When do we allow police use of force?

It’s the simple fact that truly is terrifying if you think about it too closely and for too long a period of time – police have the legal authority to kill people.

Midway Plaisance doesn't magically isolate university from rest of Chicago

Anybody who doesn’t realize that isn’t thinking too closely. Why else would we arm our law enforcement officers if we didn’t expect there to be situations in which they’re going to have to use their weapon on another human being.

I WONDER IF we have the student body at the University of Chicago not being fully aware of that reality. For last week, dozens of students protested on campus against the private police force that the university uses to patrol the campus and surrounding Hyde Park neighborhood.

Specifically, they want their officers to ditch their firearms. They also talked of more funding being provided for mental health services, which makes me think those students think the police are something along the line of social workers.

Now I understand those students are miffed about the death last week of Charles Thomas, a student who was shot and killed by a University of Chicago police officer.

Various news reports indicate the student was walking around the neighborhood in the middle of the night, waving about a metal bar and screaming various taunts. Police say that when they tried confronting the student, he raised his weapon (a metal bar can be as deadly as any pistol) and approached police.

AT WHICH POINT, the officer fired and the student was killed.

He was only 21, and some reports indicate he was in his final year of college before receiving a degree, with a 4.2 grade point average.

I know some people who found humor of a sarcastic tone from those facts – the idea that a kid was on the verge of completing college with a very respectable grade point average would appear to be someone who had the whole wide world at his fingertips.

Yet he winds up dead, right on the verge of the beginning of the adult portion of his life. Talk about life being unfair! Talk about a situation that most definitely warrants a stream of profanities to describe it most adequately.

YET I’M WONDERING how many of those students have a false vision of the world around them, and how many of them think Hyde Park is some sort of barricaded island with the surroundings walled off by the kind of ways that Donald Trump dreams of erecting along the U.S./Mexico border – rather than just some Chicago Park District lands to the west?

It’s not just the neighborhoods surrounding the University of Chicago campus.

For on Saturday, there was an incident in the West Side’s Austin neighborhood where two teenagers were shot. One, who is 13, appears likely to survive his wound to the thigh.

But the other, who was 16, appears to be deceased from his multiple gunshot wounds. He didn’t get as much of a chance at life as the University of Chicago student.

HE’S NOT ALONE. For the Chicago Sun-Times reported about 13 other people being shot in various incidents scattered across the city on Saturday. While WBBM-TV reports a total of 21 people in Chicago being shot since Friday night.

You just know those students complaining about their police (which amounts to having private security for the campus) would be even more miffed if there had been an incident involving a student being shot by someone from outside the campus community.

Would we be getting students up in arms over why their police aren’t equipped with even more firepower? So as to fight off those “outside” forces that pose a threat to their physical well-being?

It is sad that we’ll never get to see what contributions Thomas could have made to society had he lived. But many of us would be complaining even more loudly if police in such an incident had done nothing.

  -30-

Would we be better off ignoring Bannon than protesting his presence?

It was a rule of thumb I once heard from a former news colleague about the importance of covering events by white supremacists and other crackpots – it was important to do so in order to expose them.

BANNON: Better off ignored?

Let the public see how lame and pathetic they truly are so as to discredit anything they ever have to say.

A PART OF me was always skeptical of such logic – particularly in this Age of Trump that we’re now in where the crackpots are more than eager to scream “fake news” and want to believe only what falls in line with their own loony ideology.

They’re more than likely to want to believe the loony talk and use the fact that it got covered as evidence of its truthfulness.

So what do I think of those University of Chicago students who on Thursday felt compelled to protest the possible presence of one-time Trump adviser Steven Bannon on the Hyde Park neighborhood campus?

I actually wonder if this is an instance where Bannon would be likely to show up, draw a miniscule crowd and wind up being ignored. Whereas attention has now been drawn to his possible arrival, and Bannon himself is likely to have a bolstered ego as a result.

AFTER ALL, WOULD so many people get so pissed off if he weren’t such an important person? If we’d ignore him, it might be a blow to his ego by showing how irrelevant he and his followers are to the true majority of our society.

For the record, a professor at the Booth School of Business invited Bannon (who when he wasn’t working for the Trump administration was, until recently, the head of a website devoted to spewing the kind of rhetoric the crackpots enjoy) to be a part of a forum on globalization and immigration.

Bannon, whom many have claimed is motivated by racist ideas, would be expected to speak out on how bad those ideas are for our nation, while an academic type yet-to-be-determined would speak on their behalf.

TRUMP: Backers consider protests a win

I could easily envision such a program attracting a couple-dozen spectators on campus, with no attention paid by the general public.

EXCEPT NOW, THEY’RE going to be able to boast to dozens of protesters tossing out rhetoric such as “Nazi thug” and “illegitimate fascist.”

Which I’m sure Bannon and his ilk will somehow take as signs of how “out-of-touch” the majority of us are with them. Only they want to believe they’re the majority. Yes, I think that when Bannon learned of this outburst, his ego got bloated.

Which is the last thing I would want to see become of a man who was considered by some to be the brains behind the most absurd of President Donald Trump’s ridiculous rhetoric during the months last year when Bannon actually had a White House office and Oval Office access.

A part of me believes this so much because I remember back to my own college days in the mid-1980s – back when a big issue for protest were the apartheid policies that resulted in a racially-segregated South Africa. Many U.S. businesses made a point of cutting their investment there so as to try to sway protests.

I REMEMBER THE protests that took place, and the forums held on campus that did little to sway anybody. In fact, I always suspected the people most inclined to back the old regime (from back in the days when Nelson Mandela was regarded as just another black man in prison) took a certain amount of pride.

A moment from the dismal past

Particularly whenever they started screaming “Communist” to describe Mandela and anybody else who had a problem with a roughly 10 percent minority being in charge of the country as a whole.

There are times I wonder if such rhetoric actually prolonged the existence of the old South Africa that might have withered away more quickly if we hadn’t made the nitwits feel all the more important for their rancid rhetoric.

Just as I’m sure there are those who are eagerly awaiting the day that Trump and his allies get reduced back to irrelevance within our society just as the days of separateness are now an absurd part of South Africa’s past.

  -30-

How times have changed; my mother would have smacked me upside the head if I asked for a “gap” year before college

I don’t know what I would have done if anybody had presented me with the idea of a “gap” year back in the early 1980s when I was going through the process of considering college.

Malia Obama and her father, the president, board Air Force One earlier this year for a trip together. In just over a year, she'll be off on her own -- bound for Cambridge, Mass.,and the Ivy League life. Photograph provided by the White House.

Probably would have wound up trying to get some sort of job to bring in some money. But then again, wasn’t the point of continuing one’s studies beyond the level of a high school diploma that we got to divert the need to work for a living for a few years?

ALL OF THIS has been banging about my brain since the moment Sunday morning when I looked at my cellphone and saw I had received an e-mail from the Chicago Sun-Times telling me of BREAKING NEWS.

As in Malia Obama, the 17-year-old daughter of President Barack Obama, deciding she was going to continue her education at Harvard University – the place where her parents attended law school. It really doesn't take much to qualify as "news" on the Sunday broadcasts or the Monday ayem newspapers. Remember how much of former politico Pat Quinn's Sunday stunts got good "play?"

Malia, with any luck, will get to hang around Harvard Yard a few years, gain some academic and personal experiences, then make her efforts to amount to something in life beyond being Obama’s eldest daughter.

But it wasn’t until I saw follow-up reports in the websites of the Chicago Tribune (she was the lede story), the New York Times (she took a back seat to her father’s Correspondent’s dinner appearance the night before) and the Washington Post that the gap year angle jumped out.

MALIA WILL HOLD off of attending actual classes until the autumn of 2017. She won’t be a graduate until the early 2020s. She’ll use the year off to partake in some sort of travel or work or personal project that will enhance her as a human being.

Even more so than the Ivy League degree will do.

White House officials would not say exactly what Malia would do with that year off. Which makes me wonder how long until the joke machines will go into overtime.

As it is already, the idea of someone taking time off between high school and college for reasons other than having to help financially to support their families usually gets played up as a kid being some sort of lazy goof.

THEY’RE EITHER JUST being lazy and doing nothing, or else they come from some sort of wealth that enables them to travel somewhere to engage in a drunken, ribald sojourn through Europe or some other semi-exotic place.

Of course, some people want to believe that’s about all a college education amounts to these days – usually the kind of people who didn’t go straight from high school to higher education because they didn’t have the qualifications to do so themselves.

Now I’m not trying to mock Malia. I’ve never met her or sister Sasha, but I hope she is able to figure out something worthwhile to do so she doesn’t waste a year of her life.

I know in my case, going straight into academia was probably the most significant thing I could have done with the 1983-84 academic year. I suspect I would have wound up stuck working in some sort of retail job. That is, after recovering from the smack upside my head that my mother -- who pumped the idea of attending college into my head constantly -- would have given me.

PERHAPS AT THE Carson, Pirie, Scott store at the River Oaks shopping mall in suburban Calumet City, Ill. (where I lived at the time, and I wound up a few years later working at a Carson’s store at the now-defunct Lincoln Mall in suburban Matteson for a few months because my first news-related job paid miniscule-ly).

Not exactly an experience that taught me much, other than how enjoyable it was (and remains) to be able to write for a living about the people and places around me.

Here’s hoping Malia can figure out a more worthy experience for the upcoming year, or else that shouting noise we hear emanating from the White House in coming months may well be the presidential parents yelling at their eldest daughter to get off her lazy duff and do something with her life.

One final thought: I never expected Malia to be among the crew of students at a place like Chicago State University, but why didn’t any Chicago schools make it into her mix of considerations. It may have been good enough to employ Barack Obama at one point, but the University of Chicago (and Chicago in general) definitely feels like a place in the family’s past.

  -30-

How much times have changed politically. Bernie proud of protest bust

There would have been a time when a candidate seeking government office would have considered it a political death if word got out that they once took part in a political protest.

And the thought that there were pictures of the candidate in question being cuffed by police officers who are hauling him off to jail? You can forget about that guy ever being able to think of running for office again.

YET TIMES TRULY do change, it seems.

For that is the situation presidential dreamer Bernie Sanders, the senator from  Vermont who has proudly used the socialist label to describe his political leanings, is now in.

Kartemquin Films found it had footage of a protest that took place on Aug. 5, 1963 at 73^rd Street and Lowe Avenue, with one of the protesters bearing a strong resemblance to what we’d think a youthful Sanders would look like.

Also, the Chicago Tribune went digging through their own archives and found that one of their photographers took pictures of that protest. One of which is the “money shot,” so to speak, of a protester in handcuffs being taken away.

THE PROTESTER IN question in that shot? A then-student at the nearby University of Chicago by the name of Bernie Sanders.

I’m sure if Sanders were seeking the Republican nomination for anything, his reaction would be different. For that matter, if any of those knuckleheads seeking the presidency were to have been in a protest way back then, we’d be hearing the apologies now.

Now they were experiencing a moment of youthful ignorance, and how they now know better than to do anything so disrespectful as to express opposition to the establishment.

Which is a sentiment that many of those conservative ideologues really believe, even though such expression of opposition is about as “American” a concept as exists.

BUT BERNIE IS wishing to be the Democratic nominee, and one who sees how his past actions can actually be used to bolster the image he wants to create for himself as he tries to avoid losing the early momentum he gained from victories or near victories in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Because one of the raps against the Vermont politico is that he’s an old white guy who’s really not all that in tune with the interests or concerns of black people.

As it turns out, Sanders was arrested while protesting the “Willis Wagons.” Which to anyone who knows their Chicago history was that 1960s effort by Chicago Public Schools officials to thwart efforts to truly integrate the schools racially.

When the black neighborhood schools became too cramped, rather than move the overflow to schools in white neighborhoods (let’s not forget that many white families were already using the Catholic school system to keep away from people not like themselves), school officials erected mobile homes in the parking lot to use as extra classroom space.

THE THEN-SUPERINTENDENT of the Chicago Public Schools back then was Benjamin Willis – hence the use of the “Willis Wagon” monicker to denounce the practice.

The practice eventually created such a backlash that it drove Willis out-of-town. And when Willis died decades later, his obituaries all led with the fact that he was the namesake of the wagons.

The ones that caused the liberal-minded college student to spend a day in the Englewood neighborhood to protest – and be obnoxious enough that the police felt compelled to take him away.

And now, he wants it to help bolster his “liberal” credentials against Hillary – whose own ‘ancient history’ credentials include once being a youthful member of the Congressional staff that looked into impeachment for then-President Richard M. Nixon concerning Watergate.

SO A LOW-LEVEL Watergate staffer versus someone who ‘went to jail’ (even if it was just a couple of hours in a South Side police district holding cell) to picket something still considered locally repulsive some five decades later?

Who knows? It may actually get Bernie a couple of extra votes in Chicago!

  -30-

South Side, as anticipated, to get Obama presidential library & museum

Meh. Not even, Meh!!!!!

That’s about all the enthusiasm I can muster for the word that the long-anticipated Barack Obama presidential library and museum will, in fact, wind up being located in Chicago.

WORD CAME OUT Thursday in late afternoon. It seems that both WBBM-TV and WMAQ-TV (channels 2 and 5, for those of you who are call-letter illiterate) are trying to take credit for breaking the story that everybody else picked up on in the early evening hours, and which both the Washington Post and New York Times had in their Friday editions.

The proposal backed by the University of Chicago, where Obama once served as an instructor in the law school, is the one that the Obama Foundation will choose to be the site of his legacy museum where the National Archives also will store the official documents related to the Obama presidency.

A hard-nosed news-oriented person like myself should have been eager to report this Thursday night with an “Extra!” edition to try to indicate that I wasn’t lagging too far behind on the “News.”

Yet with all the speculation that has been reported in recent months with regards to the library, as to whether the University of Illinois at Chicago could beat out the U of C, or whether Columbia University would beat out both of them, I have become tired of the ordeal. Word could wait until today.

I’LL GET EXCITED about this project when I actually see brick and mortar being erected for the facility. As for those of you out there who have been saying a presidential library is boring because the same information could be more easily disseminated via the Internet, all I have to say is, “Pttbt.”

With my rosy, raspberry tongue pointed straight out, and bits of spit emanating from my lips!

The official announcement is to be made some time this month. I have heard the date of May 11 tossed about. The only mystery is whether the proposed Jackson Park location will beat out the Washington Park site that some people seem to think is the front runner.

In other words, will it be east, or west, of the University of Chicago campus and the famed Midway Plaissance?

PERSONALLY, I LIKE the thought of the site closer to Lake Michigan – which actually is why I preferred two other sites that once were talked about. The one that would have included a presidential library as part of a community development on the site of the former U.S. Steel Southworks plant, and the one that would have converted the site of the one-time South Shore Country Club.

The Southworks site, which I literally have stood upon a couple of times, would have provided a lakefront location with a wonderful view to the north of the downtown Chicago skyline. Instead, the area is going to get the Steelworkers Park, meant to allow people to romp around for leisure on the former steel mill site.

While I get amusement at the thought of the one-time exclusionary country club (no blacks or Jews, and my father only got inside because he worked there as a busboy when he was a teenager) becoming the site of the first African-American president’s library and museum.

I’m sure some souls will turn over in their graves, while their grandchildren are the ones who are going about complaining these days that the Obama presidency isn’t worthy of the recognition that a library and museum would give it.

ALTHOUGH I FIND it interesting that Gov. Bruce Rauner plans to sign into law the measures approved recently by the General Assembly that are meant to undermine any potential legal challenges to an Obama library/museum being placed on one-time Chicago Park District property.

I’m sure he could score political points if he were to veto the measures, although even Rauner doesn’t seem to be that ideologically motivated.

So this is an issue that hopefully can become interesting when work begins to actually build a facility – which could become one of the tourist attractions that future generations of “True Chicagoans” will feel the need to visit once. At the very least, it will ensure that the Obamas return to Chicago from their apparent future home in New York on the day of the opening festivities.

When that happens, perhaps I’ll get a little more enthused. Until then, “Meh.”

  -30-

Are we destined to be “blessed” by being picked for site of Obama library?

In the ongoing dispute over where President Barack Obama would choose to have the legacy museum and library meant to enhance his historical reputation, I can’t help but wonder how long until we get the big announcement.

Because to listen to the various reports that have emanated from assorted places, Chicago has done everything that has been asked.

WE CAME UP with a site with proximity to the University of Chicago and put on the political pressure to make those individuals who hate the idea of a presidential library being built on Chicago Park District land feel uncomfortable.

Heck, some 332,171 of us even went so far as to vote for Rahm Emanuel to be our mayor for the next four years – out of the ridiculous belief that having Jesus Garcia as nuestra alcalde (that’s “our mayor” for those of you who are linguistically challenged) was somehow a deal-killer for the Obamas.

That supposedly was the reason why the Obama Foundation that technically is deciding this issue (in reality, it’s the president himself, deferring to the best judgment of first lady Michelle) held off on making an announcement about a museum and library location back in February.

We needed to see if Chicago voters cast their ballots properly in order to deserve such a facility.

YES, I’M BEING very facetious in writing this, because I honestly believe if the Obama interests were being shallow enough to decide their library location based on a municipal election outcome that ought to be the deal-killer for anybody with sense.

In which case, let the facility go to Honolulu – which you have to admit would provide for a most-unique location for a facility that usually winds up in places like Abilene, Kan., or Grand Rapids, Mich.

Then again, Ike and Jerry Ford aren’t Obama by any means.

I got my amusement from the Chicago Sun-Times Wednesday, which gave us a “Sneed Exlusive” that says it’s just about a done deal – the presidential library will be located in Chicago.

THE CLINCHING ACTION was the resignation of Cassandra Francis of the Friends of the Parks organization. That is the group that always complains about over-commercialization of the public parks, and was threatening to tie the Obama library/museum proposal into legal knots if they tried to put it there.

They may still be opposed, technically. But having a hole in leadership hurts their effort to put up much of a court fight.

Although considering how political people have their ways of influencing the courts, I’d have to wonder what judge out there would want to be remembered as the guy who ruled against Obama.

This isn’t South Texas where a federal judge was only too eager to put a hold on Obama’s attempt to impose some common sense to the nation’s immigration policies – rather than the ideological nonsense that comes from the kind of people who are likely to want to demonize the library/museum project for years to come.

IN CHICAGO, THIS project is going to be a big deal.

The part of columnist Michael Sneed’s report Wednesday that caught my eye was her claim that the Business Leadership Council and other African-American community leaders were preparing to take on Friends of the Parks by claiming that their no-parkland stance was denying the black community of Chicago a chance to have a significant facility.

Even Emanuel seems to realize this. In Washington this week, he told reporter-types who asked if Chicago would consider bidding for a future Olympic Games that he was more interested in attracting the library/museum for the man whom he once served as chief of staff.

He called a presidential library, “an Olympics with an annuity that gives every year,” the Chicago Tribune reported.

EVEN THOUGH THERE’S a good chance that such a facility would be visited once by locals, then become the site where future generations of schoolchildren from the city (if not the more Republican-oriented of suburban communities) would go on field trips.

Which is what we have to look forward to when the announcement is made.

As I look up from my keyboard, I see a plastic mold figure of the U-505, the Nazi Germany submarine that was captured intact and has been on display for decades at the Museum of Science and Industry. The mold is a souvenir from a long-ago trip to the museum.

Will future generations go to the Obama museum and wind up coming home with a plastic mold bust of the president’s head – big ears and all?!?

  -30-

Will South vs. West sides equal NYC?

The great divide amongst Chicago’s African-American population is the rivalry that exists between residents of South Side neighborhoods, and those who live on the West Side of the city.

Sout’ vs. West. I have heard countless diatribes from black people who live in those parts of Chicago who will insist that their part of the city is the reality that tells you what Chicago is truly all about.

IT IS A dispute that can get more intense than the South vs. North arguments that crop up during baseball season. It also is one that has developed its character into the debate over where a future library and museum for President Barack Obama should be located.

Two of the four sites under consideration are in Chicago, although I wonder if the inability of the city to get behind one site is what will make the New York City proposal the ultimate winner.

Will the South and West side interests wind up dumping all over each other and make it easier for Columbia University to achieve its desire of housing the Obama presidential legacy for decades to come?

Now I know some people are convinced there’s no way Obama, an adopted Chicagoan, and first lady Michelle, a South Shore neighborhood native, could possibly consider a place other than Chicago for his legacy. I’d like to believe that’s true.

BUT THERE ARE those who would like the appeal of New York, and would argue the fact that Obama actually attended Columbia (he transferred from Occidental College in Los Angeles to earn his bachelor’s degree) ought to put that school on top of the heap.

Considering that the Obamas have already indicated they’re not going to hustle back to Chicago immediately once his presidential term ends in January 2017, our city may well be just the place they came from.

For the record, it was the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago that put together the competing bids that were submitted Thursday, and that will be studied between now and mid-January, when the Obamas have indicated a site will be chosen.

Illinois-Chicago says a museum sponsored with their assistance could be at either Roosevelt Road and Kostner Avenue or Harrison and Halsted streets. A CTA “el” stop on Kostner closed decades ago could be reopened, IF the Roosevelt site is chosen.

WHILE CHICAGO (AS in the university) says a museum could go near the South Shore Cultural Center, near Washington Park on King Drive or on Stony Island Avenue in Jackson Park.

Chicago’s sites would be near (as in a short drive away) the University of Chicago campus, where Obama once served as an instructor in the law school. It would be a boost to the neighborhoods surrounding Hyde Park, and theoretically would make the university less of a racial island on the black South Side.

While Illinois-Chicago’s sites could help bolster the North Lawndale neighborhood that many outsiders still think of as incurable ghetto. College officials also stress the fact that, as a public university, they are more likely to get the kinds of students who don’t fit into some academic and cultural elite.

As though implying that Flames students are less elitist than the Maroons who hang out around the Midway!

IT’S AS THOUGH people will be asked to recognize Chicago South or Chicago West as being what the Obama legacy is all about. It could make some think that New York is less of a hassle than the Second City. The ultimate neutral site!

Although I honestly think that if it didn’t wind up in Chicago, the best spot for an Obama museum and library might well be the future president’s birthplace in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The University of Hawaii (of which his parents were alumni) could literally wind up having a beachfront site that might make it a place people make the extra trip to attend.

It certainly would be a more appealing destination than Grand Rapids, Mich., which houses the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum.

  -30-

Is Emanuel provoking an Obama library fight? Or averting a city civil war?

I can see where Mayor Rahm Emanuel is coming from in wanting to get all the interests involved with a future presidential library and museum for Barack Obama to get united behind a single site.

EMANUEL: Averting a fight? Or creating civil war?

It would be easy for the half-dozen or so interests who want to promote their specific site getting so wrapped up in themselves that one of the out-of-town interests that wants to host the Obama presidential library winds up outshining Chicago.
 

OBAMA: Does Rahm still have clout?

SOME MIGHT THINK that the idea of locating an Obama library as part of Columbia University in New York is too much of a stretch. Or the idea of putting it in Honolulu where Obama actually grew up (and where he appears to think of himself as a native – even though he has lived the bulk of his life in Chicago).

Some will snicker at the thought of either location topping Chicago to become the site of an Obama museum. What would it say if one-time Obama chief of staff Emanuel couldn’t bring the library/museum to his home city.

But if Chicago can’t get its act together, I could easily see this devolving into a 21^st Century civil war of political proportions. An Obama tribute (which is what these presidential libraries really are – the papers and other documents related to a presidency could easily be a part of the National Archives in Washington) could wind up showing the multiple factions that exist within our city.

Which is why Emanuel in recent days has made it clear he wants the city to have a lone entry in consideration for a site for an Obama library. A Chicago united could be an overwhelming force that puts the Noo Yawkers or the Hawaiian types in their place in terms of thinking they have any claim to the Obama legacy.



Could Obama library become the equal ...

THEN AGAIN, THE reality is that the groups that lose out in terms of having THEIR preference for an Obama library site could remain bitter.

Emanuel is putting himself at risk of developing even more enemies from the groups that don’t get their way on this issue. Because this is going to trigger the egos to run amok in our city.

There are those with the University of Chicago who think that since Obama once was on the faculty of the law school and because he still owns the neighborhood home that a library/museum near the Hyde Park neighborhood campus makes all too much sense.



... of a Maroons/Lions brawl?

And yes, it is likely that the intense fund-raising efforts of the university and its allies will dry up if city officials wind up thinking that some other site is better.

I CAN’T SEE Maroon-types getting all excited about a presidential library being built near the University of Illinois-Chicago (which actually houses the collection of papers associated with long-time Mayor Richard J. Daley) or Chicago State University campuses – both of which are amongst proposals being considered.

Although the Illinois Senate’s former president, Emil Jones, who now is affiliated with Chicago State, is saying that NOT putting the library in an African-American oriented neighborhood where it might spur some tourist traffic is disrespectful to black people and to an Obama legacy.

Which might be taken more seriously, if not for the fact that some of the people who feel this way were among the same ones who back in 2007 were spewing the trash talk that Obama (because of his white mother and a life lived outside of inner-city Chicago) wasn’t really “black enough” to represent them.

There also are those who think that a library/museum on land that once was Michael Reese Hospital might be the best site, since it is the closest proposal to downtown Chicago.

OR PERHAPS BUILT somewhere in proximity to the proposed Pullman National Park – which itself could become a reality in the next couple of years. There are those Metra Electric line commuter trains that stop right at the site on 111^th Street.

Does this site make too much sense for politics?

My own personal favorite involves the Chicago Lakeside proposal at the old U.S. Steel Southworks plant between the South Chicago and South Shore neighborhoods – the latter of which being the place where first lady Michelle Obama was raised.

It involves plans for building luxury housing and retail – a whole community of sorts – right on Lake Michigan. The developers have said they’re leaving the northernmost tip of the site open – so it can be offered as an Obama library site.

I once had the chance to stand on the spot being talked about. It would be literally a lakefront-based museum where people could look to the north and see the Chicago skyline from a very unique perspective.

IT HAS ITS potential – which may well be why it won’t go anywhere politically. Things that make sense rarely advance without difficulty.

This is the political brawl that Emanuel has now placed himself right in the middle of. It will be interesting to see which site his influence winds up guiding the process toward.

And how many political feelings get bruised along the way!

  -30-

Will Obama ever again actually reside in Kenwood-based house on So. Side?

I must confess – I always get amused whenever interests in Chicago try to stake a claim to their particular site as the “Future Home of the Barack Obama Presidential Library and Museum.”

Will the first family's decision really be in the hands of Sasha? Photographs provided by the White House

 

It’s not even a done deal that Obama himself will ever live in this city again. If that is the case, who’s to say that the future Obama Library will wind up here.

PERHAPS WE SHOULD be giving some serious consideration to the fact that the University of Hawaii is eager to have the library on its grounds – considering that the president himself was born, and largely raised, in Honolulu.

Maybe we shouldn’t take such a parochial attitude and assume that such a facility has to be built somewhere in Chicago. Heck, we can’t even agree where in the city ought to be thought of as the primary site.

The post-presidential future of Obama came in recent days when the president let it be known we shouldn’t assume he will be back in his home near the Hyde Park neighborhood right after the 2017 inauguration.

Obama and first lady Michelle may not be using Air Force One for their final flight home to Midway Airport. We don’t know where he’ll wind up.

IT SEEMS THE complicating factor is the younger daughter, Sasha, who was 7 when her family moved to Washington and started living the sheltered existence that the White House affords its residents.

The Obamas might not need final flight home

When her father ceases to be “Mr. President” and once again becomes “Dad,” she will be in her second year of high school. The first parents are concerned that having to suddenly transfer to a new school outside of Washington would be an uprooting that could cause harm.

The hints from the president are that he and Michelle may remain in the District of Columbia (Democrats generally live in D.C., while Republicans seem to prefer the D.C. suburbs in Virginia) until she’s finished with high school and ready to venture off on her own to college somewhere.

That leads to some jokes about how Sasha Obama runs the family, while others wonder if Obama just can’t let go of the Washington trappings.

SURPRISINGLY, I HAVEN’T heard many (only a few) wisecracks about how Obama doesn’t want to be put in a position where he’d have to defend himself for not returning Sasha to a spot in the Chicago Public Schools, or some sort of criticism if she wound up in the Laboratory Schools (private entities) of the University of Chicago.

Now, this could be a whole lot of talk about nothing. It may wind up that this is merely a three-year delay in Barack and Michelle returning to Chicago.

Although after more than a decade away, it may turn out that they’re not going to want to return to the streets of Hyde Park. There are times when life has to move forward, and going back (no matter how pleasant the memories) is just a mistake.

A part of me has always wondered if Obama might be thinking of a Hawaii retirement for himself and Michelle in their golden years. He gets to return home, and Michelle – the ultimate in a modern-day South Side girl – gets an exotic retirement.

DEFINITELY A LONG ways away from her early years in the South Shore neighborhood.

Could this be the future presidential library's site?

So for those people who want to bicker about whether a future presidential library is going to be built at the one-time Michael Reese Hospital site, or near the possible future Pullman National Park; on Lake Michigan at 79^th Street as part of the fantasized-about Chicago Lakeside development on the old U.S. Steel/South Works plant or as part of the campuses either at the University of Illinois at Chicago or at the University of Chicago – keep this is mind.

He may already have put his Chicago time in the rear view mirror of life.

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Law enforcement living in warped past when dealing with protesters?

It's not the least bit surprising to me (although I wish it were) to learn that undercover police officers are posing as protesters, hoping to get close enough to people trying to express their opinions (not an illegal activity, by the way) so as to identify them as potential "suspects."

Some people are willing to give their law enforcement such overwhelming authority because they're convinced it will only be used against other people.

I'D WONDER HOW those people who are now defending the police at the University of Chicago if they found out that the police were hanging out amongst themselves -- trying to drag out details that could be twisted agaisnt them.

That is the scandal of choice these days at the Hyde Park neighborhood-based college. Protesters have been complaining about the hospital on campus, trying to get its use as a trauma center expanded for more people.

At a protest on that issue held last month, one of the "activists" turned out to be an officer with the university police department, according to the Chicago Maroon student newspaper.

The publication published photographs of the officer at the protest, showing him carrying picket signs and sending text messages.

IT'S ONE THING for police to be on hand at a protest or picket to watch over the crowd, ensure that it does not get out of hand in expressing its opinions, and also protecting them in the event that counter-demonstrators (or just troublemakers bored and looking for some mischief to cause) try to disrupt things.

During my time as a reporter-type person, I have seen various police responses. I have seen cases where protesters were thankful to have the police on hand because they felt it kept them safe to speak out from others who might have thought to use some sort of force to try to silence them.

So I don't wnat to hear that those other people are merely expressing their own opinion, and that we're all supposed to think it equal in value to that of protesters.

Other times, I have seen police at a protest who appeared bored and seemed to wish that everybody would just pipe down and go home so they could either go off to some other duty -- or perhaps finish their shift and go home themselves!

BUT THE ACTIVITY alleged by the university police? It borders on infiltration. It stinks. It really comes across as someone thinking that expression of opinions need to be silenced.

Perhaps somebody still thinks this is the 1960s, and identifies a little too closely with those who wanted to view all forms of protest as somehow subversive.

That is a scary concept, particularly since I can't envision the protester-types at the University of Chicago these days as being the type who want to overthrow anything.

They're more likely to be in training to BE a part of the establishment, than to want to take it down by force.

ALTHOUGH IT IS commendable that university officials told the Chicago Tribune this week that they will investigate the matter, although those same officials are saying they had no advance knowledge of the alleged police tactics.

We'll have to wait and see whether the university actually investigates, or is more concerned with bringing an end to any public disclosure of what happened at the hospital?

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How uncouth!

Reading the reports this past weekend about University of Chicago fraternities engaging in stunts that used Latinos as the punch line reminded me of the “Polish jokes” of old.

Those were never really funny, and neither is the thought of the potential future leaders of our society being “hazed” by having to mow the frat house lawn while wearing a gaudy sombrero.

ANYBODY WHO ARGUES that there is humor here and that some people are being overly touchy is exposing more about their vacuousness than they are our lack of a sense of humor.

Somehow, I doubt that the university will be boasting about this moment, the way they like to go on and on about all those Nobel Prize winners on the faculty -- or the fact that a current president was once an instructor there.

More about this incident can be found at this weblog’s sister site, The South Chicagoan.

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Rahm kept his “promise”

Regardless of what side of the equation you come down on when it comes to public school versus private school, there’s one thing we can say about Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

EMANUEL: Sending his kids to the South Side



He didn’t lie to us back during the campaign season.

EMANUEL TOOK CRITICISM last year when he said he and his wife, Amy Rule, were considering sending their three children to private schools in the city, rather than have them attend a school in the Chicago Public Schools system.

Now, it’s no longer being considered. It is fact. Both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times used their websites to report Thursday that the three Emanuel kids – who finished the old school year in Washington, D.C. – will transfer this fall to the Lab School that is affiliated with the University of Chicago.

Much is being made of the fact that the Lab School is the same school that Barack and Michelle Obama sent their daughters to, back before he got elected president and they moved to Washington.

But that school has been around and included so many more among its alumni (retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, former Paramount Studios head Sherry Lansing and presidential advisor Valerie Jarrett, just to name a few) that it has become an integral part of the city’s character.

I REALLY CAN’T say I’d blame Emanuel for wanting his children to attend that school.

But there are those who now want to lambast the mayor for not showing a sign of faith in the Chicago Public Schools by sending his children there.

I couldn’t help but notice the Sun-Times account included quotes from former mayoral opponent Gery Chico criticizing Emanuel, reminding us that this was a campaign issue.

Although I have to admit that hearing a repeat of his criticism, along with his reminder that he and his daughters attended schools in the Chicago Public Schools system, came across as sour grapes.

I’D HOPE THAT Chico isn’t still feeling this intense about the issue. If he did, it would say something more negative about Chico than it does about Emanuel.

Personally, I don’t think many people in Chicago are going to hold it against Rahm. Unless they’re the kind of people who for politically partisan reasons want to trash him. In which case, it wouldn’t have mattered where he sent his kids to school.

The fact is that for people who are determined to live in Chicago no matter what the circumstances, the whole “public” versus “private” debate is one they carry out in their own families.

In fact, a part of me has always wondered if the quintessential Chicago “experience” also has to include a stint in a private school – most likely one run by the Catholic Archdiocese in Chicago.

IT JUST SEEMS that, whether for religious reasons or other factors, a lot of people decide to pick educational alternatives for their children other than the Chicago Public Schools.

Which is a problem for the city. Because those schools can cost money, and not everybody is capable of affording the tuition. Many don’t even want to hear the word “tuition” until it is time to think of paying to send their children to some sort of college.

If anything, that is the reason why the suburban part of the Chicago area is twice as large as the city proper. Many parents wanted that public school option, and felt that it was only doable (and affordable) in a suburb.

It creates the phenomenon of parents desperately trying to move to select suburbs that happen to be included in school districts that are more respectable. Perhaps if the Chicago Public Schools were more respectable overall, we wouldn’t have so many young parents with four-year-olds deciding it is time to leave Chicago proper.

IT IS FOR that reason that Emanuel ought to be making a priority of trying to work with the Chicago Public Schools to improve their overall quality. That ultimately is what will keep more people in the city. I don’t necessarily see it as being hypocritical that Emanuel talks of wanting to improve public education, while sending his own children to private schools.

If anything, the Chicago experience is that mixture of people who were educated both “public” and “private.” There are advantages to each.

And while there are some interesting programs within the Chicago Public School system that offer students opportunities to learn, there simply aren’t enough quality slots for the large student body.

Which is what creates the masses of public school students who are sloughing along in mediocrity. And which is what needs to be addressed, and resolved.

IN FACT, THERE’S really only one issue I have with the idea of Emanuel’s kids attending the Hyde Park neighborhood school.

Personally, I welcome them to the South Side (even though one can argue that Hyde Park is really a world in-and-of itself). But if the Emanuel family plans to keep living in that Ravenswood neighborhood home that just recently became vacant (their renter finally left), that is going to be a long haul for those three kids every day.

Unless there will be some sort of mayoral driver with a city-owned car transporting those kids half-way across the city to get them to school. In which case, THAT would become the controversy.

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