Rauner remembrance of tragedy – an effort to divert public’s attention?

Reading Gov. Bruce Rauner’s formal address to present a state budget for Fiscal 2019, I couldn’t help but notice his opening bit.

RAUNER: Trying to redeem his pol priorities?

The reference to it being exactly 10 years since the day a former Northern Illinois University student felt compelled to fire off his weapon – killing five students before he turned his gun on himself.

THE NEWS EVENTS of the day even called for a last-minute rewrite, also offering a mention of the death Tuesday of Chicago Police Cmdr. Paul Bauer – the officer who tried to stop a fleeing suspect being chased by other police, only to get shot and killed.

Both tragic happenings. In the case of the DeKalb slayings a decade ago, I’m sure the memories remain as strong now in the minds of those who were there as they were back then.

But a part of me couldn’t help but wonder how much this bit of rhetoric was an attempt at misdirection.

Rather than get worked up over the details of the budget proposal Rauner wants the General Assembly to approve for Illinois government for the fiscal year beginning July 1, he’d rather we think of these other happenings.

BECAUSE IF WE think too much of budgetary matters, then we wind up touching on some sore spots of the Rauner era of state government.

Let’s not forget that Rauner, although in his third year of government, has never managed to get a budget proposal of his implemented into law. Heck, he’s never offered up anything that wound up becoming policy.

The only reason we have a budget in place now is because Democratic legislators were joined by a few Republicans willing to put the daily workings of government at the forefront to pass a budget that Rauner himself tried to use his veto powers to kill off!

Because Rauner is the guy who came into the governor’s post thinking he could strong-arm the rest of state government into going along with his vision – one in which organized labor and unions take a severe blow to their influence over Illinois.

THAT CONCEPT WAS more important for the past two years to Rauner than anything concerning the daily operations of the state, which does have responsibilities to fulfill – regardless of one’s ideological hang-ups.

The question we ought to be asking ourselves is whether Rauner is willing to get serious and try to put together budget proposals this year – or if we’re headed for another budgetary standoff.

The last of which stretched out over two years, caused serious complications for daily government operations and created financial problems that will take Illinois years (if not decades) to resolve.

You’d think that Rauner, facing a re-election cycle complicated by the fact that the conservative ideologues the governor is counting on to support him have their own partisan objections (being anti-union isn’t conservative enough for them), would want a straight-forward budget process. Something to ensure that he signs into law the Fiscal ’19 budget on or before June 30.

BECAUSE THE $37.6 billion spending plan for state government the governor put forth includes some serious changes to the way retired teacher pensions are funded – mostly by sticking them on the school districts.

Something I’m sure will tick off the Chicago Public Schools, where officials would actually like to have the state assume a larger share of those pension costs. Is the governor’s budget address merely another excuse to set up a political brawl with Chicago interests later this year?

Some reports made mention of the fact that Wednesday’s budget address, in addition to being 10 years since the bloodshed at DeKalb, was 225 days from the end of the budget standoff.

Will it also become the beginning of a political sequel – one in which Rauner will try to redeem his political self-image at the expense of the people of Illinois. Elections day are March 20 and Nov. 6; those dates can’t come soon enough.

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Bears win, but Packers lose. So now, it’s “Go Huskies!” for gridiron fans

26-24 was good. But the 37-34 score on Sunday was bad, very bad – at least for those individuals who derive any joy from the game of football and the "Monsters of the Midway" (who make the Cookie Monster look terrifying by comparison).

The end result being that the Chicago Bears’ season came to an end. No playoff appearance. The one time that Bears’ fans wanted the Green Bay Packers to do something, they blew it.

CAN’T COUNT ON a “cheese head” to do anything. It seems that even the Hoosiers are more reliable (the Colts managed an end-of-season victory over Houston).

Personally, I can’t get too worked up – and not just because I have never gotten into the game of football (futbol is a totally different story).

Let’s be honest. Even if the Bears had managed to creep their way into a playoff slot, they would have been the team that deserves to lose in the first round. Now we can all move on to more sensible (only 52 more days until the first exhibitiongames of baseball spring training) pastimes.

Although for those of you who have to have more of the gridiron activity, let’s not forget the Orange Bowl game on Tuesday.

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY’S Huskies have spent the past few days in Florida acclimating themselves to the surroundings before they take on Florida State University.

Personally, my only tie to NIU is that I have a step-brother and two cousins who received an education there. Also, my step-mother’s father, Meyer, was an alumnus and long-time fan of the University of Florida. I remember the most angry he ever was at me was one time when I said something that besmirched the image of the Gators.

So somewhere, I suspect his spirit will be watching the bowl game on Tuesday, and eagerly rooting for the Huskies to defeat his arch-rival Seminoles. Maybe all of Chicago ought to join in rooting for the boys from DeKalb. It’s not that far from us.

So come Tuesday, the call goes out. “Go Huskies!!!!”

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What does '4/14' really mean?

It appears that the men’s room of Regina Hall, a freshman dormitory at St. Xavier University, is NOT a harbinger of doom – as some people had feared.

It was in one particular stall of the men’s rest room of the co-ed dorm that three different menacing messages were found – the last of which implied that some sort of carnage could be expected on campus on Monday.

OFFICIALS AT THE college in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood – noting the bloodshed that gave DeKalb, Ill., its own version of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre earlier this year – decided to play it safe. Students at the main campus, along with a secondary campus in suburban Orland Park and classroom space used in downtown Chicago, were all evacuated.

Four other schools in the area, including a Catholic high school located across the street from St. Xavier, all had classes cancelled on Monday.

Students at the schools are not sure just how (if at all) the time will be made up, or whether they will be expected to cram the same amount of studies into a shorter time period – commencement ceremonies at St. Xavier had been scheduled for May 17.

Now some people might think that bathroom graffiti is not a sufficient reason to shut down a college campus, even if in the final instance on Thursday, a scrawled note warned people to, “be prepared to die 4/14.”

I’D BE INCLINED to think it is just someone with a warped sense of humor, except that there are at least two other colleges in this country – Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., and Malcolm X College on the West Side – where graffiti also implied threats of violence in conjunction with Monday’s date.

Law enforcement officials who are monitoring the incidents at all the campuses say they believe the significance of the date is that it comes exactly two months after Steven Kasmierczak, a former Northern Illinois University student, walked into an auditorium with firearms and began shooting – killing five students and wounding several others.

What exactly the connection would be, they can’t say. They really don’t know.

Is there someone out there who is angry about the way in which police and college officials handled the Northern Illinois incident, thereby provoking them to cause another violent incident at another college campus out of some sort of revenge?

IT WOULD NOT be the most ridiculous concept.

People unstable enough to wreck vengeance with violence often time their incidents to specific dates that carry significance in their minds – even if, to the rest of the world, the connection seems ridiculous.

Let’s not forget the April 19, 1993 incident near Waco, Texas, where federal agents trying to raid a religious compound where a stash of firearms was being held illegally wound up causing a fire that killed the people inside.

It was two years later to the date that Timothy McVeigh triggered an explosion that demolished the federal government building in Oklahoma City, and he saw his actions as payback to the federal government for killing “innocents.” He also noted the original fighting in the American Revolution began April 19, 1775, and saw his own conservative viewpoint as being the equivalent of the original revolutionaries.

IT COULD TURN out to be that the April 14 date has a completely different significance. I would guess that because it keeps turning up on bathroom stalls of so many college campuses. If it were just the two Chicago schools, then an NIU connection might be relevant.

But a Michigan college, where I would guess most of the student body had never heard of DeKalb, Ill., until two months ago?

These college closings have me wracking my brain for any historic incidents that may have taken place on April 14 – although nothing of significance comes to my mind.

I also wonder if perhaps it is the digits themselves (4 – 1 – 4) that have some significance. Perhaps they add up to a different date or statistic, or perhaps they should be read in a different order, in order to figure out their true meaning.

OR COULD IT be just that one person came up with the date, and other losers are copying it as some sort of a twisted gag – almost like they are a part of something bigger than themselves.

Does all this sound irrational? It is.

But then again, that’s the kind of mindset we’re dealing with in incidents like this. Someone has a convoluted logic that is meant to justify either committing an act of violence on a college campus, or just trying to terrify student bodies across the United States into thinking that something bad could happen.

And if any law enforcement personnel are reading this, let me emphasize that all this is a guess on my part. I don’t have any understanding of what 4/14 means, or why we ought to think that college kids will be safe on Tuesday even though they were at risk on Monday.

I HOPE THEY are safe. Personally, I think they will be as safe Tuesday, or any other day this week, as they would have been on Monday. Ultimately, the college campuses will just have to take a chance and re-open, although it was uncertain just when that would happen.

As of late Monday, St. Xavier campuses (which sit in a heavily residential neighborhood on the edge of Chicago and in one of the lowest of low-crime suburbs in the Chicago area) remain closed, although Malcolm X officials reopened their school for Monday night classes.

Students, however, are having to submit to searches by security before being allowed to enter school buildings.

This could wind up being the norm, at least for the rest of this year, as university officials around the country would rather not provide the next dateline to gain national infamy, even though on a certain level they realize there’s nothing they can do to guarantee beyond a doubt that an act of violence will not occur on their campuses.

STUDENTS ARE REALLY going to have to start justifying their existence, and the concept of a college campus as some sort of forum for public expression may just be a quaint remnant of the past.

Also a part of the past, it seems, is the day when we can think of bathroom graffiti as just the mindless rambling of people with too much free time on their minds while they are supposed to be doing their business.

No more do we get such “gems” as this graffiti ditty that I recall from one day while sitting on a stall during my own college days.

“JESUS SAVES,” READ the graffito, to which someone else had felt the need to add the line, “at Corn Belt Bank.”

The reaction then, as I recall, was for other people to add more lines of graffiti, turning the stall into a debate on whether speculation about where Jesus does his banking is disrespectful to the Lord, or whether some people take bathroom graffiti too seriously.

Now, we’d have ministers wanting to exorcise the bathroom stall and the FBI coming in to investigate whether the threat is legitimate, while also weeding their way through countless telephone numbers belonging to guys, only with girls’ names attached as a junior-high level joke.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: These are the latest updates (http://update.sxu.edu/) provided by St. Xavier University about their closing and when they think they may re-open.

Students got an unexpected ‘spring break’ this week (http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2008/04/14/threat_prompts_closing_of_schools/2481/), due to an outbreak of graffiti.

My alma mater, Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Ill., increased its own security measures (http://chicagoargus.blogspot.com/2008/02/not-even-my-alma-mater-is-safe-these.html) in the days following the Northern Illinois University incident.

I never thought I'd be trashing the Chicago Sun-Times in the space of their own web site

For those of you who actually pay attention to every little detail about the Chicago Argus, you noticed earlier this week that this weblog became one of many across the country whose content is distributed by BlogBurst. (Their logo is at the bottom of the right-hand column of this weblog).

Their service (which doesn’t pay me a dime) takes the content of weblogs and distributes them to companies that publish websites, which then have the option of putting links to the posts on their own websites. Many of these companies are established newsgathering organizations who use the BlogBurst-distributed content to supplement their own work.

I OFFERED UP the Chicago Argus content (which does not yet provide me with any income) out of some hope that BlogBurst would expand the numbers of people who find, read and enjoy this site, since people who click onto a BlogBurst link can be taken from wherever they were on the Internet directly to this site, if they wish.

But I never envisioned what would happen next.

The Chicago Sun-Times website (http://www.suntimes.com/) is a BlogBurst client, and their site immediately latched onto eight commentaries I wrote here during the past month. Copies of all eight are now posted on the newspaper’s website. For all I know, more may turn up there in coming days and weeks (although personally, I’m more interested in seeing if Fox News websites have the nerve to run any of my commentary, which is more honest than a lot of the claptrap we hear from their loudmouthed, high-paid talking heads).

That is how it came to be that one who goes rooting around the depths of the Sun-Times website can find the commentary I wrote Feb. 19 about how ridiculous the newspaper’s coverage was of the Northern Illinois University gunman’s girlfriend and her teary interview with CNN.

THE COMMENTARY WAS a part of my occasional “Ink Stained Wretch” series of media criticism where I try to channel the ghost of the Chicago Journalism Review of old and offer explanations of how news coverage went awry, or could have been done more responsibly.

On that date, the Sun-Times (a newspaper I still enjoy reading, even in its current emasculated format) was my target.

Either some editorial staffers at the Sun-Times are secure enough in their jobs to accept the headline “Is the Sun-Times off-kilter in DeKalb coverage” on their own web site, or someone wrote a computer program that selected my commentary without really understanding its content.

I’d like to think it’s the former, but my personal experience with computers in the work world makes me realize it probably was a dumb machine rather than a clever person at work.

FOR FEAR OF sounding like a crabby old man yelling at the neighborhood kids to “Get Off My Lawn,” there are too many people in this world who are growing up thinking about how to find key words in an essay, rather than comprehending the content of whatever it is they are reading.

Reading this juxtaposition of critical commentary (http://tinyurl.com/22w8nk) published in the original source was the highlight of my day Wednesday, and one of the most unusual things I have ever seen turn up on a so-called Mainstream Media website.

And now, a month later, I still think it was tacky for the newspaper to over-hype that teary-eyed interview, which wasn’t even their own to begin with.

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THE INK-STAINED WRETCH: CNN kept Waukegan explosion "humor" in check

Perhaps it is because I worked for two decades in the news business, but I could see the CNN anchor Thursday afternoon doing her best to suppress a laugh as she gave us the update on an explosion in Waukegan, Ill., that the network had reported live earlier in the day.

As it turns out, no one was killed in what officials say was a gas explosion that gutted several businesses and was felt by people as far as a block away. Eight people were taken to area hospitals for minor injuries.

THE POTENTIAL FOR humor came out of the fact that the initial image presented by the explosion was so incredibly disgusting. Firefighters and other emergency crews arriving at the scene found body parts strewn all about the street.

For a few seconds, officials surveying the scene saw the flesh-colored parts and feared they were going to be spending their next few hours picking through rubble while trying to resurrect the parts of people who just happened to be present at the wrong time.

But in what sounds like a bit from a “Marx Brothers” movie, the body parts turned out to be not quite what they appeared at first glance. Among the businesses gutted by the explosion were a hair salon and a clothing store – specifically, one that sold tuxedos.

Had the body parts not come from mannequins, Waukegan, Ill., would no longer be remembered primarily as the birthplace of Jack Benny. Photograph provided by City of Waukegan.

The body parts in question belonged to the mannequins used in the store to display the tuxedoes. At least those mannequins ended their time on this planet while being well dressed. Except for the mannequin clad in the light blue tuxedo with a ruffled shirt and dark blue cummerbund. That one gets the shame of dying in a tacky high school prom outfit.

SOME PEOPLE ARE going to be repulsed at the notion that anyone could find humor in an explosion. But actually, it is the way reporter-types (and many law enforcement officials I have known) deal with the potential tragedy once it turns out there is no real carnage.

It’s not like anybody is making quips about Tinley Park, where police continue to look for the man who earlier this month killed five women and seriously wounded a sixth during a robbery attempt at a Lane Bryant women’s clothing store.

Nonetheless, I can appreciate the differing viewpoint that non-reporters take toward incidents. After all, a reporter (particularly one who focuses attention on crime and disasters) usually pops into the lives of people at their absolute low point.

It is why I can understand why reporters approached Gov. Rod Blagojevich when he attended a ceremony at Northern Illinois University, and then proceeded to ask him questions about issues other than the 21st Century version of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre that left five students dead and several others shot.

SEVERAL STUDENTS BOO-ED and heckled reporter types, which probably fed into the governor’s ego and makes him think all the more that the people of the state of Illinois love him (they really love him) and will forgive him for anything he does.

The simple fact is that Blagojevich may be implicated in a federal investigation of political corruption. He gives people so few chances to talk to him, that this occasion had to be used.

Besides, the world does not revolve around DeKalb, Ill., even though some students may wish it did. Blagojevich said he would push for state funds to pay for demolition of the hall where the shootings took place and construction of a new memorial. That story got reported as well as Blagojevich’s lame response to being “Public Official A.”

What else was notable this week in the world of the Chicago-area reporter types who try to follow in the footsteps of “The Front Page?”

SUN-TIMES DINGS TRIBUNE, WHOOPIE!!!: The Chicago Sun-Times went a tad overboard with its coverage Thursday of how Tribune Co. chief Sam Zell seriously wants to find some corporation to pay him big bucks for the right to put their name on the stadium used by the Chicago Cubs.

With a screaming headline reading, “It’s Trib vs. Chicago,” the newspaper made a big splash with stories and columns denouncing Zell for even daring to think of changing the name of Wrigley Field (which is named for the Wrigley family that used to own the team and still owns the chewing gum manufacturing company).

The newspaper also devoted ample space on their website to the comments of Cubs fans (many of whom read as though they forgot to take their medication) who want to get all worked up over this.

THE ONLY REASON the Sun-Times cares about this is that it is an excuse to beat up on the opposition newspaper. If anybody other than Tribune Co. owned the Cubs, the Sun-Times would take a more rational viewpoint on this issue.

The truth is that modern sports economics make all of Zell’s proposed moves (including more night games and concerts at the stadium) the norm. He is not asking for anything out of line with other professional sports teams.

If our government officials are going to be forced to deal with this issue (the state may wind up buying the stadium and paying for a major overhaul of its infrastructure), they are going to have to get over this silly notion that the Chicago Cubs are “holier than thou.” They’re just a baseball team, and a lousy one at that.

BLACK’S BLACK DAY: He was done in by videotape.

An appeals court panel in Chicago rejected the request of former Chicago Sun-Times chief Conrad Black to remain free while his appeals take place. Black will have to report to prison on Monday, or risk being labeled a fugitive from justice.

The court ruled that his conviction on an obstruction of justice charge on claims that he removed boxes of documents from his office in Toronto after a court had said they were not to be touched is so air tight there is no chance it will be overturned. They cited the security video used during Black’s trial that shows him hauling box after box after box out of the office.

So that puts Black in the same category as one-time Chicago Cubs idol Sammy Sosa as someone whose Chicago rep was forever damaged by incriminating video (remember the security camera that caught Sosa leaving a game early at the end of the 2004 season?)

Unlike Sosa, Black now has a 6 ½ year prison term to serve (provided he behaves himself while in prison, he’ll have to serve about 5 ½ years before being eligible for early release).

AND ON A FINAL NOTE: I’m still trying to figure out just what officials with the “Today” show thought they were accomplishing by having former Bolingbrook police officer Drew Peterson on their program.

Peterson, whose third wife is now officially a homicide and whose fourth wife is still missing (it has been four months now), didn’t say anything of interest during his show, and the perception most viewers picked up is that NBC will put anything on the air if they think it will help bring in ratings.

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Is the Sun-Times off-kilter in DeKalb coverage?

I will concede that everybody has somebody who loves them.

Nobody is completely evil. And it probably is good not to automatically demonize people, even if they do something repulsive.

BUT THE CHICAGO Sun-Times is taking that logic to an extreme with its coverage the past couple of days of the shootings by a former Northern Illinois University student that left five current students dead, several others wounded and hundreds more mentally injured.

I thought it a bit strange when Mark Brown, the primary hard-news columnist for the Sun-Times, did a piece for the Sunday newspaper where he talked to people around campus who knew Steven Kasmierczak when he was a NIU student and were having trouble believing that the calm young man they knew would be capable of planning, then carrying out, a shooting spree.

Kazmierczak was a star of the sociology department who graduated with a perfect 4.0 grade point average and who went on to work on a master’s degree at the University of Illinois in Urbana – not exactly the type of person who fits the profile of a heinous criminal, except that Brown found some people who noted that Kazmierczak was having trouble coping with the additional expectations put on graduate-level students.

It was unlike other pieces of reporting I had been reading, most of which were the stereotypical story that gets written everytime some violent crime takes place – the perpetrator was a loner who “creeped out” everybody who had any slight contact with him, and reminded many people of Travis Bickle, the character Robert DeNiro played in “Taxi Driver.”

I HAD TROUBLE accepting the notion of Kasmierczak as an “ideal student,” but I am willing to give Brown credit for doing some serious legwork to track down these people and use his column to tell a different story than what everybody else had.

But the Sun-Times on Monday crossed over a line in trying to humanize Kasmierczak, and I’m still trying to figure out what their motivation could be.

A big huge full-page cover with the screaming headline, “He was anything but a MONSTER” and a second full page inside provided ample space for the story of an interview with Jessica Baty – Kasmierczak’s girlfriend of two years.

She talked of their last time together on Valentine’s Day, and their last telephone conversation just hours before the shooting took place. She also talked of the package she received the day after the shootings that contained some of his belongings.

“HE WAS PROBABLY the nicest, most caring person every,” Baty said.

Now as a former reporter myself, I fully understand the notion of giving big play to a shocking story. The first-person reminisces of a criminal’s girlfriend certainly count. While somewhat pathetic, Baty’s feelings for her boyfriend (whom she was living with in Champaign) can be news.

But such treatment would usually be reserved for a story that the newspaper dug up on its own, and that it had to itself. What a newspaper wants to do in such a situation is create a dramatic front page image that makes people want to plunk down their two quarters at the newsstand or in a newsbox and buy a copy of the paper.

Then, they want that front page to get photographed and used as a background shot over the head of the news anchor on television newscasts across the country as part of their own coverage of the Dekalb shootings (most of which will consist of reading wire service copy while shots are broadcast of police milling around campus).

BUT THERE WAS nothing “exclusive” about Baty’s interview. She talked to Cable News Network, which has been airing excerpts over and over and over both yesterday and today. Even as I write this Monday night, CNN is still playing the interview, and Baty’s tears continue to be choked down.

The Sun-Times is hyping a story that really isn’t their story. As far as I can tell, the story was put together from information compiled by four reporters, and most of it came from the person who took notes while sitting in the newsroom in front of a television set hooked up for cable.

Now there have been times when I, as a reporter, took notes off a television screen, then wrote them up into copy for a news story. The time that jumps immediately to mind was an incident nearly two decades ago when rumors were floating about that Oprah Winfrey and her longtime fiancé, Stedman Graham, were involved in an incident that involved police being called.

It didn’t really happen, but the talk had become pervasive enough that Oprah felt compelled to use a few minutes of her syndicated television show to address the matter. Hence, I wrote a few paragraphs based on what she said. It was a minor contribution, and it certainly wasn’t something I tried to hype into a major story the way the Sun-Times did in Monday’s paper.

IN ALL FAIRNESS, there are a few paragraphs that indicate some signs of actual reporting taking place. It appears someone actually went to the Baty family home in Wonder Lake to try to talk to Jessica, and get some original quotes for the Sun-Times. But that attempt apparently failed.

She isn’t talking anymore to anyone else, which is her personal right.

So all the Sun-Times got for having a reporter make the 70-mile drive to Wonder Lake was a colorful bit of detail that the Baty family had set up a sign in front of their home basically telling people to leave them alone while they “grieve and mourn” for what happened last week in DeKalb.

Now the Sun-Times was not alone in stealing quotes from Baty’s CNN interview. Jessica is also quoted on the front page of Monday’s editions of the Chicago Tribune.

BUT THE TRIBUNE’S approach was just to write a few Baty-related paragraphs saying that she had talked to the Atlanta-based news channel, and work them into the larger story that many students at Northern Illinois University were turning to local clergy people to try to cope with Thursday’s acts of violence.

In fact, I had to go looking very closely at the Tribune story before even realizing the same quotes from Baty were in both newspapers. The Sun-Times smacked me even before I paid for the newspaper with a full-page image of a tearful Baty, and a smaller photograph of Baty and Kasmierczak appearing to be the cute, adoring couple.

Now why does this bother me so?

It is because I do not understand why the Sun-Times is so willing to try to make Kasmierczak appear to be so typical.

ADMITTEDLY, HIS PHYSICAL appearance would not have attracted much attention unless he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, in which case his heavily tattooed arms would have stood out. But tattoos, in and of themselves, are not a criminal act.

But Baty, in her CNN interview, admits Kasmierczak’s final farewell to her during their last telephone call was different in that it was so final. She also noted he had stopped taking his prescribed medications a few weeks earlier, and had also begun purchasing more firearms – two of which he kept stored in the Champaign apartment they shared.

To my sense, this indicates someone who is planning a violent outburst. In his mind, he was plotting last week’s events for some time. While I can understand how Baty would not notice changes in his behavior until it was too late, to me it makes last week’s acts in DeKalb all the more premeditated, and repulsive.

Yet the Sun-Times wants us to think he’s almost as much a victim as anyone else who died last week.

IT HAS MADE me wonder. Would Kasmierczak be getting such a sympathetic view if he weren’t a “scrawny white male” (the original description offered by NIU campus police when the incident first happened)?

I can’t help but compare the view to the demonization being given to the, as of yet, uncaught gunman in a quintuple murder at a southwest suburban Tinley Park shopping center. In my mind, the only difference between Kasmierczak and the uncaught gunman was that after killing five people, Kasmierczak turned the gun on himself, while the Tinley Park gunman drove away.

We have seen multiple police sketches of the Tinley Park suspect, who clearly is an African-American man with elaborately-braided hair. We got to hear the eerie audio tape Monday of the store manager whispering into her cell phone while trying to tell police what was happening – just before she was shot to death.

VARIOUS CLERGY PEOPLE on Monday came forward to urge the man to surrender, saying he would suffer even more if his time on the run lasted much longer. Political people are trying to turn him into the poster child for resurrecting the death penalty, even before he is arrested.

Police are emphasizing that the man is a threat to everyone around him, and that people who are not giving up his identity to the police are really criminals themselves. I’d argue that Kasmierczak was just as much a threat by stocking up on firearms, although I’m not sure what legal methods could have been used to restrict him from owning so many pistols.

Were the actions at a suburban Lane Bryant store (a robbery attempt that got violent when the store manager tried calling police) really that much more heinous than what happened in DeKalb?

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Northern Illinois University’s student newspaper found students who remembered living (http://www.northernstar.info/article/2354/) in an apartment building with Kasmierczak. They gave the stereotypical responses of a loner who they paid little attention to.

The Chicago Sun-Times tried to boost their own newspaper’s circulation with this pickup Monday (http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/799650,CSTNWS-NIU18.article) of an interview by CNN. Columnist Mark Brown did some serious reporting in coming up with this column (http://www.suntimes.com/news/brown/798118,CST-NWS-brown17.article) in the Sunday newspaper.

Not even my alma mater is safe these days

I have often heard my mother say she is thankful both my brother and I have completed our college educations.

It’s not that she’s pleased we went to college (although she is). It is that she is grateful neither of us is still hanging around college campuses, which in recent years she has come to see as places that attract too many strange people.

HER MOST RECENT round of worrying came last week after she first learned of the quintuple slayings at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. The thought of a former student (and one who actually graduated with honors) losing control of himself and opening fire on a hall full of students has her creeped out.

It also has my aunt (her sister) upset, because my cousin is an NIU alum. The two of them have speculated how much worse things could have been, if we had had family on that rural Illinois campus last week.

Now it is easy for me to dismiss these concerns as just the nitpicking of a couple of people who are over-reacting. But apparently, they aren’t alone.

Northern Illinois University police officials have gone out of their way to make it clear that nothing they could have done could have prevented the incident from occurring.
Not even my alma mater, Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, is as secure as we students liked to think of it, or as it appears in this wintry illustration. University officials recently tried to reassure students, parents and alumni that they have security measures in place, but cannot guarantee that such incidents would not occur there. Photograph provided by Illinois Wesleyan University.

OFFICIALS AT OTHER universities are feeling the need these days to assure their students, parents and alumni that their campuses are as safe as any place could possibly be.

How else to explain the e-mail I received Friday from officials at Illinois Wesleyan University – the Bloomington-based college from which I graduated some 21 years ago.

University President Richard Wilson (whom I have never met because he was not at IWU back when I was a student there) and university officials felt the need to include me on their list of e-mail recipients who received a message telling me how the Northern Illinois University incident impacts colleges everywhere.

Now I’m sure the current student body and parents of those students were the primary recipients, since I am not a significant financial contributor to my alma mater (why I don’t is another subject altogether) and I have not even set foot on the campus for even a brief visit in nearly nine years.

SO IT IS nice that I could contact the university chaplain if I feel the need for spiritual support in coping with the news out of DeKalb. But I doubt I will take them up on the offer.

What caught my attention about Wilson’s mass e-mailing was the portion that basically told me Illinois Wesleyan could not have prevented a similar incident from occurring there.

The key, Wilson wrote, was that university officials in Bloomington and on other college campuses, “remain vigilant in our efforts to attend to the welfare of our campus community.” He also pointed out the portion of the university website that provided a summary of the IWU emergency response plan, and just how students, faculty and staff would be notified in the event of an actual traumatic experience.

The place we students used to mockingly call “Wesley-land” and think of as our own little academic island in the cornfields of central Illinois could just as easily have a former student wander in off the streets and pull a similar incident.

I HONESTLY DO not know how I would have handled such an incident happening in my proximity when I was a college student. I’d like to think the level headed demeanor I developed as a reporter for dealing with coverage of crime and violence would have kicked in a few years sooner than it did.

But nothing of the magnitude of what happened at Northern Illinois University, or last year at Virginia Tech, occurred at the IWU of my memories.

The closest thing to a violent crime during my college years was during my first year when David Hendricks was arrested in 1983 and charged with the brutal slayings of his wife and three kids. He was convicted, spent a couple of years in prison before the conviction was overturned, then acquitted on re-trial.

The slayings of the Hendricks family officially remain an unsolved crime for the Bloomington police department.

BUT IT WAS easy for us students to ignore that because it happened in town, and to our college-kid arrogance, it just didn’t matter. We envisioned some sort of magical force field at campus’ edge to keep us safe.

And insofar as the one student-oriented act that got national attention, it wasn’t even us. I remember sitting in a college dormitory trying to study when I heard the word that at Illinois State University, the Normal, Ill.-based college whose campus was about a five-minute drive from ours, students were protesting what they perceived as excessive force being used against them by local police.

That protest turned from a totally legal march through Normal into a rampage where students committed vandalism against public buildings and caused several hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage.

That one was too easy for us IWU kids to laugh off as a bunch of goofs run amok.

I REALLY DON’T want to believe that times and people have changed that much during the past two decades since I was in Bloomington and my brother did a stint in Urbana at the University of Illinois.

I honestly find it most comforting to just acknowledge that bad things can happen, and there’s no way to absolutely protect oneself from harm.

After all, if there is truly no safe place, then there is no point to worrying. Precautions can make it less likely that someone will put themselves in harm’s way. But, personally, I’d rather not have to go through life with extra worries on my mind. I’d rather just try to live life to the fullest, without having to restrict myself out of fear of what could happen.

Also, a part of me thinks it is probably the height of arrogance for anyone to seriously think they can find somewhere to go where they can be absolutely free of violence or harm.

IT ALMOST SOUNDS like those people think they are too good to be hurt, while people on the college campuses where traumatic events did occur somehow deserve what they got because of where they happened to be at the time.

College campuses officials and security are not alone in having feelings of insecurity. In the normally tranquil southwest suburb of Tinley Park, there was a quintuple slaying earlier this month at the shopping center located just blocks from my mother’s residence.

Residents there are still going through their own grief. In fact, a prayer service Sunday at the Christian Life Center gave locals their chance to try to overcome their feelings of forboding.
Nobody deserves to have to go through what happened in DeKalb or Tinley Park, not the students or faculty on campus or suburban shoppers who are going to have to wonder when (not if) such an incident will again occur in their lives.

THE FAMILIES OF the five students or the five women shopping at the Lane Bryant store who were killed shouldn’t have had to be put through the grief of losing a loved one just at the point when they were starting to get near the prime of their lives and potentially go on to make something of themselves. Those families are going to spend the rest of their lives wondering what could have been.

I even feel sympathy for Robert Kazmierczak, the father of Steven, whose emotional demons got the best of him and caused him to build up the small arsenal of pistols and a shotgun that resulted in last week’s shooting rampage.

Regardless of what anyone thinks of Steven Kazmierczak these days, we have to concede that Robert (who is not in the best of health these days) lost his son, and in a way that will prevent him from doing much in the way of public mourning.

Just as much as anyone else affected by the DeKalb shootings, Robert’s emotional and physical well-being deserves to be in our prayers.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: My alma mater went out of its way to reassure me that they were doing (http://www2.iwu.edu/CurrentNews/newsreleases08/news_niu_208.shtml) everything possible to prevent a similar occurrence from getting out of control at the Bloomington campus. I guess the alumni association hasn’t given up on getting a sizable donation from me someday.

Here’s a semi-competent analysis (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/15/illinois-shooting-tragedy_n_86851.html) of the news coverage generated of the Northern Illinois University slayings. While no one has seriously offended me with their approach, I also haven’t seen anything that makes me think somebody will win their Pulitzer Prize for their work the last few days.