Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson's real estate transfer tax is a good idea

Proceeds from the tax will fund increases in spending to address homelessness

I recently wrote the Chicago Tribune a letter criticizing their hyperbolic dismissal of Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson's proposal to tax high-value real estate sales at higher rates than average property sales and to set aside the proceeds to fund increases in programs that will reduce homelessness. The Trib published the letter on November 27. Here it is:

 

In a recent editorial, the Tribune Editorial Board argued, without evidence, that Mayor Brandon Johnson’s real estate transfer tax plan will cause major property owners in the city to panic and sell their properties as quickly as they can. In “Owners are scrambling to unload high-profile buildings. Is this a backlash to Mayor Johnson’s ‘mansion tax’?” (Tribune, 11/15/23), the editorial board also adds, again without evidence, that the recent mandated increase in tipped-workers’ wages, and a new city law creating legal minimums for paid time off, may have  caused the closing of a popular Michigan Avenue restaurant.
 
Here’s the problem: the editorial does not even briefly explore the possibility that the real estate transfer tax, which will dramatically increase the amount of money the city spends to address homelessness, could have any positive impact. But think of the benefits of funding long-term services aimed at eliminating homelessness. Who in the city, major property owners included, wouldn’t benefit greatly from such an increased investment in eliminating a fundamental social problem?
 
And are we seriously going to compare such a continuing social investment adversely to the one-time only increase in tax consequences to the very largest property owners in the city? Haven’t those owners all benefitted from years of city investment in infrastructure and from years of reduced property taxes? Isn’t a big part of the value of any major real estate property related to years of working people all over the city getting their jobs done, paying their property taxes, and driving Chicago forward?
 
Why would any property owner in Chicago leave now, just when the city is tackling chronic problems with genuine vision? Why would a property owner in Chicago sell now, leaving all that future value behind in a city where homelessness has been eliminated?

A collective challenge: Eco-anxiety is not a mental health problem

A recent letter-to-the-editor that NYT did not print. Oh, well. It still has a home here on In and Out.

Editor, The New York Times

 

A recent article (“That Feeling of Doom? It’s Called Eco-Anxiety,” NYT, Sept. 17) advanced a theory of “eco-anxiety,” a new concern for mental health professionals, and a new area of investigation for journalists and pollsters. Widespread fear that more severe environmental changes are coming makes sense.

 

And while treatment for individuals suffering from any form of anxiety and, even, despair, also makes sense, the only cure ultimately is collective action. Human activity is the root cause of climate change and cascading environmental catastrophes. And environmental scientists tell us that this has been happening for millennia. But the acceleration of these changes over the last two centuries is largely the result of a process that has created global corporations with nearly absolute authority over how resources will be distributed and consumed. A direct effect of this process has been the conversion of the vast majority of people into either disempowered consumers or dehumanized objects.

 

This phenomenon is the cause of eco-anxiety. Can we fix this? Develop and deploy strategies and innovations that can mitigate the climate harm coming our way? Perhaps. Success is not guaranteed.

 

But the individual experiences of anxiety that people are suffering from now would certainly be reduced by participation in a mass movement that aimed to eliminate racial and economic inequity. History tells us that such movements never achieve all their goals. But when they come close, they make a lasting difference and are often described as revolutionary. 

 

 

 

Stunning, how inept...

... I can be

Before I elaborate on that statement in, hopefully, efficient detail, I want to note that my previous three blog entries (variations on "In the time that we have left..."), may not have been a good idea. Or, at least, advanced an idea that needed extensive elaboration, which I was not at all prepared to develop. Another time, perhaps.

Moving on, then.

This is a story about how inept I can be. It begins around 8:03 some recent morning when Brendan, who was probably already out uberring, texted me. "Hey, did you ever happen to get a new city sticker for my car?"

I read his text about an hour later. Reading sent my stomach to roiling. In my Chicago experience, going on 15 years this century, renewing the city stickers on our cars is a reliably fraught undertaking.

After writing most of the 130 or so words immediately preceding, I took my first writing break. I know. I write all of 130 words and I am so exhausted I need a break? Yeah, well, diligence is not one of my major qualities. Regardless, after I took that break, I wrote the paragraphs indented below:

I need to run out to the porch to check the temperature on the grill because I am trying to slowly smoke a slab of back ribs. And, having performed that check, I extend my break to take a shot of tequila. A reward I promised myself if I so much as began this post about my day in pursuit of a renewed city sticker for our Honda Accord. The one that Brendan takes uberring.

Tequila shots are not, of course, my usual practice. I drink beer moderately and rarely touch hard liquor. But that day was special. It was 40 degrees out and I was trying to smoke a slab of ribs on my grill. Lots of people can do that, although the cold day will increase the challenge of maintaining the grill temperature in the range of 180 to 200 degrees. 

And it was also the day that I had the set of experiences that led me to decide to write a story about how inept I can be, an ineptness that had me rueing bad decisions and incompetence. Hence, in the moment, I soothed myself with a shot of tequila.

Break over, I returned to the writing task. The tequila shot was a big one in more ways than one. 

Oversize shot glass. A Mark Twain souvenir from Hannibal, Missouri. 'Never refuse to take a drink--under any circumstances," it says, quoting Twain. 

That's not my style. But right now, I wish it was. Not because my especially inept performance earlier that day made me wish I was drunk. After all, that experience of myself as less than competent is in no way unusual and, at this point in my life, it's not very distressing. Overtime, one tends to get over harsh feelings about oneself. But from time to time I do wonder if I might have tapped a little bit more genius if I had gotten to the bottom of more bottles in this life.

After absorbing Brendan's text and moving on from the sinking feeling, I dialed the city information line. A polite and helpful phone operator answered almost immediately, giving me a number for the city clerk's office where, the helpful phone operator assured me, still another helpful city staffer would certainly tell me how to go about replacing the city sticker that I apparently had previously purchased, and then lost, in some unremembered fashion, and was never gonna find.

Thirty-one minutes later, I finally came off hold to engage a voice. Thirty-one. Minutes. Later. WTF, you're probably saying to yourself, you stayed on hold for 31 minutes? Couldn't you think of a better way to go about doing what you needed to do?'

Well, no. I just let the time slip away. Though while on hold I did get through two pages of comics in the morning newspaper. Some number of other people (many? most? all?) wouldn't consider that a very productive use of my time, but I am generally not inclined to think about my time in such terms.

Anyhow... "I bought a new city sticker for my car about two months ago, but my son just told me that we still have the 2022 sticker on the windshield. I assume we lost the last one, so I need to know how to get a replacement."

"Oh," the helpful voice responded, "I'm going to give you the number of the office that can answer that question for you."

"Oy," I kvetched, "you can't tell me how to do it?" I almost added that I'd been on hold for thirty-one minutes, then refrained from saying so. Because, really, nobody who takes the calls of people who have been living on long holds is likely to be motivated by a desire to provide whatever it is that might be needed by the person coming off hold, especially if they had been holding on the wrong line.

"Sorry," she responded, "this number is for fines and late fees."

"Okay, I get it. Can you give me that number, again?"

And she did. And I called the number and talked to a woman who told me that I just needed to come downtown to city hall, go to the police desk near the entry, get a "miscellaneous police report" from them, take it to the clerk's office on the first floor, and pay $5 to replace the missing city sticker.

I was good with that. I could take the Green Line from the 31st Street/IIT station near my house and get downtown in, oh, say, 30 minutes or thereabouts. And, before I could even consider riding my bike to the clerk's office (which, as it turned out, would have been a much smarter decision), I realized that I could read on the train. This is generally a good thing because I tend to not put aside time to read at home.

Brendan had offered to stop uberring for a bit and give me a ride downtown. But I'm thinking that he needs the money he's working to earn--he's in law school and near-broke most of the time--and I make a habit of walking or taking public trans whenever I can, even when it comes at a significant cost in time.

I should add that much of my adult life has been shaped by another "behavioral inefficiency," the guilty wish to be the direct cause of as few environmental-havocing, fossil-fuel-consuming, climate-changing, class-gender-and-race-privileged deeds, woke or otherwise, as I can manage. (This statement should also be the departure point for a future post about the privilege I was born with, and have never been able to outrun, despite struggling often, but perhaps half-heartedly, to reject. Privilege is, after all, the collective advantage of the caste into which one is born. Individuals can steer neurotically, or any other way they might wish, into calamity, and even sever themselves violently from their caste, but the privilege that is the property of the group, is not diminished. Until the revolution, maybe.)

By the way, Helen Oyeyemi is a pretty wonderful writer. I've been a writer, on and off, for the last 60 years, probably three times longer than Oyeyemi has been writing, but I can't touch what she can do. Why is my writing no match for Oyeyemi's. Not imaginative enough? Far less dedicated to the craft? Less disciplined in the effort? Who knows? But it's safe to say that if we were playing basketball, Oyeyemi would be dunking on me at will.

So, that's a good thing that happened that day. I read probably 40 pages in The Icarus Girl, in which Oyeyemi tells the story of Jess, the daughter of a Nigerian woman and a white Brit, an accountant, no less. Jess is a quirky, but loved child who visits her ancestral homeland and befriends a ghostly inhabitant of her grandfather's family compound.

Oyeyemi's control of her work creates numerous chances for her to digress in the service of enriching the story. She quotes Samuel Coleridge, making one of his poem's importance to Jess a way of deepening Oyeyemi's characterization of her 14-year-old character. "And all should cry, Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair! / Weave a circle around him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honeydew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise."

It is a bit of forewarning that Jess fails to process. I can confidently say that if I had somehow made myself read that Coleridge poem, I would have encountered those lines without any sense of what they might mean, or how they might make me feel. But reading those lines in the context of Jess's journey, I felt schooled. And moved. And, so, maybe it was a good idea to take the train.

But, no. The train and the book would turn out to be among the many ways I would waste time on the day that began with that morning text from my youngest child, whom I like to call Brendo. Or Mr. Potato Head. The child that Nate and Julie, his much older siblings, like to call Jumpin' (different story, another time).

At the police desk at city hall, I asked one of the officers for a "miscellaneous police report," as I believed I had been directed to do by the last voice I had heard. "No, you have to go to the clerk's office to get the form," the officer said. "Then bring it here and we fill it out. Go to room 107 around the corner and ask them for the form."

Okay. Room 107. Waiting my turn, I stand in line. For an extended period of time that I could only endure and knew, for a fact, that I would not be able to even estimate how m much time would pass, let alone measure with precision.

But finally, I stood in front of a real live person at one of the long line of teller's windows in the clerk's office. Vehicle-registration-and-neighborhood-parking-permit Department. Or Division. Who ever really knows the precise names of these offices, departments, divisions?

"I need the form for the miscellaneous police report," I said to the person before me.

"Oh," she side-eyes me. "You get that from the police desk in main lobby."

Oy.

"Really. They told me that I get it from you and bring it to them."

Nope.

I went back to the lobby. The police officer whom I had first encountered, a sergeant, no less, smiled a greeting. "Didja get it," he asked.

Nope. "They said I'm supposed to get it from you."

The sergeant was incredulous. "C'mon, I'll go back there with you."

So, we walked back to room 107 together. A polite guy, the sergeant signaled to the teller to whom I had spoken earlier, that he would wait to speak to her until she was done with the person she was currently serving. But, feeling that I had long since wasted all the time that any ordinary standard of public service would require me to waste, I spoke up without waiting my turn. A demonstration of class privilege, perhaps?

In the upshot, my impatience, my attempt to make the teller do what I needed her to do, had no effect. "I'll be with you in a moment," she said.

When it was finally our turn, the sergeant spoke, then the teller spoke, then the sergeant spoke, and on and on. I didn't fully understand what they were saying to each other, but it became clear that I had asked the teller for the wrong form and the fault was mine. In any case, she was prepared to give me the correct form, the one that I would take to the police desk in the lobby, hand over to the police and receive, in return, the miscellaneous police report that I would take back to her and hand over, along with a five dollar fee, and receive, in return, a replacement city sticker for our Honda.

"I just need to see your driver's license," she said.

But I could not show her my driver's license, because it was at home, sitting on our copier, where I had left it after having scanned it for the purpose of sharing it with a different city office in an attempt to get a city permit for an entirely different purpose.

"Funny story," I said. "I don't have it. It's at home on my copier."

"Well, I need to see some sort of state ID."

Oy. I sorted through a number of other comments I might make in that moment, but none of them seemed at all relevant to the problem created by the fact that I couldn't produce my driver's license.

I left room 107. On the way out of the building, I stopped by the police desk ion the lobby. The very cheerful sergeant, apparently eager to fill out a temporary police report on my behalf, smiled at me.

"Guess what," I said to him. "I couldn't get the form. I left my driver's license at home."

Determined to help, he suggested that I go to the Secretary of State's office across the street and ask them to issue a replacement driver's license. This did not strike me as a good idea, at the time. But on the way back to the Green Line, I stopped in the lobby of the state office where a number of people were in lines that snaked around corners and ended somewhere out of sight.

I decided that I would go home and get my driver's license off the copier and try again the next day.

Risking failure in the accounting of the soul

On Sept. 17, the Trib published a letter from me responding to Shmuly Yanklowitz's message about ethical self-review over the Jewish New Year:

Editor,

I appreciate Shmuly Yanklowitz’s op-ed (“This Rosh Hashana, let’s commit to repairing the injuries of injustice,” Sept. 11) elaborating the Jewish New Year practice of moral and ethical self-evaluation. “Jewish or not, we all find ourselves asking the question: How do we make restitution for our complicity in injustices that were beyond our control?” Yanklowitz wrote.

 

The reminder that the moment has come for each of us to consider our own responsibilities in a world deeply in need of repair couldn’t be more timely. On the same day, the Trib ran an editorial about the challenge that thousands of recent migrants present to Chicago’s willingness to truly embody the values of a sanctuary city. Will we, as the Torah commands, welcome the stranger?

 

Nor should we, as Yanklowitz points out, limit our self-examination to harms directly caused by our own actions or inactions. “We’re all, to one extent or another, complicit in historical injustices that we’ve indirectly benefited from…we are obligated to do what we can to fix [the damage].” Specifically citing Christian nationalism and white supremacy, Yanklowitz continues, “directly or indirectly, we often benefit from ideologies and movements that press people down.”

 

Unfortunately, Yanklowitz’s op-ed ignores one area that most American Jews prefer to leave unexamined. If one is truly making a complete moral and ethical self-examination, failing to consider the fate of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, and the role of American Jewish congregations in supporting Israeli policies that oppress Palestinians, confiscate their lands, and subject them to lethal military occupation, means to fail in the “accounting of the soul” that the Jewish high holidays require of us.

 

Jeff Epton

Bronzeville

Poverty, by America

A great book with a great message

around which we should mobilize

In the park with Jetta a couple days ago, thinking about all sorts of people and things. About how I drifted home from the airport after dropping Marrianne off to catch a flight to Pittsburgh.

 

The rush hour traffic was jammed up on the Stevenson from Cicero Avenue pretty much all the way to the Dan Ryan. Drivers frantically changing lanes, sometimes changing back instantly, looking for ways to shave minutes off their commutes to work. Meanwhile, I was, like I said, drifting; sliding carefully over to the left lane knowing that the right-side exit ramps to the Ryan northbound and south were the targets of probably 90 percent of the drivers around me.

 

At 75, I’m enjoying a level of health that my Bronzeville neighbors, 10 and 20 years younger than me, don’t share. The privilege that drives my longer life expectancy and relative comfort is rooted in my whiteness, my gender, my sexual orientation, and my class background. Retired these past many years, I still have the energy to stay fit, to take care of my home, to travel and to, sometimes, write.

 

I am privileged to have walked thousands of miles with Jetta. To have thought about so many different things on those walks. To have admired beauty. To have perceived great stories written in grit and rooted in the sometimes-blighted city in which we live, to have witnessed so many Chicago stories full of heroes, both visible and, more often, unsung; the heroes, the ordinary folks, who have labored to create a city that always rises above the worst that it could be and do, and sometimes shines with rare beauty.

 

For the immediate future, though, a piece of every day is and will be about how I must urge tired, chronically alarmed, old Jetta to wander wherever in the park she might want to go after I let her off the leash. “You don’t have a lot of time left in this life, Jetta,” I tell her. “Enjoy this beautiful day.”

 

I think also of my friend Richard and the time some years back, that Richard set aside an afternoon for a community of friends to stop by to say goodbye to Ginger, a noble-looking, golden-haired German shepherd, about to be put to sleep before she was 8 years old. I think about Richard himself, a big, dignified, Black man, who nevertheless was also a chronic complainer, constantly annoyed by both trivial and significant matters, Richard who gave of himself always to take care of his frail mom and his disabled brother, and was my best DC friend, a gay man who flamed exuberantly on Facebook, and who passed away before he was 60.

 

And here I am, 75 and healthy, privileged to take leisure whenever I spy the opportunity. Privileged to own the right clothes for any season and to live in a nice, big house with a brilliant, diligent, loving woman and to have children who have forgiven me for my failings more than I deserve.

And there is also, in my life, Isabel, a granddaughter who spreads cheer.

 

I have had what feels like years of running and jumping and hooping. I have acquired the language and perspective to express gratitude, and to recognize that my privilege is rooted in the price that others with less privilege have been forced to pay. Privilege that allowed a big, white, straight, middle-class guy to dodge the worst consequences of stupid risks that ended badly, the same or similar mistakes for which others almost certainly paid a higher price.

 

But, now comes a book, Matthew Desmond’s Poverty by America, that makes it clear that the cost of the wealth and power that some of us enjoy in a lifetime is paid by others who suffer, repeatedly, the injuries of class and race and other systemic hatreds, the outrageous cost of being poor in America. Desmond makes it clear from the start that his book is not about the lives of the poor, not about the “what” of poverty, but is about the “why.”

 

There have been plenty of good books, great ones, Desmond writes, about poverty and the poor. The list of reliable and noteworthy accounts of what the poor live with every day is long, stretching back to the 19^thcentury, Desmond notes, specifically citing books by Jacob Riis, Jane Adams, James Agee and Walker Evans, and the photojournalism of Dorothea Lange. Desmond ends the list with Michael Harrington’s The Other America, which, along with the impetus created by the Civil Rights movement, directly inspired Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.”

 

These are “books [that] help us understand the nature of poverty. They are vital. But they do not—and in fact cannot—answer the most fundamental question, which is: Why? Why all this American poverty? I’ve learned that this question requires a different approach. To understand the causes of poverty, we must look beyond the poor. Those of us living lives of privilege and plenty must examine ourselves. Are we—the secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, the lucky—connected to all this needless suffering? This book is my attempt to answer that question, addressed to that ‘we.’ Which makes this a book about poverty that is not just about the poor. Instead, it’s a book about how the other other half lives, about how some lives are made small so that others may grow.” 

(Desmond, Poverty, by America, pgs. 7-8)

 

On pages 176 and 177, Desmond quotes James Baldwin as part of his effort to explain why the United States, which celebrates itself for its great wealth, would tolerate endemic poverty. The quote nowhere near captures the range and subtlety of Desmond’s explanation, but it’s a foundational piece in the structure of his argument.

 

“’Any real change,’ writes James Baldwin, ‘implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed.”

 

At the time, Baldwin was pointing to pending desegregation as the threat on the horizon for (mostly) white folks that warned of a coming dispossession that would strip white people of their most celebrated entitlement, their supremacy, which might be the last of many privileges to go, but would, they feared, crumble and collapse, swept away by a tide of enemies, hated and feared, people not like them.

 

But Baldwin, were he here today, might well be writing the same thing to assess MAGA, which developed out of the renewed threat white folks always knew was coming, had known for years, out of a past that was literally perceived by white folks as a black hole, and manifested itself finally just as Trump was preaching nativism and nostalgia for the edenic past, as Black. Lives. Matter.

 

I’m not saying that the various narcissistic and psychopathic demagogues, like Trump (who arise always to amplify and soothe those fears), require anything from the rest of us—no sympathy, no understanding, and certainly no forgiveness. But I am saying that we must understand what terrors infest the minds and hearts of those they incite.

 

We must understand those fears because the changes that must happen to eliminate the inequities and injustices that plague our society will take a bigger movement than any that have tackled the problem before. In his epilogue, Desmond describes a few movements that made a difference in the past.

 

“Behind every great blow dealt to the scourge of poverty, there have been ordinary Americans who have bound themselves to one another to accomplish extraordinary things. Social movements spark ideas, providing the blueprint for reform, as when the unemployed workers’ movement of the late nineteenth century called for a public works program decades before the New Deal,” he writes.

 

“Most important, movements apply the heat. The American labor movement was the dominant force behind the New Deal. The tenants’ union that rose up during the Depression provoked Congress to establish our public housing system. How was President Johnson able to break through congressional gridlock to deliver the civil rights acts, the Great Society and the War on Poverty? The civil rights movement forced his hand by putting unrelenting pressure on lawmakers. Johnson admitted as much in 1965, telling Congress that the actions of Black Americans who had joined the civil rights movement ‘called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress had it not been for [their] persistent bravery, and [their] faith in American democracy?’”

(Desmond, Poverty, by America, pgs. 183-184)

 

And, we must understand the fears of our fellow citizens who have been and are incited to hate and dread the progress that others make because the movement that must be built if we are ever to end poverty, by America, must necessarily be the largest in the history of this country and cannot be confined only to those who already believe that the arc of history bends toward justice. Without those who are afraid and wish to barricade themselves away from the future, we cannot build a movement big enough to force the change that we wish to see.

 

Because, if poverty in America, and all the social consequences that arise from poverty, is ever to end, it will be because Americans who have benefitted from the inequity that is an integral part of our society, will also have come to understand that what they must give up on the way to a country that is both equitable and just will be much less than what they gain.

 

“When your power comes from people,” Desmond writes. “you need a lot of them. The movement must grow, which means we can’t afford to write anyone off. As Alicia Garza, co-creator of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, has put it, ‘To build the kind of movement that we need to get the things that we deserve, we can’t be afraid to establish a base that is larger than the people we feel comfortable with.’ That is, ‘We have to reach beyond the choir.’”

 

Indeed, it is likely that a significant percentage of those who voted for Donald Trump, and even the true believers who think that the 2020 election was stolen, follow Trump because his relentless fury at “outsiders,” at those who want their fair share of the wealth of this richest of all countries will get that share at the expense of those who live a precarious middle-class life, a life that they insist that they “earned.” Their stability and their luxurious, earned or otherwise, precarious or not, the goal of the demagogue is to stoke fear and hatred among them because when the demagogue succeeds at that work they are rewarded while the people who revere them find themselves alienated from their neighbors, and blind to genuinely common interests.

 

Desmond shares a story about activists trying to get signatures supporting a higher minimum wage at a mall in western Michigan, Maga country. “I really thought we were going to be punched or something was going to happen,” Sara Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, told Desmond.

 

“[Jayaraman] and her team stood out,” Desmond writes. “They were all women of color, including two wearing hijabs, in a place where nearly all the shoppers were white. ‘But we’d walk up to them and say. ‘Do you want to sign a petition for 15 [dollars an hour]?’ Ninety-nine percent of people said, ‘I already signed it,’ or ‘Where can I sign?’ It reminded Sara of what happened almost two years before, in November 2020. One Fair Wage were gathered outside the statehouse in Albany, New York, to call for a $15-an-hour minimum wage for tipped workers. The crowd of mostly Black and Hispanic New Yorkers had bought with them a twenty-four-foot-high statue of a flexing and aproned Black woman nicknamed Elena the Essential worker. As the workers were chanting and cheering on speakers, a group of white men and women in red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats approached. Unbeknownst to One Fair Wage, the day of their rally was also the day the state legislature had scheduled to certify the results of the presidential election, and MAGA protesters had gathered earlier to challenge the count. When the pro-Trump protesters learned that the workers were there to push for higher wages, they shook hands and joined their protest.”

(Desmond, Poverty, by America, pgs. 187-188)

 

So, there it is. It’s not about the demagogues. It’s about the people who feel that they don’t have all that they need and are in danger of losing what they have. They should be the building blocks of an historic movement, one that works in their interests and ours. People need to know that their privilege, however limited it might be, is an obstacle in the way of our collective challenge to bend the moral arc. They need to know that giving up privilege opens a doorway to a better world.

Police and prosecutorial misconduct: What we can see is just the tip of the iceberg

In the last month, I’ve discovered anew, notwithstanding my advanced and advancing age, that I really do still care about a lot of stuff. About, say, how the politics of our time could evolve. Or how much higher might grow the mountain of human suffering. Or how my garden might grow. And, here’s the thing, I could tend my garden, but I’m really not that good at it. Nor would that activity solve much of anything. I could water my garden until the water runs out--we might all run out of water eventually, or the power to pump it, or the resources to clean it--if we don’t do more to hold back climate change.

 

But I’m not a researcher. I’m not a manufacturer. I’m not a business owner. I can do my best to green up the block I live on, but who am I kidding? The climate fix we’re all going to need will take a movement.

 

But, much to my regret, to the point.

 

Some two weeks ago, I posted “Police and Prosecutorial Misconduct in Chicago, we are all implicated.” The event that provoked that piece was a hearing in the Will County Courthouse for Devon Daniels, who has been in prison for the last 27 years for a double murder he did not commit, but to which he confessed after being tortured by now retired Chicago police detective, Kriston Kato. Devon’s claim that his confession was coerced and that no other evidence exists that ties him to the murders has recently been investigated by the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC), which found that his claim was credible, and that he was entitled to full judicial review. Hence, the hearing, part of a slow and painful process of court appearances that hopefully may end with Devon’s conviction thrown out, and his release from prison. Ideally, soon. But maybe a year from now. Given the grindingly slow pursuit of justice in these parts and elsewhere, maybe two.

 

I wrote about Devon and his mother, Paula, more than 20 years ago, but fell out of touch afterward. Late last fall, I renewed contact with Paula, and was shocked to discover that Devon was still in prison, still trying to get his account of his arrest and torture heard.

 

What first happened to Devon and his mom and others in their family almost three decades ago, and has followed a continuously traumatizing path since then is horrifying. Still worse, it is not unique. The larger context with which to think about the injustices that Devon and Paula and their family are experiencing includes noting that Chicago is notorious (or ought to be) for the frequency with which scandals develop around groups of cops who are linked, or rumored to be linked, to dozens, if not hundreds of wrongful arrests and detentions, torture and coerced confessions, followed logically by wrongful, if not malicious, prosecutions, arbitrary judicial rulings, and ultimately by long sentences for individuals innocent of the crime for which they were convicted.

 

It follows that I personally need to work harder to develop a more complete grasp of how many individuals may be included in the sum of “dozens, if not hundreds…” of people battered and abused by a justice system which does not reliably pursue justice. Moreover, in framing that bigger picture, it should be clear that the still larger context within which to understand wrongful conviction, coerced confessions and innocence, is that the incidence of such things would be far less frequent if it were not for the fact that underlying such convictions is the endemic brutality of police misconduct on the streets of minority and poor neighborhoods, and a system of justice that encourages prosecutors to prioritize convictions, and judges, by and large, to ignore the constitutional rights of defendants who are routinely presumed guilty.

 

In other words, for every high-profile discovery of wrongful conviction and decades-long prison sentences for individuals later found to be innocent, there must necessarily be tens of thousands of wrongful stops, wrongful detentions and brutal beatings by police that never, ever, get to a hearing in court. Wrongful convictions do not come easy. A whole system must be in place and working relentlessly to make that happen.

 

I am not plowing new ground here. John Conroy, formerly an investigative reporter for the Chicago Reader and now senior investigator for the Chicago Justice Center, did incredible work throughout the 1990s, writing story after story about former Chicago police commander John Burge, and his “midnight crew,” whose investigative and interrogation techniques led to the convictions of more than 100 people who were tortured and, not infrequently, innocent of the crimes for which they were sentenced. Many of those individuals, who were fortunate enough to get their convictions overturned, subsequently filed lawsuits against the Chicago police department, and the city, and won millions of dollars in damages. Conroy’s work and the multi-million-dollar payouts by the city were the principal impetus for establishing the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission.

 

According to the Innocence Network, “Since 1989, over 3,320 wrongful convictions have been revealed across the nation with individuals collectively losing 29,500 years serving time for crimes they did not commit. We cannot know exactly how many innocent people remain in prison today, but experts estimate that 2% to 5% of the nearly 2 million people in prison in the US were wrongfully convicted, meaning that anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 people are wrongfully incarcerated at this moment.”

 

The National Registry of Exonerations lists 12 people convicted of murder in Cook County since 1998 who were later exonerated. One was exonerated in 2003. Two others were exonerated in 2011. One in 2012, one in 2014, and two more in 2015. The pace of exoneration has picked up in recent years. So, also, has the cost risen to the city of Chicago for settling lawsuits with individuals tortured into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit by the Chicago police. According to a Chicago Sun-Times story (“Taxpayers shell out $250M in police-related settlements; new report slams city efforts to learn from those mistakes,” Sept. 29, 2022), 19 cases of “reversed conviction” settled in 2018, 2019 and 2020, cost the city $72.2 million.

 

Last month (June 2023), the Chicago city council approved a $7.25 million settlement with Arthur Brown who was sentenced to life in prison for a double murder and arson in 1998. The three detectives implicated in Brown’s coerced confessions are now deceased. Whether or not they would feel any guilt for the fact that Brown served almost 20 years in prison if they were alive today is a question that will go forever unanswered. 

 

But the costs to cities everywhere don’t begin to approach the cost to communities from police misconduct beginning with simple harassment in all its many forms, and proceeding through false arrests, brutal interrogations and, eventually, coerced confessions and wrongful imprisonment. “Depending upon the size of the neighborhood and the method of counting, studies have estimated that up to 25 percent of adult male residents in particular neighborhoods are locked up on any given day, up to 13 percent of adult males enter prison or jail in a given year, and up to 2 percent of all residents enter prison in a given year,” writes Todd R. Clear in “The Problem with ‘Addition by Subtraction’: The Prison-Crime Relationship in Low-Income Communities” (from Invisible Punishment, The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, ed. By Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind, pg. 184).

 

“The dynamics of growing concentrations of the residents of certain neighborhoods going to prison (and jail) are not insignificant for these locations,” Clear continues. “Imagine, for a moment, living in an area where one in eight parent-aged males is removed for confinement each year, and one in four is locked up at any given time. It is not difficult to see that this social process, over time, would be one of the truly important aspects of community life. The question is, how does this level of coerced mobility affect public safety through its impact on the building blocks of social order?”

 

Clear’s language is emotionally neutral, as befits an academic reporting the results of research and asking additional questions in follow up. But the facts about how we police in Chicago and across the country, how we prosecute, how we judge and how we sentence, are anything but neutral.

 

If we connect the dots, and listen to the stories of people whose lives are under relentless attack by a system that spreads injustice, and devastates families and communities, we have to conclude that the enormous sums we spend in the name of public safety makes everybody less safe, angry about the taxes we pay, and angry about how badly our government performs its essential role.

And if we continue to pay those taxes without also clamoring for a justice system that works for all, then we are siding with the system that devastates some communities more than others and, by design, protects those of us who live with privilege that we do not deserve.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Police and prosecutorial misconduct in Chicago

We are all implicated

In 2002, working with the women of Sankofa Community Outreach and Restoration (SCOR), I produced a pamphlet that shared the stories of four women from the south and west sides of Chicago who all had sons who were imprisoned, some of them convicted on thin evidence for crimes they did not commit.

 

Paula Daniels was the force of nature who envisioned and organized SCOR and recruited me to work with her. Paula’s son Devon was first jailed in 1997. Paula and I expected the 36-page pamphlet, Silent No More: Chicago-area women talk about the criminal justice system, to build connections between SCOR and other Chicago-area families crushed by sustained involvement with the criminal justice system and to “broaden public awareness of the effect the…system has on families.” That may have happened on the margins, but it did little to further SCOR’s organizational development and even less to help Devon Daniels (and other wrongfully convicted people).

 

Though I moved on to other work, and even left Chicago between 2007 and 2017, Paula continued struggling with the system that sat like a gargantuan weight on her, on Devon, and on the rest of her family. Finally, late last year, Paula and I reconnected.

 

Paula has various chronic ailments now that she didn’t have 20 years ago. She has neuropathy and a vaguely diagnosed autoimmune disease, and significant mobility problems. And Devon is still in prison. If there’s one tiny piece of good news in all this, it is that the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC) has investigated Devon’s case and has concluded that he is entitled to a judicial hearing that will fully assess his claim that he was convicted solely on the basis of a coerced confession.

 

But special prosecutors assigned to “represent the people of Illinois” in these matters have consistently behaved as though their exclusive focus is on defending the original conviction, no matter how flawed it may be. As those prosecutors file motion after motion that result in long procedural delays, Devon, and others whom the commission has referred for full judicial review, find themselves enduring still another form of torture. 

 

Devon himself is one of an estimated 50 or more inmates who were tortured and brutally interrogated by a Chicago police team led by former Detective Kriston Kato. I will write more about Devon over the next few months. But here is some of what we wrote about his story in “Silent No More”: “Devon is serving a life term for two murders committed on the west side on February 7, 1996…Devon saw the murders. He was leaning up against a car, talking to the two men inside, when two gunmen got out of another car and came up the street shooting. Devon ran, but the whole thing was over quickly and it wasn’t long before Devon morphed from witness to accused. Paula says that even the basic facts of the case should have exonerated him. ‘It was physically impossible for him to do what they said he did, because the boys were shot with two different guns, yet they charged my son with both homicides. Two different guns from two different directions; this is what we get from the criminal justice system in America…His confession was coerced…[Kato] beat it out of him…he was a witness to the crime, but by the time they were done, Devon was the victim to go down for that particular crime.”

 

The  legislation that created TIRC was originally passed in 2009 to create a review process that would fully investigate the claims of torture, coerced confessions, and wrongful convictions that developed out of more than 100 arrests by “the Midnight Crew,” a team of police officers and detectives led by Chicago police commander Jon Burge during the 1980s. In still another series of egregious police misconduct, former Chicago police detective Reynaldo Guevara has been accused of torturing arrestees, coercing confessions, and fabricating evidence in more than 50 instances where people served or are continuing to serve time in prison. Guevara has never been charged for his terrorism. Perhaps worst of all, Sgt. Ronald Watts and his crew have been implicated in coercing confessions and framing arrestees in more than 200 cases on the south side of Chicago in the 1990s and early 2000s. Watts, now retired, lives in Arizona.

 

After working with Paula, I moved on to other challenges, essentially taking a twenty-year break from worrying about what happened to Devon Daniels. People just like me have also had the luxury of not worrying about Devon or Kevin Murray or the thousands of others that have been harassed, wrongfully arrested, brutalized, tortured or worse by a system that routinely works to create injustice in Chicago. That is the kind of privilege that defines the border between the lives of people like me and the lives of hundreds of thousands of others living mere miles away in this most segregated of major American cities. Paula, and Devon, and his sister and brothers and his own children and his nieces and nephews have no experience of “justice” as it is commonly understood. Despite the weight, the details of all that she has endured, which is a story that I will write more about soon, Paula has responded to my return from a long absence with a loving welcome. 

 

They bear up under what should be properly understood as unbearable. They live with injustice. They live with no opportunity to thrive. The system that denies them benefits us. And we tolerate that system. And our taxes pay for it. When will the rest of us acknowledge the fundamental indecency, the immorality, of all that?

The Debt and Deficit Follies

I find the constant angst over the national debt quite frustrating and, thoroughly vexed, I'm always hunting for a succinct explanation of why the size of the national debt doesn’t matter as much as folks believe it does. And I may have found that simple, focused explanation in Paul Krugman's opinion piece published in the New York Times on May 19:
 
“Whenever I write about debt and deficits,” Krugman wrote, “I receive the same letter — OK, not exactly the same letter, but a number of letters with more or less the same gist. They read something like this: ‘If I borrow money from the bank, the bank expects me to pay the money back. Why isn’t the same true for the government? Why can we keep borrowing when we already owe $31 trillion?’
 
“Just about every economist will reply that it’s misleading to make an analogy between household and government finances. But it seems to me that we often aren’t clear enough about why, perhaps because we don’t say it bluntly enough. So here’s the difference: You are going to get old and eventually die. The government isn’t.

 

“I don’t mean that governments are immortal. Nothing is, and no doubt someday America will, as Rudyard Kipling put it, be ‘one with Nineveh and Tyre.’ But individuals face a … predictable life cycle in which their earnings will eventually dwindle…

 

“And lenders therefore demand that individual borrowers pay off their debts while they still have the income to do so. Governments, on the other hand, normally see their revenues rise, generation after generation, as the economies they regulate and tax grow.

 

“Governments, then, must service their debts — pay interest and repay principal when bonds come due — but they don’t necessarily have to pay them off; they can issue new bonds to pay principal on old bonds, and even borrow to pay interest as long as overall debt doesn’t rise too much faster than revenue.”

 

There it is: “You are going to get old and eventually die. The government isn’t.”

 

So every entity who has ever lent you money has an expectation that you will pay your debts. Preferably on a strict schedule. And if you don’t do so, your creditors will come after you. And charge sometimes exorbitant penalties. And never lend you money again.

 

The government is in a different position. The government’s fundamental obligation is to service the debt. To pay interest. And sometimes to pay off the principal, but, as Krugman writes, the government can issue new debt, sell new bonds, which will work as long as there are buyers out there for those bonds.

 

And, yes, right now, default is a real threat for the US and that must be avoided at all costs. Default would mean that buyers of new bonds would disappear and the whole apparatus would come crashing down. But default is looming for political reasons. Not for economic reasons.

 

In practical terms, the extreme anti-government right would love to see the government crippled because that would end the government’s ability to fund change. The kind of change that in the past once kept the cost of a college education affordable for large numbers of people, poor people, and make it affordable once more. The kind of change that funded the expansion of public transit decades ago and allowed poor folks to find affordable ways to get to and from work. The kind of change represented by last year’s misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which is actually the most significant government effort ever to target the climate change crisis and which will dramatically increase government investments in green energy. And in doing so invest in new jobs across the country. The kind of change that could threaten existing power relationships and dethrone incumbents for whom the status quo works nicely, thank you.

 

Of course, the size of the national debt is not inconsequential. As a line item in the country’s annual budget, the interest expense will be almost $650 billion in 2024. But spending for the military in the same year (including the portion of the military budget that is buried in the Department of Energy and other departmental budgets) will be more than $2 trillion in the same year. Education spending, which might well be cut in any debt ceiling compromise negotiated between Republicans and Democrats will hover between $60 and $70 billion, at best. So, sure, one could argue that annual interest on the debt comes at the expense of spending for other social programs, but one could make the same argument about $35 billion in federal farm subsidies, most of which goes to large agribusiness.

 

The point is that the national debt isn’t the problem. National budget priorities are. To address the issue of debt discussions that absorb so much rhetoric in a time of escalating climate crisis, increasing inequity and widespread attacks on the rights of sexual, racial and ethnic minorities, it’s past time for a national discussion of what we actually want government to do. And if anyone says that they want to balance the budget and reduce the debt, tell them to get serious.

Stephen Markley’s book, The Deluge

A history of our frightening future

 

The Deluge is both a fine novel and a frightening and convincing history of our future. At almost 900 pages long, the book is unlikely to reach the full audience that ought to absorb the lessons about climate change, climate-driven catastrophes, and climate activism that Markley is trying to convey. And the book could use a table of contents that would demonstrate up front both The Deluge's time and geographical sweep, and it's obsession with detailing a wide sample of the heat waves, droughts, dust storms, floods, wildfires, famines, political confrontations, climate denialism, capitalist opportunism, totalitarian actors, craven capitulations, terrorist attacks and grassroots activism that will dominate the next decade and a half of life in the United States and around the world.

 

There can be no succinct summary of The Deluge, but on page 639, in one character's attempt to capture what life had been like and why no one had been able to predict, in full, all that they had experienced, there's this:

 

"Little did we know the self-reinforcing crisis of our climate, our economy, and our democracy would begin to spiral and whiplash like the arms of a gathering cyclone."

 

The destruction and loss of life that dominate the news cycle in this book, and will materialize in similar forms in our own lives in the years to come, are horrifying. The destruction and loss of life as the book proceeds, and as we navigate our own future, will relentlessly and persistently bend the arc of the universe in the world of The Deluge, and in our own parallel universe, in unpredictable ways. And those "ways"will create conditions that some significant number of us will not survive, regardless of the extent of our personal privilege.

 

The Deluge is full of engaging and generally well-defined characters. But one colossus of a character stands astride them all. Kate Morris, both an obsessive-compulsive truth teller, and a devious hero with little interest in playing nice, seems like an amalgam of dozens of charismatic and relentless activists that dot the history of American resistance to power; take your pick of figures like, say, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Emma Goldman, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Wilma Mankiller, or make your own list. Kate Morris stands on the shoulders of all those heroes that came before her and goes as hard and moves the needle as far as any of them were able to do. Kate is the founder of a wildly successful organization, the Fierce Blue Flame, that fights the giant fossil fuel corporations and all their lobbyists and political servants, to a virtual standstill. It is with the description of her musings on page 459, that I realized that I had better begin writing:

 

"Instead, she couldn't stop thinking of how the blood had roared in her ears as that armored vehicle rolled toward her, how the adrenaline felt like it might lift her off her feet and send her hurtling like a mortar round into its hull. Shock them, fuck them, grind them to the bone. Be fearless. Be Achilles, be Roland, be Joan of Arc. Have a mental disease. Follow your clit. Drive across the Dakotas and watch a storm sear the horizon, recognize herself in its peals of wind and each crack of lightning, her true fellow travelers. Don't change, don't learn, don't fall, don't flinch. All she'd ever feel was sorry for people who didn't know what it was to want something more from their own life. Conjure a tempest, spew rage from the heart, and make them stare into this city of Cassiterite dark she'd made with nothing but her ravaged voice."

 

All of Markley's true, live heroes have weaknesses. In some cases, staggering weaknesses that few could expect to survive through the decades of political, economic and climate storm und drang. But on page 634-635, there's this soliloquy from Keeper:

 

"'I've done so many awful, awful things. Horrible things, man. I've--I've hurt people. People I don't even know or couldn't even find again to tell 'em I'm sorry. Tell' em I'm sorry. Tell 'em what I did was evil. How am I supposed to believe God can forgive me? That'd just be me wishing there was a way I could even get forgiven.' Your voice cracks and you swallow this lump of grief yet again. The next words come out in a snarl. 'We were in Georgia and Florida after the hurricane. That big one, Rose. And in one of these collapsed buildings, we hear this baby crying somewhere down in the rubble. Of course, no one really wants to get down into that shit, but I do it. I go. And it takes me forever. I'm crawling down into this hole, crawling on my belly, and there's slime everywhere, and it smells like shit. But finally the hole opens up into this little space. Freezing water up to my thighs. No sign of the parents, but I could smell them, somewhere nearby. But there was this little girl still in her crib because this one room didn't collapse, and she's shrieking and shrieking, so I go over to her and pick her up, and then ...' Your voice cracks again and you let a small sob escape. 'As soon as I pick her up, she stops crying. Just goes totally silent. And she's staring at me with these huge brown eyes, looking so scared, and I swear to God when I picked her up...'

 

“Now you can't help yourself. You start crying and it's embarrassing, how you're powerless to control your own hurt. Your hands come out in front of you like you're still cradling her.

 

“'I swear to God, when I held her in my arms, it felt like she was my own daughter.'

 

“Tears fall from your cheeks to the snow, and when you dare glance up, you're surprised to see the reverend is also crying.

 

“'I carried her out and handed her off. I'll never know what happened to her.'"

 

Nearing the end of the book, one particularly cranky research scientist, who has been warning for decades about the severity of the coming climate catastrophe, finds himself afflicted with a metastasizing cancer that has escaped treatment because his own role in forcing climate legislation through Congress in one of the most dysfunctional moments in American government history means that he has no time to set aside for the medical procedures that will prolong his life. But he does have a final opportunity to share with a friend his feelings about his wife's death from cancer some twenty years earlier.

 

"'When I lost my wife,' said Tony, 'I decided that grief is actually always there. It's like it lives in you, dormant. Until somebody goes. And that person dying, it just wakes you up to it. Makes you aware of it. But it's always been there (page 830).'"

 

That moment comes just over 50 pages from the end. But it suddenly felt to me that I was hearing the author, Stephen Markley, expressing his own feelings through Tony. Feeling grief. Endless grief encountered in the course of writing this book and knowing how much suffering of all kinds lay ahead. 

 

But here's the thing, in Markley's book the activists never give up. And they are, by and large generous and stalwart and, most importantly, strategically and tactically agile. In The Deluge the struggle between the people and the power may take an unfamiliar form, but don't be deceived. The struggle for climate justice and more is the same old struggle. And the future always hangs in the balance.

A political lesson Bernie Epton's life can teach

An open letter to Paul Vallas: 

An edited version of this op-ed piece was published by the Chicago Tribune on March 12, 2023. 

I understand how you must feel right now. The possibility of being the mayor of Chicago, this massive, shiny, and troubled metropolis, is likely intoxicating. I know my father, Bernie Epton, felt that way in 1983. Forty years after his campaign against Harold Washington for mayor of Chicago, popular history characterizes him as a candidate who had an undistinguished political career until racism made him a viable candidate against a Black man. But that is not who he was in the years leading up to that election.

 

In 1950, he ran for congress in the Republican primary against Dick Vail, then a former congressman and always a red-baiting, race-baiting echo of the notorious Wisconsin senator, Joe McCarthy. Among Bernie’s supporters in that race were leading south side Black ministers, like Archibald Carey, Sr. and Major Taylor. Dad also received the endorsement of the Chicago Defender, perhaps the country’s most prominent Black newspaper at the time. But he lost that race.

 

In 1968, after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, rioting in Chicago’s south and west sides caused extensive damage that still scars the city’s neighborhoods 55 years later. At the time, Dad was again a candidate for office. This time for an open Republican seat in the Illinois House of Representatives. During that campaign, he took the time to go to Memphis to join the memorial march for King, organized and led by the Memphis sanitation workers’ union. After the march, he returned to Chicago, resumed his campaign, and won--the beginning of 14 years of service as a Republican representative from Hyde Park. Twice during those 14 years, the Independent Voters of Illinois (IVI) named him the state’s “Best Legislator.”

 

By late fall in 1982, when Bernie decided to run for the Republican nomination for mayor of Chicago, his reputation, earned over 40 years of political activism, as a supporter of open housing, an opponent of redlining, and an ally of the Black community and of anti-machine Chicago voters, was well established. But in the ’83 campaign against Harold Washington Dad became the champion of white supremacists citywide. Though the campaign was characterized by recurring racist incidents, two facts stand out.

 

First, of course, was the historic Washington victory, due largely to a strategically mobilized Black community. But the second most striking feature of the campaign was Dad’s slogan, “Epton, before it’s too late.”

 

Dad claimed, often and always, that the slogan meant that the city was teetering on bankruptcy and he was the guy to rescue it before collapsed. Some family members and lifelong political supporters took him at his word. That was the position that he maintained throughout the campaign. But everyone else in Chicago who gave a damn about such things knew the slogan for what it effectively was, a dog whistle, beckoning white voters to the ramparts. And many of those white voters would have shrugged away any concern about dog whistles. To them, it didn’t really matter what it meant; Bernie was their guy. He was the white hope.

 

Imagine what that meant. The Bernie Epton who had been a colleague of Timuel Black and Harold Washington in the creation of a Chicago-focused Henry Wallace for President Committee in 1948, who had walked in the Memphis memorial march for Martin Luther King in 1968, who continued sending his children to public schools long after many neighborhood families had fled to whiter communities, had somehow transformed 25 years later into the George Wallace of Chicago. And he had brought it on himself.

 

One legacy of his campaign would be an empowered white majority on city council that opposed every Washington reform initiative for the next four years. Chicago’s bitter power struggles would earn the city a reputation as “Beirut by the lake.” Dad’s election defeat sidelined him forever. But the divisiveness that characterized city politics for years began with the racial warfare of the ’83 campaign.

 

So, consider now, before this campaign goes any further, your “let’s take Chicago back” message. That message is landing as a dog whistle only slightly less shrill than “Epton, before it’s too late.” Stop saying that it means something else. The senders of messages don’t get to determine their meaning, which lies inescapably in what the audience hears.

 

Do what my Dad did not do; pivot to a different message. One that unites. That envisions a single city, unified in its pursuit of equity and justice. Hit that message hard, even if it costs you a victory. Because no victory is worth the price of your reputation. And no victory is worth the price Chicago would pay if a Vallas victory depended on an appeal to white supremacists.

 

I understand how you must feel right now. The possibility of being the mayor of Chicago, this massive, shiny, and troubled metropolis, is likely intoxicating. I know my father, Bernie Epton, felt that way in 1983. Forty years after his campaign against Harold Washington for mayor of Chicago, popular history characterizes him as a candidate who had an undistinguished political career until racism made him a viable candidate against a Black man. But that is not who he was in the years leading up to that election.

 

In 1950, he ran for congress in the Republican primary against Dick Vail, then a former congressman and always a red-baiting, race-baiting echo of the notorious Wisconsin senator, Joe McCarthy. Among Bernie’s supporters in that race were leading south side Black ministers, like Archibald Carey, Sr. and Major Taylor. Dad also received the endorsement of the Chicago Defender, perhaps the country’s most prominent Black newspaper at the time. But he lost that race.

 

In 1968, after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, rioting in Chicago’s south and west sides caused extensive damage that still scars the city’s neighborhoods 55 years later. At the time, Dad was again a candidate for office. This time for an open Republican seat in the Illinois House of Representatives. During that campaign, he took the time to go to Memphis to join the memorial march for King, organized and led by the Memphis sanitation workers’ union. After the march, he returned to Chicago, resumed his campaign, and won--the beginning of 14 years of service as a Republican representative from Hyde Park. Twice during those 14 years, the Independent Voters of Illinois (IVI) named him the state’s “Best Legislator.”

 

By late fall in 1982, when Bernie decided to run for the Republican nomination for mayor of Chicago, his reputation, earned over 40 years of political activism, as a supporter of open housing, an opponent of redlining, and an ally of the Black community and of anti-machine Chicago voters, was well established. But in the ’83 campaign against Harold Washington Dad became the champion of white supremacists citywide. Though the campaign was characterized by recurring racist incidents, two facts stand out.

 

First, of course, was the historic Washington victory, due largely to a strategically mobilized Black community. But the second most striking feature of the campaign was Dad’s slogan, “Epton, before it’s too late.”

 

Dad claimed, often and always, that the slogan meant that the city was teetering on bankruptcy and he was the guy to rescue it before collapsed. Some family members and lifelong political supporters took him at his word. That was the position that he maintained throughout the campaign. But everyone else in Chicago who gave a damn about such things knew the slogan for what it effectively was, a dog whistle, beckoning white voters to the ramparts. And many of those white voters would have shrugged away any concern about dog whistles. To them, it didn’t really matter what it meant; Bernie was their guy. He was the white hope.

 

Imagine what that meant. The Bernie Epton who had been a colleague of Timuel Black and Harold Washington in the creation of a Chicago-focused Henry Wallace for President Committee in 1948, who had walked in the Memphis memorial march for Martin Luther King in 1968, who continued sending his children to public schools long after many neighborhood families had fled to whiter communities, had somehow transformed 25 years later into the George Wallace of Chicago. And he had brought it on himself.

 

One legacy of his campaign would be an empowered white majority on city council that opposed every Washington reform initiative for the next four years. Chicago’s bitter power struggles would earn the city a reputation as “Beirut by the lake.” Dad’s election defeat sidelined him forever. But the divisiveness that characterized city politics for years began with the racial warfare of the ’83 campaign.

 

So, consider now, before this campaign goes any further, your “let’s take Chicago back” message. That message is landing as a dog whistle only slightly less shrill than “Epton, before it’s too late.” Stop saying that it means something else. The senders of messages don’t get to determine their meaning, which lies inescapably in what the audience hears.

 

Do what my Dad did not do; pivot to a different message. One that unites. That envisions a single city, unified in its pursuit of equity and justice. Hit that message hard, even if it costs you a victory. Because no victory is worth the price of your reputation. And no victory is worth the price Chicago would pay if a Vallas victory depended on an appeal to white supremacists.

Waiting for Isabel

Waiting for Izzy to wake,

my baby grand,

my Izzy Bizzy Bell.

I should head to Chicago,

move on to next things.

There’s stuff to do,

and I, my reputation

as dithering guy who never,

never gets to the end,

notwithstanding,

am still the only guy to get it done.

 

But I’m waiting for Isabel to wake—

me, Isabel’s Jeff,

here,

waiting for Isabel,

who, just before she slept,

spent a long, full, bunch

of uncountable minutes

in loud, overwrought,

and well-acted screaming;

in epic distress,

mommy-mommying her way

between long, sobbing, hiccups,

until she decided that mommy-mommying

wasn’t working,

and switched to daddy-daddying,

which also did not work,

falling finally asleep, exhausted,

when Mommy did show herself.

 

That’s the person,

Isabell Lozen,

my grand baby,

for whose next waking moment

I wait.

 

Because love,

I guess.

And knowing that

what I might otherwise

do is no longer the point.