cookie, filling the glass case, and the wall behind the counter. The effect was surreal, cinematic, charming. 
    I asked about the cookies, of course, and Gus suggested a dozen at $9.50. I already had breakfast, so compromised with a half dozen.  Gus gave me a complimentary honey cookie, wrapped in a napkin, and I ate that on the spot. It was very good, and I mentioned another Greek restaurateur of my acquaintance. His honey cookies ... Gus knew him, and he and I exchanged a knowing, sorrowful glance. Yes, well, baking is an art, is it not? And art, by definition, is not open to all, despite effort and intention.
      The bakery, he said, has been there for 50 years. These things take time to perfect. There was a sign in the window I admired on my way out. "All nicely wrapped." That was very sweet, in a way as sweet as the cookies. 
     The kourabies were very powdery -- not the best cookie to eat sitting in your car, but I managed. They were worth the care needed to eat them and the clean-up required, some diligent brushing and flicking. These crescents can be made with almond, or walnut, but these seemed a straight shortbread. I limited myself to two, saving the rest for the family, though that took an application of will as the day progressed. 
    Leading us to hell. As for hell, well, that's more complicated, as hell tends to be. You'll have to read my column on Monday. There too, I might be overstating the case, but again, only slightly.


     

You can lead a girl to slaw, but you can't make her eat

  
     In an ideal world, the Sun-Times archive would be online, where you — or I — could access it. But it's not. In that same ideal world, I would at least be able to explain why it isn't online, or when it might be. We don't live in that world either. 

      Though I can post favorite columns here, where people can find them, one of the many benefits of running a blog. I even have permission to do so, until that happy day when the archive is online.

     This is one of my favorite columns; I'm posting it so I can show it to people. It has an interesting back story. A chef I admire, Sarah Stegner, was coming to my kid's junior high school to make cole slaw. What I thought would be the story — the award-winning chef interacting with the school lunch ladies — did not turn out to be the interesting part. 

     What turned out to be the interesting part was the reaction of a group of 12-year-old girls I stumbled upon in the lunchroom. I was a little skittish about using them -- people are sensitive about being in the newspaper, and no parents had been consulted, no approval sought. None was needed, of course. A free press may go about in public. But I didn't want the story spoiled by aggrieved parents. So after I reported this but before it ran, I did something I had never done before, or since. I phoned the mother of the Queen Bee student I focus on, to tell her the column was coming, and seek her permission to use her daughter's name. To my relief, she didn't mind.  

     Lily Jaeger, 12, a willowy wisp of a girl, is sitting in the cafeteria at Northbrook Junior High School, picking at her lunch: a bag of salt & vinegar potato chips.
     That isn't all she brought to eat of course -- she also has two sandwich cookies and some gummy bears in a brown bag.
     "I originally had applesauce in there but I took it out," she explains.
     Neither Jaeger, nor her seven friends crowding cozily together at a table, have touched the free cole slaw set out for them.
     "Too healthy," explains Kayla Fox.
     "We like junk," laughs Maddie Caplis.
     "It's yellow . . ." says Shayna Lutz.
     "If it were blue . . ." speculates Jaeger, in a dreamy tone suggesting that, well, then it might be an entirely different story.
     The slaw is indeed yellow -- a rich orange yellow that suggests fresh peaches, which comes from the organic golden beets and roasted organic squash used to make it, along with ripe pears, apples, cabbage, honey and a sprinkling of roasted pumpkin seeds.
     The slaw has just been prepared in the school's kitchen by Chef Sarah Stegner, who spent years running the dining room at the Ritz-Carlton, and Chef George Bumbaris, her partner now in the Prairie Grass Cafe and Prairie Fire shrines to carefully-crafted seasonal comfort foods. This is "Slaw Month" at the junior high school, which has Stegner and Bumbaris coming in each week to disguise good-for-you organic vegetables and fruits as cole slaw. "Hell's Kitchen" this ain't.
     "As a chef, you are a leader in the food community whether you are conscious of it or not," says Stegner, explaining why she is here. "You set the pace for what's out there. If you can give a little bit of direction and guidance and help, you should do that."
     Receiving direction are Donna Eckles, the food service manager at the school, and her staff of three: Linda, Joyce and Petra.
     Cafeteria ladies do not have a good reputation -- popular culture tars them as mean and their food as glop delivered with the ring of a big stainless steel spoon against a metal tray. But Eckles, in her blue smock with snaps and her name on a metal tag, who received her culinary training on the job at Libertyville High School, works smoothly alongside Stegner, in her crisp white chef's tunic with cloth buttons and her name embroidered on it, who studied at the Dumas Pere Cooking School and received the James Beard Award, twice.
     "Part of this is trying to get the staff here to do the setup, to work with them," says Stegner, who found Eckles receptive to ordering and preparing the organic produce.
     "She did this, and I'm sure it was not easy for her. She peeled butternut squash and diced it up. She had to call the farmers and tell them where to deliver."
     The school scrapped its fryer years ago -- fries are now baked -- and welcomed Stegner.
     "She's really nice," said Eckles, who has cooked with Stegner before. "Sarah has come and done a chicken dinner with the whole works, broccoli slaw. We do Tallgrass burgers, and they did guacamole sauce."
     That would be 100-percent grass-fed beef burgers from Bill Kurtis' Tallgrass ranch, the only beef served at Northbrook Junior High, a choice the school explains is healthier and not too expensive, when you factor in money saved by using organic-fed chicken. Lunches here cost $3, just 50 cents more than at the Chicago Public Schools, which has its own healthy initiatives starting this year. ("We have salad bars in Englewood," says CPS spokeswoman Monique Bond.)
     Getting kids to eat slaw is another matter
     Erik Dieschbourg, 11, is first to take a sample of the cole slaw, adding it to the pizza and chocolate ice cream cup on his tray.
     "Is it good?" asks Reid McCafferty.
     Dieschbourg tries a nibble.
     "Yeah," he says, without enthusiasm.
     The consensus is that the yellow slaw looks "gross" but those who try some like it.
     Madelyn Rowan, whose hand is covered with scrawled notes, dissolves into giggles before hazarding a morsel. "It's really good," she says, to her unconvinced friends.
     "Wash it down with this," says Maddie Tatham, 11, extending a Chewable Lemonhead in her direction.
     Lily Jaeger reconsiders rejecting slaw.
     "Is it free?" she asks, hopping up.
     "She's not going to eat it," confides Shayna Lutz. "She's going to pick at it, say 'Eww' and start crying."
     Not quite. Lily returns with a cup of slaw. She holds it dramatically at eye level, examining it closely, her features a symphony of disgust. She holds it to her nose and sniffs.
     "I smelled it," she announces to her seven friends, hoping that will placate them. It does not. Goaded, she gives a shrug, then plucks up a shred of slaw between pink polished nails and raises it to her mouth, gagging as Shayna instantly brings a napkin to Lily's lips -- the way a mother would do with a child -- so her friend can spit the shred out.
     Lily trots off to the water fountain, then returns, nibbles delicately upon a salt & vinegar chip, as if to settle herself, then decrees:
      "It's actually not that bad."

                            –Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 15, 2010

Repeating "We are SO screwed..." over and over is not a success strategy

“Now we’re feeling what not having hope feels like."                                                                                                     — Michelle Obama

     Oh, I don't know about that.
     Yes, the brittle fraud we elected president has been scraping together a rogue's gallery of right-wing goofs and fringe mediocrities as his Cabinet.
     Yes, he has been as manic on Twitter as ever, firing off poorly spelled salvos at all who dare question him. Yes, he has been willfully blind to Russian meddling in the U.S. election, leaping to slam our intelligence agencies while making goo-goo eyes at Vladimir Putin.
     Pretty grim. With the promise of more grimness to come, as every closet bigot, neighborhood bully and tin-hat lunatic feels emboldened to strut his stuff in public, praising Trump all the while.
     But how does recognizing this translate into lack of hope? Just the opposite. Hope is required now. The first lady gets that. "Hope is necessary," she continued, pouring out her heart to Oprah.
     It sure is. Merely repeating "We're screwed" over and over is not a success strategy.
     Four reasons for hope:
     1. The Curse of the Outsider. President of the United States is the first elective office will Donald Trump hold. You know who that evokes? Jane Byrne, whose only elective office was one term as mayor of Chicago. Remember Jane? She won by opposing insiders like Ed Vrdolyak and Charles Swibel then, once in power, panicked and ran into their arms. We're seeing that already with Trump. Just because he thinks governing is easy won't make it easy...

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