On the recent protests

     Honestly? The protests that have been roiling the country have not been an occasion for deep re-evaluation on my part. I've long practiced a policy I think of as "Trying not to be a bigot"—judging others as individuals and not by whatever cliched slot their race or ethnicity would place them once upon a time. Evaluating their unique qualities, merits, and deficiencies.
      Note the word "trying" in that policy.  As with any program of moral purpose, I'm imperfect at this. Then again, I believe everyone is. I think we should aim for a world where all of us admit these imperfections and recognize that we have prejudices, then fight against them. That seems more realistic than to assume, mistakenly, that because nobody should, therefore nobody does. That only encourages self-designated avengers fall slavering on the necks of anyone who by accident or design touches a certain racial mousetrap. This tends to allow actual haters a pass, since they exist safe in crazyland, while good-intentioned persons are crucified over some lapse or gaffe. I will never be so woke that I don't like "The Mikado." Judge me harshly if you must.
     Other than that, I try to decry racism as often as useful, from my tiny blown-out bullhorn of a column, and in general stand poised to do my part to nudge our nation forward toward a more equitable, more diverse, more compassionate, more just society. My powder is dry, my taxes paid, my vote ready for whatever Joan of Arc seizes the banner of Justice.
     Oh wait. Joan of Arc. White savior. Sorry. It's so easy to screw this up. That's why so many whites fall silent—fear of being hung-out to dry. But silence, to me, encourages indifference. If we don't comment on it, we don't think about it, and pretty soon it's a distant buzz happening to someone else. As opposed to, in my view, all of our problem, one that demands engagement from each American.
     This is an especially fraught, especially contradictory corner of American politics. On Saturday, without trying at all, I hear both "White silence is violence," on the radio, and a call for white commentators to fall mute so that the black voices they are drowning out can be heard.
     I suppose both can make sense. So this is my attempt to fill the silence. And if you'd like me to fall mute then, heck, stop reading now, forgot what you heard, and go read the always-excellent Charles M. Blow. I won't mind a bit.
     Still here? That's flattering. I'm almost done. All that's left is to remind you that the internet is nothing if not an infinity of space for voices of every kind, and if you feel mine is drowning out yours, well, maybe you should try speaking louder instead of blaming me.
     We are at the third and by no means final stage of the 2020 Year of Crisis—first the society shutting shock of COVID-19, followed by widespread unemployment and economic contraction. And now these protests, and the violence that often follows hard on its heels. Emotions are high, and it is too easy to announce that society has entered some New Phase. I support protests, but I also like those mechanical horses you used to see at Woolworth's. That doesn't make them real horses. Occupy Wall Street was a thrilling protest movement. And then economic disparity got worse.
     That isn't a hope, or a prediction. It's a possibility. 
     But positive signs are there. We've seen how bad can follow good. Barack Obama was the first black president, a careful, active, dynamic man who tried to do important things, and faced the shrieking id of unrepentant American racism. I don't want to say he woke the napping Beast. But Obama exited stage left, while from right strode the weak, petty, gross, perverse, cruel, unfit, incurious, traitorous, lying, fraudulent, excrescence that is Donald Trump. Maybe the pendulum is going to keep going and wrap around the axle. An emboldened police state ruling side-by-side with Trump in his second term, as he grooms Donald Jr. to be his replacement.
    Or maybe the pendulum will reach its maximum displacement this fall, and will start its swing back.  We've seen before how good can follow bad. Maybe the time that begins again is now.
 

Texas Notes: Searched

"New Kids on the Block," by Norman Rockwell. This ran in Look Magazine in May, 1967,
with an article on Park Forest, Illinois, known as a model of integration, with a
human rights committee that would smooth the way for new black residents.

     This singular national moment demands that writers respond, or become irrelevant, and Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey, as always, rises to the occasion.    

     In grammar school a handful of kids in my class had to take a bus to school from the next neighborhood over. Meanwhile, my childhood friends and I carelessly met on corners to walk or we “doubled” on banana seat bikes — two passengers on one bike — to get to the same school, which rested in our safe enclave of what we called West Rogers Park. 

     We’d show up wearing matching Izod Lacoste shirts and tapered jeans, looking like some kind of feathered-hair squad in an after school special. We saw ourselves as friendly to everyone but seven of us in particular were quite the clique. We even poked the tips of our fingers with pins to draw bright red bubbles of blood and rubbed our bloody fingers together to become what we said were real sisters. We walked to each others houses at lunch time and made sandwiches of Wonder Bread, bologna, American cheese and mayonnaise that we tucked Doritos into on our more daring days. We drank cans of Coke and finished boxes of Twinkies and Ho Hos while we watched All My Children, then ran back to school just in time for the bell to ring. We could barely focus on classwork much of the time and our teachers called us the Seven Social Butterflies. Our biggest concerns at school were whose Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers flavor was the best and how many pastel colored puffy stickers we had to decorate our Chandler’s daily planners. As we got older we progressed to obsessing about the cute older boys and holding hands with the guys who were much shorter than us in our own grade. 
     While all this was happening we were unaware that some of our classmates were having a very different experience. One classmate recently shared with me that as a young black man he felt so scared coming from his neighborhood over to our school that he only lasted one year, and then demanded to be allowed to return to his old familiar school the following year. While we traipsed around braiding each others hair and sharing secrets, we felt perfectly safe and sound and had absolutely no idea how to truly welcome the new kids into our world. Appearances might have indicated otherwise, but we did not truly integrate our school — it was just a surface fix.
     As we got older we learned that one of our black classmates had died a violent death near Sheridan and Jonquil Terrace, and yet another the same fate not too far from there. In retrospect I now see that we had absolutely no idea what it must have been like to be a visitor in what felt like our home away from home, Philip Rogers School, from a world so different than ours that it was inconceivable. These kids lived a life much different and often much more stressful than ours.
     The first time my car was taken apart and I was searched was when committing the crime of driving while with black men in the car. Did you know cops can easily remove all of your car’s seats for a thorough search? A few friends and I were trying to get down to the lakefront near the Arie Crown Theatre on a rainy afternoon. As a young driver I’d accidentally turned onto the wide, paved bike path, just an honest mistake. Two white cops pulled me over and I thought it would be the usual “officer, I am so sorry!” and they’d laugh and tell me to be more careful next time. Not so this time. Their countenance was threatening, they were unsmiling and they were going to teach us a lesson. They had the four of us, two teenaged white women and two teenaged black men get out of the car while they exercised their will upon us, notwithstanding the letter of the law. There was no probable cause. There was no warrant. There were just four scared teens standing in the rain for an hour or more while they shamed us, terrified us by their stony and methodical silence, and tore my poor 1978 Chevrolet Caprice Classic station wagon apart. Poor girl, she had no idea what was happening. She’d never been treated like this before. Once the cops realized we were clean as whistles they had to let us go with nary a murmur of apology.
     The next time I witnessed harassment of a black man and was harassed for being white while caring for a black person was during the detainment of a light skinned black male friend who was having a mental breakdown. He had started to decompensate into a manic episode with psychotic features at his father’s house, and his father and I tried to talk him into a better place, and into getting help. Instead, in mental torture he ran away from us down the street to his own apartment and we followed him. By the time we got to the scene unfolding in front of his building he was barefoot and bare chested since he had flung all but his jeans off during his manic episode. He was leaning back against a marked police car smoking a cigarette the best he could with his hands cuffed in front of his body, a heartbreaking scene. We later learned that he had called the police himself on his way home, telling them he was a danger to himself, so they had met him there.
     He smiled at us and cracked a joke, his fight and flight chemicals quieting down, and perhaps relieved that he might be getting the help he sorely needed. Suddenly an unmarked burgundy sedan came screeching up and a gigantic burly undercover white male officer jumped out of the car in what looked like a manic episode of his own, and right up into my five foot four skinny friend’s face. The cop ripped the cigarette out of my friend’s mouth and threw it to the ground. His face crumpled. I said “the other cops said he could have a smoke!” As soon as I said it I realized my grave error in trying to stand up for my friend in the face of an adrenaline filled maniac. He marched over to me, nearly bumping his bullet-proof vested chest into my head, glared down at me and demanded to know who I was. I backed away and said “I am his friend.” I cautiously retreated into the street away from this beast. Then his stocky white female partner approached me and demanded to know my name and to see my ID. I clearly said “I am doing nothing wrong and I do not have to show you my ID.” She told me that I could not stand in the street and I said “yes I can. I am doing nothing wrong and I am allowed to observe this arrest,” shaking as I acted bravely. She backed off and they took him away to the hospital. I was lucky that day. I realized later that it could have ended up a lot worse for me, and I recognized my good fortune in the fact that I somehow found the right words and used them to protect myself and also that this would have gone very differently without my white skin.
     As I look back at my life I recall time after time when I witnessed mistreatment of black men and was mistreated myself for being with them. Since George Floyd’s murder many such stories have been flooding back. They all occurred it the 90s and mostly in Chicago. There was the time I was with a white woman and a black man driving my car near Belmont and Damen. While stopped at a stop sign a group of white skinhead type males surrounded my car and thumped their fists on the windows and hood, causing me to tear off onto Belmont as quickly as I could. They could have caused an accident. We shook and trembled as we left the area, furious but also too scared to do anything more but flee.
     A black man and I were walking to our car from a grocery store on Division and Clark and a white man drove by and shouted “jungle fever!” in a menacing tone, upsetting the previous lightness of our day.
     An Asian woman and a white women picked up two black men, all friends of mine, on Howard Street to get some dinner when the driver noticed flashing red lights behind her. She pulled over to yield and let them pass. Instead of the officers passing, she shockingly realized she was being pulled over but had no idea why. The cops did not explain but told them all to get out of the car. They were scared and complied. The men were patted down and they were all made to stand in the rain waiting for a female officer to show up to pat the women down. The cops thoroughly searched the car. Since there was no illegal activity going on they were let go. In a conversation this week the Asian woman told me that she was terrified that the cops would find somehow find contraband even though there wasn't any. She recalls the surreal feeling of being stopped and searched when none of them had done anything that might have seemed suspicious, other than the color of their skin, which in the cops’ eyes was commensurate with a crime.
     It would seem I might run out of such stories, but alas no. Another car taken apart and this time a strip search by Canadian border patrol as a mixed group of us tried to get to Carabana Festival in Toronto one hot summer weekend. One of the young men had forgotten his identification, and rather than humanely turning us away we were detained for hours. Seats were removed, door compartments forced open. I had no idea my car had such possibility. The most unpleasant part for me was being taken into a small room and mandated to bend over naked and cough as two female officers watched, to be sure I was not smuggling drugs. Of course nothing illegal was found and we were finally let go, but the officers told me that they would keep my license plate number and if I ever tried to enter Canada in that car it would be impounded. I may never forget the visceral feelings of anger, powerlessness and humiliation of that day.
     My stories are nothing in the scheme of things, except to further illustrate the fact that systematic racist policing definitely exists. Until people including me figure out ways to contribute to ending this culture of abuse it will not change. It’s not enough to read about it, to protest, to educate. What will it take to create a just world? For now I have distributed lists of food sources throughout Chicago to friends there, as countless grocery stores and corner stores remain boarded up in the aftermath of or to prevent looting. I attended a days long training about intersectionality and institutionalized racism especially as it pertains to healthcare access here in Austin Texas, where I sat on the hot seat and started to learn how to check my privilege and become a listener. I know that I will do whatever it takes to contribute to the demise of our intrinsically racist society and I will have to come up with every and any way I can think of as well as ally with others to contribute in a meaningful way. Just as I know the stars are in the sky I know that I do not want to live in a world absent of ethical humanism towards every single person. After all, as Dr. Cornel West brilliantly surmises, “justice is what love looks like in public.”

What do protests do? Quite a bit

Protest march at the 2016 Republican National Convention

     So what do these protests do?
     Good question. Space is limited, so let’s get to it.
     Six purposes:
     1). Protests provoke the wrong being protested, flushing it into the light. Civil rights demonstrations worked because Southern sheriffs broke out the dogs and firehoses and showed America exactly what these marchers were talking about. Had they broken out trays of pralines instead, we might still have segregated lunch counters. Protests against police brutality wouldn’t be half as dramatic if some police didn’t, on cue, start being brutal, on camera, blasting peaceful protesters with tear gas. Not many — most showed admirable professionalism and restraint. But it only takes a little spit to spoil the soup.
     2). Protests benefit the protesters themselves. Not content to sit at home watching Netflix after — oh, for instance — a police officer is captured on video slowly strangling a black man who may have passed a bogus $20 bill, they leap up, make signs, pour into the street, march, raise their voices. They’re doing something. True, the problem being protested is never fixed by the end of the day. But it isn’t as if they didn’t try. So points for trying; it’s more than most do.
     3). Protests are informational. The “If the czar only knew” aspect. At the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago, young people covered themselves in chocolate syrup and lay in the street to draw attention to the oil sands situation in Canada. I had never heard of the oil sands situation in Canada before, nor thought of it since. But they did raise the issue.
Is that happening now? Are there really people watching TV, thinking, “What’s this about? Police brutality? Tell me more.” Probably. Never underestimate the vast ignorance of the American people; doing that is like assuming you can wade across the Atlantic Ocean.

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Welcome Prof. Savage's class

Wrigley Building

     Today is a little unusual. Bill Savage, a sui generis Chicagoan—Cubs fan, avid cyclist, hot dog expert, and Northwestern literature professor—is assembling a year-end extravaganza for his Chicago Way class. He asked a group of friends and associates to pick a location in Chicago that "speaks to the essence of the city."
     To just flick a name at him and be done with it seemed the quick way, the easy way, the coward's way. Certainly not the Chicago way, where you help your pals and your pals help you. Manus manum lavat—one hand washes the other. Besides, I was intrigued by the question, so decided to not only pick a place, but remark upon it, here, thus both instruct those students lucky enough to have Bill as a teacher, and entertain of what readers of this blog aren't Russian spambots.
     The Wrigley Building flashed to mind, first, because I've always loved the Wrigley Building, this terra cotta Spanish Revival Beaux Arts hodgepodge of a skyscraper, with its clock tower, glazed ivory skin and nickel skybridge.  I figured I could backform some justification for choosing it: built in 1921 (and, quirkily enough, again in 1924, since the building is actually two separate towers with different addresses) it was always brightly lit, intended to be a dramatic lure to draw business across the river, on what was still Pine Street, because there wasn't much there: a few Gilded Age mansions and the old Water Tower.
    That's why the Wrigley Building hosted a bank and a restaurant and other facilities, to service officeworkers marooned there while the city grew up around it (including, to my good fortune, the Chicago Sun-Times, whose squat gray trapezoidal monstrosity of a building, situated next to the Wrigley's beauty, was described by one wit—okay, me—as like placing an overturned galvanized metal bucket next to a spun sugar wedding cake. Gone now, replaced by the cool blue Marian skyscraper known as Trump Tower, for now).
    I could talk about real estate development and the growth of the city. Redlining, speculation, inherent at its very birth, when Native-American land was platted up and sold off just 90 years earlier in the speculative frenzy that followed the opening of the Erie Canal.

City Hall

      No. Real estate development can't be the essence of Chicago. Something else then. My mind wandered to City Hall and the Cook County Building, two identical, mirror-image halves filling an entire city block, constructed at different times by two different governmental entities.
     Any idea which two? C'mon, you guys need to pay attention. The city and ... yes! Cook County. Bill has trained you well. A massive cube, it speaks of the wheeling and dealing, the way Chicago government has sparked and squelched, led and responded to, constant change in the city. The City Council where the 50 wards gather to receive their slice of the pie.
    Not that either. The first two candidates were inspired by faulty thinking, focusing too much on the "location" part of the assignment. The more I thought, the more "essence" came to the fore. The essence of Chicago couldn't be the Wrigley Building, no matter how twee, nor City Hall. We aren't rococo architecture or shameless boodle. Important, but not what the city is about. Wrigley Field flashed, briefly, but was dismissed for the same reason. Chicagoans love sports. But we are not about sports. It is not our essence.
    And then the choice came to me, fully formed, Venus on the Half Shell, the place that reflects Chicago's birth, entire existence, and life to come. Its past, present and future. The essence, the juice, wrung out and reduced to a dark liquid at the bottom of a retort. The key, as it were, to understanding everything that has happened and will happen here, whether the city will continue to thrive or flicker and fade, as so many cities have,  becoming some vast American Naples where aging men with sports coats draped over their shoulders stand at espresso bars,  squinting into our past, trying to detect a flicker of vanished glory.
     Ready? Wait for it.

Union Station

     Union Station.
      We would sit in the Grand Hall, itself a vast, almost sacred space. It is there—we are here—because Chicago is a portage. That is why Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet paddled here in September 1673. They were returning from their exploration of the Mississippi Valley, heading north to Green Bay, and were shown a shortcut; go up the Illinois River to the Des Plaines, then carry your canoes—in French, portage—to the muddy trickle of the Chicago River. From there up Lake Michigan to Green Bay.
     That act of transfer is the essence of Chicago. From one river to another, at first, then from lake steamers to the rail system that spread out in all directions from Chicago.  When Lewis & Clark set out West in 1803, they left from St. Louis, already a majestic, bustling city, Gateway to the West, while Chicago was a swampy nowhere with a trading post and that's it. But half a century later, with the advent of trains, Chicago, which was not on a mighty river, embraced the new technology, while St. Louis— worried especially about putting railroad bridges across their river — stuck with the old way, steamboats and the Mississippi. Both cities gambled. They bet on the past and lost. Chicago bet on the future and won.
    There's a lesson there, kids.
     Chicagoans weren't enamored with trains either, at first. That's why the station is on this spot, across the river, on what used to be the outskirts. To keep the damned contraptions, which did tend to explode, away from the glory of downtown. The first line was heading toward Galena, a prosperous lead-mining town that was the same size as Chicago when the first track was lain. But Galena, like St. Louis, wasn't a portage either, and so stayed a small 19th century relic known for its fruity wine and its connection to Ulysses S. Grant.
     So why is being a portage important? Because there is profit in being the middleman. If you look at a layout of Union Station, you will see it is misnamed. It is not a station at all, in the sense that it does not sit on railroad lines passing through. It is really Union Terminal: because all routes end here. You cannot take a train through Chicago. Every line stops here, intentionally. There are north tracks, and south tracks, and one little feeder that connects, for moving stock, not passing through.
    Why do you think Chicagoans did not want trains passing through their city without stopping? Discuss.
    Freight was offloaded in Chicago, cars changed, handling and storage fees collected. Passengers poured out of one train to buy meals and gifts, maybe stay a night, then left on another.  Chicago was the nexus where the developed East met the agricultural West. That was enough for Cyrus McCormick to bring his reaper works here, to be close to farmers who bought his threshing machines.  That's why the commodities exchanges are here—because 150 years ago wheat and corn and oats were rolling into Chicago. The first ceremonial train to leave Chicago in 1848 returned with a load of wheat, purchased from a passing farmer. That's why mail order houses like Montgomery Ward and Sears grew up here — because here the tracks went out in all directions, the factories were nearby, and if you were shipping corsets to Los Angeles and New York and New Orleans, Chicago was the place to be.
     That dynamic persisted, even after water traffic fell away. A century after McCormick brought his factory here, Douglas Aircraft started building planes in an old apple orchard northwest of the city. Convenient location. Close to all that steel coming out of Gary. After the war, the city took over the runways, eventually building an airport there, named for World War II hero Butch O'Hare. A plane couldn't fly all the way across the country in one hop in the 1950s, so they'd land in Chicago to refuel. A portage still. If you puzzled over the "ORD" on your luggage tags, it stands for "orchard," one of those little winks where the past shows up today and reminds those who notice.
     The fact this waiting room isn't jammed with people is a reminder that technology changes. Trains to planes, planes to computers and the cloud. A few key battles in the communications revolutions were fought here — the first cell phone call placed by a member of the public was made during a stunt in the parking lot at Soldier Field, by the first company to sell car radios, in 1930, its name a mash of "Motor" and "Victrola" — Motorola.
    A good student doesn't argue the question's premise, but I should end by pointing out that key though transportation is, one vital truth that makes a city like Chicago great is that it has many essences. With an eye to these very difficult times — a traitor and fraud in the White House, plague in the land, the economy cratering, and now civic unrest because the first three weren't bad enough, apparently — we could have met at the Chicago Fire Academy on De Koven Street, built, with a more nod to the symbolic than is common among city officials, on the exact spot where the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 began — and no, Mrs. O'Leary's cow did not start it by kicking over a lantern; that's just a xenophobic calumny that somehow buried into the public mind and became accepted as fact.
     We could have talked about rebirth, about how that disaster and the city's frenzied re-building is what led to our future greatness, and quickly too. The flames burned away Chicago's past and left it with only future.
     We might have met in Hyde Park, on Midway Plaisance, the mile-long street connecting Washington and Jackson Parks. Here was the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, another essence, Chicago as that glittering destination that rustics from Davenport come to witness wonders, a dynamic that was repeated artfully in the construction of Millennium Park. Like the ORD luggage tag, if you go to a carnival midway to knock down milk bottles, you're hearing a faint echo of the Midway Plaisance, which was jammed with sideshows, with Little Egypt dancing the hootchie-coo and the first hot dog stand.
    When Prof. Savage raised this idea, I naturally assumed he would ask me to be waiting here, in Union Station, cross-legged on one of the massive wooden pews, cup of coffee in hand, to deliver this to you in person, after you shambled in, bemasked and bemused.
     But that turned out to be a physical impossibility, as you have already scattered around the country. Which itself might be a hint of where Chicago is going — a source of virtual classes taught by people you never set eyes on about locations you perhaps haven't seen. Maybe that's an improvement. Wherever you go in life from here, keep an eye out for the portages — isn't that what Amazon is? The manufacturers of the world dump stuff at their feet, and they unpack it, box it back up and ship it down the line. The same dynamic with a new twist. Worked for them.
    In closing, Chicago is a gift the past has given us that you can spend the rest of your life unwrapping. I know your professor has, and I have, and if you choose to stay or to return here, like us, you will not regret that decision, or at least not regret it much. Thank you for your attention.

‘This is my store!’ Loop icon holds on

     Last Friday, Scott Shapiro wore a necktie — an ivory Italo Ferretti with blue dots — for the first time in more than two months.
     “I almost forgot how to tie it,” he said. “It took me several times to get it right.”
     This is noteworthy because Shapiro owns Syd Jerome, the upscale Loop menswear institution. Like many Chicagoans, Shapiro is eager to get back to his old life, which for him means standing at the front of the store, impeccably dressed, greeting customers, helping them navigate Syd Jerome’s fifth and fanciest location, on Clark Street just north of Madison.
     That slow climb back began Friday. That’s what the sign said: “Re-Opening May 29.” The clerks were nattily attired, alert and ready. Carlos Nava went over the windows one last time, wiping every smudge. It seemed a fresh start and not a mere lull between Act One, the medical crisis and economic disaster of COVID-19, and Act Two: all that, plus widespread, ongoing violence following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
     Syd Jerome began in 1958 when Scott’s father, Sidney Shapiro, who by age 11 was steering customers into discount suit joints on Maxwell Street, opened a store of his own, less than a block away.
     Now, during the pandemic, through April and May, Shapiro came into the shuttered store every day. Keeping up with the paperwork of being closed was itself a full time job.

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Help Central Camera rebuild.

Photo courtesy of Dave Hoekstra's blog.

     I am not a photographer, obviously. But I like to think I have an appreciation for photography, and photographers, and cameras. Nor am I a graphic designer, but I admire a really cool logo. 
    Two buttons pushed by Central Camera, a wonderworld of old cameras, with rows of boxes of film, and odd ephemera to be expected in a shop now in its third century, all under a gloriously retro cool logo. I loved walking in, noting the glowing green neon "Since 1899." I only went in a few times: curiosity, if I recall, one of the boy's photography class projects, with a friend seeking a certain sort of film, showing off the place to visitors.  The clerks, I recall, were knowledgable and nice.
     So as much sorrow as Saturday's riot unpacked, seeing the smoke pouring out of that little shop touched upon how our current crisis, a dumb beast, tramples on the lives of all sorts of Chicagoans. My longtime Sun-Times colleague Dave Hoekstra says it far better than I could, so I am going to defer to him, and let his blog take over, with his kind permission. But not before reminding you to click the GoFundMe link and give money. I did, and in case you overlook it in his story, here is the link again. 
     Dave writes:

     I was at the historic Central Camera Co., store, 230 S. Wabash on Friday afternoon.
     I waited outside the door to pick up some prints at Chicago’s oldest camera store. My friend and long time clerk Timothy Shaver came out. We did an elbow bump and I gave him condolences towards the recent passing of his mother at age 99. Third generation store owner Don Flesch arrived next. He offered me a piece of candy as he does with most of his customers. He pulled his face mask down a bit to reveal a smile that would never be denied.
     We began talking about the pandemic and all the things Central Camera has survived since his grandfather Albert Flesch opened the company in 1899. World Wars. The Holocaust. The Great Depression. Digital photography.
     And a little more than 24 hours later Central Camera was torched in the downtown riots.
     The store was looted and set on fire Saturday night.

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How could he do it? Riots don’t touch key question

Photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin Garcia

     They’re breaking into all the stores. We have nothing on State ...
     The updates calmly crackle across the police scanner, urgent and unceasing. CPD in my left ear, CFD in my right.
     The injured officer is on the west side of the bridge, squad ...
     Saturday night creeps by that way, 5 p.m. to midnight. I’m keeping track, while chewing on the question that set all this in motion:
     How could he do it?
     The question that had to cross every mind — maybe too obvious to say out loud — while watching that video of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneel on George Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes Monday until he was dead. It sparked horror that rattled the nation.
     We need everybody to report to State and Lake, they’re about to set a building on fire.
     But protests quickly deteriorated into violence — a police precinct headquarters burned in Minneapolis. Then in scattered cities. Then in cities across the country Saturday night including Chicago. Watching TV news is like trying to breathe through a straw. Trying to figure out what was happening here as dusk fell, I sat and listened to the police scanner.
     The injured officer is on the west side of the bridge ...
     Chauvin being charged with murder should have defused the outrage. So why this chaos? Economic ruin? Pandemic fatigue? Outside agitators? I don’t buy that. The disturbance took on a life of its own. This riot had as much to do with George Floyd as the championship riots of the 1990s had to do with Michael Jordan. The scanner constantly crackled.
     Wagon at Macy’s, come up Madison now!
     The key question got lost in the smoke and shattering glass. How could he do it? How could Chauvin do that to another human being?
     Squad car north of Adams on Dearborn on fire ...
     The easy answer: because Chauvin is a cop. Cops do that kind of thing.
     But yet ... aren’t those also cops scrambling around downtown, holding their lines, issuing requests, trying to keep the city from tearing itself apart?
     Two squad cars on fire in front of the Witt Hotel. Anybody know where the Witt Hotel is?
     How could he do it? Lack of training? I was shaking my head sadly at the Gopher State cops botching it so badly up until 5 p.m. Saturday. We have our own training issues here. What was the plan for handling unrest, and how did it fall apart so quickly?
     Give me more units at Hubbard and State, they’re surrounding them.
     Police represent society, for good and bad. They represent us, our values. So let’s ask again: How could he do it? Easy. Because George Floyd wasn’t a person. To Chauvin, he wasn’t human, he was black.
     They broke into the Palmer House ...
     The Black Lives Matter movement is misnamed. Because black lives don’t matter — not to Derek Chauvin. Not to a lot of people. Look at the crimes that aren’t captured on camera. The substandard schools reserved for African Americans. The gaps in housing, education, employment, capital. We focus on one death while the machinery crushing uncounted lives chugs away. As it always has.
     We need units! We need officers now!
     How could he do it? He was trained. Not at the police academy, maybe. But by America, and its 400 years of systemic dehumanization and enslavement. Those go together and endure, a legacy baked into everything today. Of course, 40 percent of Americans ignore facts; they always have. You can’t be a self-satisfied slaveholder otherwise.
     201 N. State, we got a squad car on fire ...
     The Floyd killing isn’t even the only horrific killing of a black man to emerge on video in the past month. Ahmaud Arbery, or have you already forgotten? Shotgunned while jogging in February. The video created a stir ... three weeks ago.
     Rush and Walton we have a large crowd. They’re going into Versace.
     Forgotten now. Maybe that’s why this keeps happening. Because problems are easier to forget than fix. Bigotry is not a flaw in America but a feature. Black lives matter to some people in some places. But not to this cop in Minneapolis, nor his colleagues, nor many other Americans too dumb to even realize it.
     To them, black lives — or gay lives, or women’s lives, or Jewish lives, or my life, or yours — simply aren’t important. How do you fix that? Hell if I know. I just report the fires, I don’t put them out.
     15 West Hubbard, they are outnumbered, they need more cars ...
     Those trashing the city — do their lives seem to matter much, even to themselves? On Saturday night, the Chicago cops seemed to be the ones to whom life really mattered.
     15 West Hubbard, they are throwing things at the officers ...
     15 West on Hubbard, please, they need some help ...