Can’t we agree on anything?!?

We’re in an era of rabid political partisanship and one in which the proponents of the old-school way of thought are openly resisting any thought of change, no matter how progressive or fair-minded it might be.

Heroic? Or misguided?

So perhaps it shouldn’t be a shock that some people can find offense in anything, particularly things that once might have been considered sweet and innocent – but now are regarded as evidence of the callousness oft expressed in our society.

WHAT CAUGHT MY attention was reaction to a story by the DNAInfo.com website for Chicago that gave us a feature story about Chicago Police Department officers who put their own physical well-being at risk to save a dog.

Specifically, a pit bull that was stray and somehow got into Lake Michigan and was thrashing about in the water trying to avoid drowning to death.

The website reported that the two officers, one of whom is a recent graduate of the Police Academy. It seems the officer in question was paying attention during class, in that he used a maneuver learned at the academy to get into the water and pull the dog to shore.

As things turned out, one of those television news helicopters was flying overhead and got video from above for the incident. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals was pleased to see such kindness to a dog – and DNAInfo reported that the department was sent a certificate, along with a box of vegan cookies.

NOW I’M SURE some people will feel compelled to joke that if the activist group really felt appreciative, they wouldn’t have sent the cookies – or anything vegan.

Compassionate? Or cold-hearted?

But one group seems to have taken offense to the whole incident – the activists associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. They’re the ones who in recent years have been going out of their way to show how law enforcement is focusing its ire on people of a certain melanin complexion.

They’re quick to trot out the lists of names of countless young black men who wound up dying or being beaten severely while at the hands of the police. So perhaps they’re not eager to see anything placing the police in a positive light.

Or perhaps it’s the idea that an animal received an act of kindness from police?

Self-defending? Or myopic?

IN ADDITION TO using Facebook and Twitter to promote such causes as the Chicago Dyke March (on June 24) and the right for free travel to Cuba (a protest on Friday at the federal building complex), the Black Lives Chicago group had a statement trashing the report, and PETA for feeling the need to praise police.

“F--- Black people huh PETA?,” the activists wrote on Twitter, while then naming a lengthy list of Rekia Boyd and other, now-deceased black people who suffered police abuse.

This is a confusing situation to contemplate, largely because I can comprehend why activists would be upset. Considering the tensions that have arisen between law enforcement and a certain segment of society, some sense of bitterness is understandable.

Although I also can hear in my mind all those people now eager to either defend PETA or criticize the Black Lives Matter movement.

SOME MAY WANT to claim they’re merely being compassionate to another living creature, while some may well believe that a dog’s life is worth more than that of a black person. Of course, many of them will want to believe they’re not being racist and are entitled to such thoughts.

Which really means they don’t want to be called out for their nonsense, and may well be a part of this Age of Trump we’re now in that they want to believe legitimizes their way of thinking.

That ultimately is the problem we face as a society – those who refuse to acknowledge the problem and want to think it is someone else’s hang-ups about life that are improper. Which often comes down to our own ignorance about public affairs.

I had a recent conversation over dinner with someone who passed along an anecdote about encountering some young people who had no clue what the Civil War was in the United States. If we’re really at a stage where we’ve forgotten, then it’s no wonder some of us are spewing stupidity when we contemplate race relations in our society these days.

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Maybe it’s not murder by a cop? Nor will health care be “reformed” at all!

Somebody’s failure, particularly if it is with regards to actions that impact all of us, is always a standard for news judgment. Although I have to admit the degree to which the Friday news reports relied upon ineptitude and incompetence was truly depressing.
 

VAN DYKE: More, or less, likely to be found guilty?

It’s not just the lingering uncertainty over whether President Donald J. Trump will be able to repeal the health care reform proposal enacted a few years ago by then-President Barack Obama. He's failed, for now. But likely to be conniving enough to concoct another scheme in the future.

BUT WE’RE SEEING uncertainty in that criminal case some people were determined to believe was open-and-shut – the 2014 shooting death of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer.

An officer who now faces additional criminal charges that were filed to show great symbolism and appease those people who like symbolic gestures. Yet to those of us concerned with the bottom-line verdict, it shows that maybe the handling of this criminal prosecution to date has been uncertain enough that the outcome is far from definite.

We may very well get the day when officer Jason Van Dyke is acquitted of the murder charges he has faced for more than a year now. A result that may upset many of the same people who now are uncertain how much longer they will have health insurance – all because the Trumpites of the world don’t like the idea of Obama having anything on his legacy for which he can be praised.

And providing a plan that gave many people access to health insurance (myself included) is something for which Obama would be favorably remembered.

BUT BACK TO the McDonald situation, where it was learned in court this week that Van Dyke now has charges of aggravated battery added to the murder and official misconduct charges he already faced.

The Cook County state’s attorney’s office decided to get cutesy with the new charges, filing 16 counts of aggravated battery. One charge for each of the 16 shots that police video shows were fired by an officer into McDonald’s body on that night when he was running around acting crazy and refused an officer’s order to stop and be questioned.

Reading around the Internet, I have read countless comments posted from people who like the “16 counts” touch. As though it could result in a few extra years in prison for Van Dyke for each shot fired.

 

TRUMP: More, or less, likely to repeal healthcare reform?

But others, myself included, wonder if the aggravated battery charge is merely an excuse for a future judge to find Van Dyke guilty of something, anything, because it may well turn out that as a police officer, Van Dyke did have the legal authority to use some force in this particular situation.

THAT IS AN attitude that I’m sure McDonald’s activist supporters in the Black Lives Matters movement will refuse to ever concede. But it is a real factor to consider as this criminal case proceeds.

Just as Trump and his alleged Republican allies in Congress were desperately trying Friday (but ultimately were unable) to configure their American Health Care Act into something that could get a vote of approval, the state’s attorney’s office is now trying to configure criminal case that will result in a “guilty” verdict.

Absolute failure for Trump and the conservative ideologues who for years have been engaging in “Repeal Obamacare!!!” rants is to be exposed as “all talk and no action” on this particular issue. Just as the sight of Van Dyke being able to someday walk out of the Criminal Courts Building with a smile on his face and a “not guilty” verdict would be considered an even bigger loss for society.

Personally, I view the healthcare reform debate as the ultimate politically partisan whine. Because there are those whose ultimate idea of victory would be for nothing to happen. As in the old Affordable Care Act of Obama would disappear, to be replaced by nothing. For now, "Affordable" remains, but with an uncertain future.

OBAMA: Some wish they could erase his presence

OBAMA’S REFORM MEASURE was “Affordable,” and not “American” like the Trump plan that is filled with enough gobbledygook and legalese to confuse just about all of us.

While in the pending criminal case of “People vs. Van Dyke,” we’re going to have to seriously contemplate just how much physical force a police officer is entitled to use in the commission of his job.

I suspect many of us aren’t going to like the outcome of either issue.

Because they'll reveal the degree to which the "politics of nothing" prevail over our society, and are the reason why so much never gets accomplished.

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Societal tensions are going to linger amongst us long after Election Day

This year’s election cycle turned into an ugly display over the tensions we have in our society from people who can’t handle that everybody isn’t like themselves, and we don’t somehow grant them superiority status over the rest of us.
 

A place for those not enthralled by urban life

Take the latest rant of conservative commentator Ann Coulter, who suggested that Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations would have been a complete-shoo-in, IF ONLY we restricted the ability to vote to people who could document that all four of their grandparents had been born in this country.

ANN, OF COURSE, is often off-kilter. I don’t doubt she’s just trying to get a rise out of those more rational amongst us in society. But the sad thing is that she’s not alone – of that I have no doubt.

It’s an incident in my beloved home city, and in fact on my preferred Sout’ Side, that makes me see the kinds of hostilities that this year’s elections placed a magnifying glass to are going to linger on for awhile.

At the crux of it was yet another police shooting. A man from Indianapolis got into a fight with an off-duty police officer who wound up using his weapon, resulting in the man now being dead.

Yes, it was a black man, who was only in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood this weekend because he was attending a funeral. Anyone familiar with the neighborhood at the far southwest end of Chicago near suburbs such as Alsip and Evergreen Park knows there are a lot of cemeteries located nearby.

BUT THAT APPARENTLY wasn’t a good enough reason for a black man to be in a neighborhood that is overwhelmingly white, and also a cop enclave (for the record, I once had an uncle, now deceased himself, who lived there in large part because he was a Chicago cop).

It’s one of those places where people choose to live if they want to be isolated from the daily realities of Chicago, or want to be isolated from certain kinds of people they wish weren’t a part of Chicago’s daily reality.

In short, the kind of people whose votes Trump might very well have sought out – if he weren’t busy looking for each and every excuse he could to demonize Chicago to get himself the votes of people from elsewhere.

Socorro Salas, later Vargas, was the only one of my four grandparents to be born in the United States. I guess the ideologues think I shouldn't have a vote either.

This shooting incident predictably enough resulted in activists coming into the neighborhood, and local residents turning into counter-demonstrators wishing to show their outrage at what some referred to as “animals” who “ought to go back home.”

ANYBODY WHO KNOWS anything about Chicago and its past won’t find any of this surprising. If anything, it’s a wonder that the alleged counter-demonstrators controlled themselves to avoid bashing anyone’s skull in. Although a second round of protests that took place Tuesday got a little more physical, as police had to separate black protesters from local residents.

Yet then, we see the behavior of students at Marist High School, a Catholic school in the neighborhood that is a popular choice of many South Side and surrounding suburb kids whose parents don’t want them in public schools with “those kind” of people.

A text message being passed around the study body shows that some of these high school students are in full agreement with their parents’ behavior – and want to view the “problem” as one of a guy who didn’t have the sense to stay out of a neighborhood he should have known better than to set foot in.

Also, the few students who tried responding to the text in ways to show their disgust with bigotry wound up being laughed at. Administrators at the high school say they’re “devastated” and want to try to teach the young people about tolerance and brotherhood.

YET I CAN’T help but think that many of these young people are going to wind up yawning, paying a bit of lip service to the concepts, then wind up going about feeling the way they feel.

 

Certain attitudes passed down through generations?

Which may largely be the same as their parents who may have cast their ballots for Trump on Tuesday out of a belief that finally, there’s a guy who “gets it” and won’t try to put them on a guilt trip for feeling the way they do about those who are different.

Is it really any different than that incident earlier this year when students at Andrean High School, a Catholic institution in Merrillville, Ind., tried to turn “Build a Wall” into a taunt to be used against a rival high school with a significant Latino enrollment?

This election cycle forced us to see how ugly a certain segment of our society has become. Incidents like these amongst our young make me wonder how long it will be before the stain can truly be washed away?

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We can’t even decide what exactly it is we’re angry about these days

There are those people in our society who are all angered and upset about the fact that several police officers in Dallas, Texas, were killed by an angered sniper – one who apparently was military trained in the ways of killing people efficiently.

Equating all three incidents is not a common sentiment, which is what makes this suburban Homewood church's viewpoint unique. Photograph by Gregory Tejeda

But I suspect they’re less angered about the actual deaths of those five officers (and shootings of several other people who happened to be nearby at the time of the incident last week), than they are in the fact that all of America isn’t united in outrage with them at the thought that someone would think that police ARE the problem.

FOR THERE ARE others amongst us who think the outrage of last week were a pair of incidents in Baton Rouge, La., and Minneapolis, Minn., in which video snippets showed people being shot to death BY the police.

Killer cops who have to be reigned in before they wreck more havoc upon us all – a thought that those people inclined to think of all cops as the mythical Officer Friendly want to believe is absolutely absurd. If not downright subversive!

The point being we have a major schism in our society. We can’t even agree what the problem is we face. Which means many of us are determined to think of at least one of these three incidents as being something in which someone got what they deserved.

This certainly isn’t the mood of the nation as it was in the weeks following Sept. 11, 2001 when the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in suburban D.C., created a mood of so-called unity.

EVERYBODY THOUGHT WE were all on the “same side.” Even though that, too, was a myth.

For what I recall was that the ideological right wing of our nation – the ones who were always eager to think of those Ay-rabs as some sort of degenerate force on our planet – were using those events of 15 years ago to claim they were right.

Others who didn’t comprehend what was taking place were scared into submission; into thinking that they had to just “shut up!” and go along with what was being spewed by the ideologically-minded.

Nothing like that is even close to occurring in this instance.

THOSE AMONGST US whose distrust of law enforcement has been intensified by recent incidents occurring across the nation (the 2014 shooting death of Laquan McDonald in Chicago is far from unique) are not going to be intimidated into just “shutting up!” and accepting current police conduct as the status quo.

Protests have arisen in cities across the nation, including several demonstrations that occurred this weekend in and around the Taste of Chicago event in Grant Park.

Not that there were any outbursts of violence in Chicago as a result. In fact, people I know who were in the downtown area during the weekend said all the noise from more celebratory events and their accompanying crowds made it easy to ignore the presence of protesters at all.

But I’m also sure that those people inclined to want to think that protesting of any sort is a subversive activity (yes, they do exist, and they usually proclaim themselves to be the biggest patriots of all within our society) notice the activity and use it to be themselves all the more worked up about these radicals out to undermine our nation. Those who approve of the off-duty Minneapolis P.D. types who walked off the job when Minnesota Lynx players (that's women's professional basketball) expressed their support for the protest movement.

WE HAVE A split amongst us, and I’m not quite sure how it will all play out before it ends. I have no doubt our presidential election cycle will be the ultimate viewpoint of which way it leans.

For Republican Donald Trump is going out of his way to proclaim himself the candidate of choice for those people who want to view their cops as heroic and want to think “subversion!’ whenever they see the “Black Lives Matter” phrase. While Democrat Hillary Clinton has tried showing some sympathy for those individuals – only to be dumped on by Trump who claims she’s showing just how reckless and irresponsible she is by taking the wrong side.

Except that poll after poll shows a majority of the nation siding with her, even though Trump remains convinced his outspoken backers will turn out in force on Election Day to give him a political victory.

Which could make this a key issue in determining whether we move forward in our society, or backward in thinking our police exist to protect only certain segments among us.

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