Does anyone seriously think people are better off living under Lake Shore Dr.?

I’m not kidding with that question. Because when it comes to the matter of people opposing city officials who want to do repairs to the drive in the Uptown neighborhood because it forced homeless people to relocate, I just don’t get it.

Homeless not just in Uptown, also downtown

The issue came to a head earlier this week when Chicago police had to use force to get people who had developed a “tent city” of sorts near Wilson and Lawrence avenues to leave the area.

CITY OFFICIALS HAD made arrangements for homeless shelters to accommodate those residents, but many of the homeless did not want to go. Which I almost understand – when one has little in life, they tend to cling too tightly to what little they do have.

No matter how cruddy it might be.

But there were activist groups who were fighting the city, trying to get measures approved in court that would interfere with the efforts to do the repair work to the bridges that are some 85 years old and are considered to be structurally deficient, due to age.

To those activists, the right of a person to take shelter under the bridges was more important than the public safety at large.

THERE ALSO ARE some people who think that plans to include bicycle paths are less about making public improvements for the surrounding neighborhood and more about making the area unsuitable for the return of homeless people once the bridge repairs are complete spring of next year.

Now throughout my years as a reporter-type person, I have heard countless arguments about gentrification and community repairs being made that do not take into account the existing residents and are meant more to turn a community into a place suitable for someone of a higher economic bracket.

I actually can sympathize with those arguments on the grounds that you’re trying to chase existing residents from their homes.

But in this case, we’re talking about people without homes. Personally, I find it shameful to think that anyone can find homelessness to be acceptable, and think that those people forced to seek shelter in public places isn’t an embarrassment to our society as a whole.

I’D SAY IT’S wrong that it took a road repair project to get city officials concerned enough to want to find proper shelter for those individuals in our society who, often through no fault of their own, have no other place to stay.

I’d say it’s long overdue that city officials made an effort to find alternate sites for those people who in some cases were pitching tents (and in some cases might not have even had that much shelter) to provide themselves something resembling housing.

And I’d say city officials ought to be concerned about the existence of conditions that cause many of those homeless officials to resist the idea of staying in a homeless shelter.

Seriously, anyone who reads the news reports of recent days about this issue can hear from those homeless who think a tent is a better shelter because of the sanitary conditions or overcrowded conditions of some of the homeless shelters.

IT TRULY IS sad to think our society in Chicago has reached a point where some people think they’re safer and more secure living out in the open of the Uptown neighborhood (which may not be the impoverished turf along the north lakefront that it used to be, but is still far from luxurious) rather than in a place with electricity and running water.

Perhaps those activists who were fighting in court until recently to thwart the road repair projects should have focused their efforts to improve the shelter options for those people whose life circumstances have caused them to resort to such conditions.

And I don’t want to hear from anyone who wants to believe that some people don’t know better and want to live like that. They’re probably the same nitwits who think that some women choose to be in prostitution.

We all have an obligation to try to help those at the bottom rungs of our society, if for the only reason being that our society as a whole is no longer than its lowest members.

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Bye, bye bridge. Are we truly more enlightened about our surroundings?

I have my own personal pet peeve when it comes to news judgment and the types of happenings that are proclaimed to be “news” by various reporting organizations making their money in the “news business.”

I can’t stand anything that is a story only because it was captured on video. Something that wouldn’t have been acknowledged at all if not for the fact that someone felt compelled to play with their video camera at a certain moment in time.

IF THAT MEANS I expect there to be some significance to the happenings that become news, then so be it. My own hang-ups about broadcast operations is that they’re more interested in showing moving pictures than they are presenting any information of significance.

And now that many newspapers are thinking in terms of their websites and wanting to capture video snippets, they are falling for the same level of triviality in terms of what they report.

Hence, I bring up my own personal non-news story for Thursday – the demolition of the Torrence Avenue bridge at Chicago’s farthest south border.

I only know of the bridge because I am by birth a 10^th Warder who was raised in Calumet City. Meaning that particular stretch of Torrence Avenue is one I have driven along so many times in my life I’ve lost count.

IT WAS THE connection between myself and the other parts of the family that remained living in Chicago proper – and not the poofy parts of the city, but in places like Hegewisch and the East Side (I don’t want to hear from some poofy downtown resident claiming Streeterville is the real East Side – it ain’t).

But that bridge over the Grand Calumet River (which is the city limits (to the north is industrial area of Chicago and to the south is Burnham – a community Al Capone and his cronies once used as a way of dodging law enforcement in Chicago) is now no more.

It seems the bridge had become so decrepit that Illinois Department of Transportation officials ordered it blocked off a year ago.

On Thursday, officials finally got around to setting up the explosives that knocked out the support beams that were holding the structure up. Now, the rubble can be cleared away and a new bridge eventually will have to be built at Chicago’s southernmost tip.

SUPPOSEDLY, THAT BRIDGE will be complete by next year. Until then, people will have to continue using the Bishop Ford Freeway (which, in all honesty, I still think of as the Calumet Expressway) as the way to get into and out of the city proper.

I first saw a video snippet posted by 10^th Ward Alderman Susan Sadlowski Garza, who also published notices on her own Facebook account to let local residents know of what was happening – just in case they happened to be driving around the area Thursday morning.

But I also noticed how many television stations, web sites and newspapers felt compelled to make a story out of this – because they now have video of a bridge being blown to bits.

Not particularly good video – all the images are grainy. It’s also not like anybody did anything with their stories to try to report how this change would impact the lives of people who actually live in the area (in all honesty, it has been a few decades since I have lived there).

IT WAS JUST moving pictures of a bridge being taken down, with large puffs of smoke emanating from the structure before it collapsed into a large pile of metallic trash. Somehow, I doubt the opening of a new bridge providing access to Chicago will get anywhere near the attention of this explosion.

Watching it all made me feel like I ought to be giggling that stupid laugh of Beavis (or was it Butt Head). “Heh, heh, heh, heh, blowing stuff up is cool,” is what they’d think, before flipping the TV to some headbanger music video.

Which seems to be the tone of too much news coverage these days.

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