How un-American can we get; spraying cemetery swastikas for Memorial Day

I feel sorry for those cemetery work crews in Glen Carbon – an Illinois-based suburb of St. Louis – who had to spend their Saturday sweating it out in the summer-time heat scrubbing swastikas that were spray-painted on head stones at a local cemetery.

Who in 'right' mind wants to bring this back?

For officials with the Sunset Hill Cemetery found headstones vandalized Saturday morning, and they wanted to be sure the mess was cleaned up prior to Monday.

THE LAST THING that anybody wanted was the symbol of Nazi-era Germany defacing the grave markers – particularly those of people who might have served in the military back in the World War II era.

On the day we pay tribute to those soldiers, sailors, air corps and marines who fought in the many wars our nation has taken part in, it is sad that we have some nincompoop out there who thinks it’s funny to deface graves with the symbol of the “enemy” whom we fought against.

Either that, or perhaps we have an idiot who thinks we fought a war against the “wrong” enemy! Believe it or not, there are those with enough screws loose that their vision of what “America” is all about would have had us aligned with the Axis Powers of old.

And the odd thing is, many of them have enough of a militaristic attitude that would have them believe such a viewpoint is what this country ought to be about.

SOMETHING I’D THINK the people who actually fought in that particular war would find particularly repulsive. But then again, the surviving veterans of World War II are such that they’ve reached their 90s in age – if they’re even still alive.

Meaning many of us don’t have a direct memory of what that conflict was about. Which is why we get those endless studies showing young people of today don’t comprehend Hitler or the Holocaust. Maybe they think such stories are more examples of “fake news,” because, after all, nobody could have been that delusional or vicious in their behavior.

So yes, I’m bothered by the stories that came out of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the vandalized cemetery – although it also seems some houses near the cemetery also got tagged with the swastika. Which almost reminds me of that old “All in the Family” episode where someone tagged the front door of Archie Bunker’s bungalow with a swastika – and he tried to cover it up with a U.S. flag, only to be found out because he hung the flag on the door backwards!

Happening in real-life now as it happened on TV then

Some 1,300 military veterans are buried in that particular cemetery, and officials plan a noon-hour ceremony on Monday to pay tribute to those individuals.

SO IT WOULD seem that somebody was hoping to make a visual statement – one about what they think would “Make America Great Again” perhaps? And if you think I’m exaggerating such a viewpoint, consider the anonymous rants to be found on the Internet.

I literally found one person who thinks that such vandalism is to be expected because of the disrespect being shown by, “governments taking down and destroying monuments and history.”

As though not considering someone like Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee to be heroic is the same thing. The actual comparison would be someone lighting crosses ablaze at the remains of old “colored” cemeteries.

On the positive side, police in Edwardsville actually came up with security camera video that captured grainy images of the suspected vandal in the area at the alleged time of the incident.

THERE EVEN HAS been an arrest. Although just what kinds of criminal charges that individual will face remains to be determined. I’m pretty sure, though, that there will be some people willing to make a martyr out of the individual – whose idea of a political “statement” involved running around in the dark with an aerosol spray can of black paint.

Don't see where swastika fits in

Personally, I’d rather remember on this Memorial Day the individuals who fought against such ideals that these nitwits are superficially supporting.

It’s like some people want to keep refighting the old wars – and they’re counting on our apathy as a society to permit them to have a chance at victory.

Without it, our “American” ideals (which are nowhere as narrow as they want to make them out to be) are what will continue to prevail!

  -30-

Does our Legislature need to regulate our behavior at funerals? Maybe!

About the screwiest incident I ever encountered as a reporter-type person involving a funeral was a moment a few years ago at a cemetery in suburban Calumet City where an interment turned into a brawl that some people tried to claim was gang-related.
 

HARRIS: Crafting bill on proper funeral conduct

What really happened was that the deceased person was involved, in life, with multiple women.

FOR HIS FUNERAL, several of them showed up – thinking they would be playing the role of the “grieving widow” (he wasn’t married). When the women discovered each other’s presence, things became heated.

People attending the funeral began taking sides with the individual women, and yes, a few of those individuals had gang ties.

Anyway, a brawl broke out at gravesite, which caused someone to call the police. The sounds of sirens in the distance wound up being sufficient to break this incident up.

When police arrived, there was hardly anybody left. Police wound up arresting nobody because anybody who would have done anything worth a criminal charge was gone. Which is why my editor at the newspaper I wrote for back then ultimately decided to ignore this incident, and this here is the first time I have written anything about it.

IT’S ALMOST FUNNY. That is, if anything about a funeral service can be somber. The deceased who, if he hadn’t already been dead, likely would have faced a serious tongue-lashing (and maybe a few physical blows) from the multiple ladies he was loving during life!

The scary part is that it seems such behavior is becoming more commonplace in certain quarters – to the point where state Sen. Napoleon Harris, D-Harvey, now feels compelled to put together a bill that could create tougher criminal penalties for such behavior.

He is working with funeral home directors to create laws that would have harsh penalties for using a firearm or other weapon while attending a funeral.

In theory, it’s the same as saying crimes near schools are more severe, or that using a weapon in general in a menacing manner that is worthy of a harsher punishment.

MUCH OF THE problem, however, is that these incidents often are occurring in neighborhoods where street gangs have accumulated significant influence – often through intimidation.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported this week that funeral directors in certain South Side neighborhoods often wind up turning over the guest books they put together for mourners over to the police – who use them to try to figure out if gang members are attending the funerals of rival gang members for the explicit purpose of causing a violent ruckus.

For the record, activists at a press conference this week say they know of at least 17 funerals that were disrupted by gang-related violence. In some cases, it’s the people working in the funeral homes who wind up getting caught in the crossfire.

Yes, it’s an ugly situation. Although it’s also one that I’m not sure can be addressed with tougher penalties – largely because I wonder if anyone who thinks he’s carrying out an act of vengeance at a funeral is capable of thinking straight.

THEY MAY THINK they’re above the law. Or maybe they think they’re the ones who will get away with it. Actually, it will be when communities rise up to let gang members know how uninfluential they truly are that anything happens to eliminate occurrences as stupid as these.

I’m also wondering if the “gun nut” crowd will have the nerve to claim that such restrictions impose on their right to bear arms. As though in their minds the solution to this problem is to let everybody else carry a pistol so they can fire back.

All I know is that times have changed from an incident I covered at a cemetery on the Northwest Side back when I worked for the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago. Back then, several men of Serbian ethnic origins conducted an informal “21 gun salute” at the gravesite of a friend – firing off pistols into the air.

I still remember talking to the daughter of one of the men arrested who couldn’t comprehend why there was an issue. Doesn’t everybody do this? Perhaps she was just three decades or so ahead of her time in her way of thinking.

  -30-

Burial for two dozen of the indigent deceased. Too bad we can’t do more

I’m not much of a fan of the “Star Trek” series of programs and films, but there are times that I wonder if the Klingons are on to something we could all learn from.

Klingons, for those who don’t know, are a species of warriors who are prepared to, if not all too eager, to fight to the death, and find great honor in such activity. But as for the corpses themselves, they are merely “empty shells” with the essence of what made that individual unique having been removed.

THE IDEA IS, that while they have their rituals related to death, they don’t put much stock in the idea of the body being all that important – once life as we know it is complete.

I’m not saying that corpses in that television world get disposed of like trash. But there are times I wonder if we put too much attention on the rituals related to our own deaths.

I couldn’t help but think of this when I read the stories being published about how some two dozen bodies of indigent people who died with no one to claim them were finally given a burial on Wednesday.

Those bodies were among the nearly 400 that were backed up at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office, with some allegedly being stacked in the halls because the giant freezers meant to slow decomposition of the flesh while the bodies are in county custody were over-packed.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, the Chicago Archdiocese of the Catholic Church went so far as to offer up to 300 graves at Catholic cemeteries so that the bodies could at least be put into a proper grave.

Like I said, that offer was made months ago. Yet it is only now that only two dozen were actually buried – specifically at Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery on 111^th Street near the Mount Greenwood neighborhood, the first cemetery meant to service the South Side.

Cook County government officials would have liked to have taken up the offer much sooner, and for many more of the bodies that were never claimed – or where the next-of-kin were too poor to afford the cost of a funeral.

But it literally came down to the concerns among Cook County officials that they would be attacked in the future by putting indigent people into graves at a Catholic cemetery.

WHO’S TO SAY some indigent Protestant (or maybe Muslim) wouldn’t have some family come forth at a later date, all upset that they weren’t with their “own kind” in the after-life?

County officials literally had to spend time checking, as best they could, into the religious beliefs of these people – many of whom were so cut off from the mainstream of our society in life that I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to try to verify now if it would be acceptable that they were put into a grave next to Catholic people.

Now I respect the idea that some people have very intense religious beliefs that extend to the specific circumstances under which they want their dead treated. I’m not, in any way, looking to violate the concerns of such individuals.

But those are the people who do come forth and claim their deceased loved ones.

I CAN’T HELP but think that in cases where there is no one, accepting such a plot is only too practical for county government. It also sounds so much more respectful than some of the practices that have occurred at African-American-oriented cemeteries on the South Side – where there are people who literally don’t know if their loved one’s graves truly contain their remains, or those of somebody else!

So I can only think it encouraging that Cardinal Francis George was able to take the time to lead a graveside service for two dozen people whose remains should have been put to rest months ago. It’s only a shame we don’t know, in some cases, whose minds those dead individuals continue to live on in.

Because I honestly believe that the dead live on in the memories of the living – just as there are times when I can hear my own mother admonishing me if I’m about to screw something up (or offering her praise if I get something right).

All the rants about ritual just seem so trivial in that context.

  -30-

Proposed law meant to make people think about something they usually ignore

When my mother died shortly before Thanksgiving last year, my brother and I had no hesitation about deciding to cremate her remains – largely because she was ill during the last decade of her life and had thought about the issue herself.

DART: Keeping "death" alive



I lost track of the number of times she made me promise that we wouldn’t bury her somewhere. While I’m not absolutely sure she was thinking of all the horror stories we have heard in the past year or two, I know the fact that we complied with her request offers me a bit of relief.

FOR IT WAS on Thursday that Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart again made an issue of some of the horror stories about the way in which the dead are disposed.

Most of the tales that occurred in the past involved cemeteries that historically catered to African-American people (originally, those were the only places where black people could be buried. Now, even though we don’t legally segregate, many black people still want to be buried near their ancestors).

But Dart, whose office has continued to investigate the way our dead are buried, used a press conference to tell some serious horror stories. It seems that the indigent are at real risk of getting their remains treated in a crass manner.

Although what happens in the event of a mis-identification, and somebody inadvertently gets labeled as indigent? It would be a heck of a mess to try to rectify that situation.

PRESS REPORTS TOLD stories of bodies stacked up as eight-high in graves, along with a coffin containing the remains of up to 26 infants, unidentified body parts being mixed together.

Then, there’s my “favorite” (heavy sarcasm intended here) of bodies being picked up by officials for an indigent burial in rented U-Haul trucks.

I laugh at the knee-jerk reaction that some people might feel about how “creepy” it is that the truck they rented to move out of an apartment or into a new home may have had some corpses in it. Perhaps some poor people were transported in a truck that later was used to move someone to a wealthy neighborhood.

If you think I’m being grotesque, keep in mind that when authorities stumble across injured people, the rule of thumb is that if there is even the remotest sign of life, they get a trip to the hospital in an ambulance.

IF IT IS clear that the person is dead, then it is the police squadrol (or for those of you who persist in being politically incorrect, the Paddy Wagon) that transports the body to the morgue.

That means a lot of indigent individuals got their next-to-last ride on this planet in a police wagon, which after years of being used to transport criminal elements who might not be so physically clean themselves, isn’t any more disgusting.

In fact, the U-Haul might very well be more respectful than a police wagon that just days earlier might have had to be hosed down because someone vomited in there while in police custody.

For his part, Dart held a press conference to tout a bill that will be introduced in the Illinois General Assembly and considered sometime this spring.

IT IS BEING sponsored by state Rep. William Cunningham, D-Chicago. But it is going to go through its political life this spring being known as the “Dart” bill. The sheriff may even make a few appearances in Springfield this spring on its behalf.

That is an effective way to reinforce the idea that Dart isn’t just a routine copper, but is actually a politico who is trying to address issues of concern to all of us. Just in case we get so offended at the actions, or the very concept, of “Mayor Rahm Emanuel” that we decide to dump him come the 2015 election cycle, the idea of “Mayor Dart” could be viable.

So that’s why we’re getting the bill that will require the medical examiner (along with the coroners in the counties less sophisticated than ours) to take DNA samples from the remains of unidentified people, then affix a metal identification tag to the body.

There also would be limits on burying more than one individual per casket, and how many bodies can be stacked in graves.

FOR THE RECORD, the answer is “yes.” This bill will wind up creating a bill. It will cost people $1 more per copy of death certificate to raise the money meant to cover any extra expenses incurred by these restrictions.

But what something like this truly does is make people think. My guess is that most people probably make that occasional trip to the cemetery to see a loved one, see the rows of graves, and think this little plot of land is where their “mother” (or whoever) will rest for the remainder of the existence of Planet Earth.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most people can’t conceive of the idea of bodies being stacked upon each other in graves – even though it is not a rare practice.

It is creepy, however.

WHICH IS WHY I’m glad my mother’s remains these days sit in a box resting on the dresser of my brother’s bedroom – with a couple of “Beanie Baby” figurines that my mother thought were cute ("Hope" and "Halo II" for the serious collectors) standing watch over her.

When we scatter them in a scenic, pastoral location later this year (possibly around what would have been her next birthday in June), I’ll be spared the fear of someday learning that her remains somehow got misplaced.

  -30-

Who should regulate cemeteries?

It is the knee-jerk reaction for a government official. When there is a problem, hold a hearing.

Allow a group of political people to sit in a row with microphones in front of their faces, so they can hear “testimony” from individuals who have suffered. It creates the image that something is being done.

AT THE VERY least, it makes people feel like someone is listening. But is this really the way that anything gets done?

The latest “controversy” to be dealt with in such a manner involves the situation at Burr Oak Cemetery, a historically African-American cemetery in southwest suburban Alsip, where it is suspected that bodies were being dug up so that the land used by the graves could be resold to newly deceased people.

While there is the chance that some of these people were buried at the cemetery under agreements that allowed their bodies to be moved to a mass grave after a few decades had passed, the fact is that nobody seems to know for sure.

Officials investigating the situation say the records at Burr Oak are so bad they really can’t tell who was buried under what terms. And when officials start finding body parts such as bone fragments out in the open, it would appear that the agreement to move to a mass grave was not being kept according to the letter of the law.

IT WOULD SEEM the situation at Burr Oak is a mess. And it would seem that stories emanating from Burr Oak are causing people at other cemeteries to start looking more closely at conditions.

Just this weekend, police began investigating the situation at Mount Glenwood Memory Gardens cemetery (also in the south suburbs), where a roughly 10-inch-long bone was found lying on the ground near a burial vault.

All of these stories are providing the motivation for Congress to get involved. Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., (whose district includes Burr Oak) headed up a panel on Monday at the Dirksen Federal Building that spent its time trying to look concerned while giving people whose relatives are buried at Burr Oak a chance to tell their tales in public.

Now I’m glad to hear that political people want to be concerned. I’m just not sure what was accomplished with Monday’s hearings, because this strikes me as one of those issues where the federal government is probably the least qualified to do anything to address the problem.

CURRENTLY, THE STATE provides the Illinois comptroller’s office with limited authority to regulate cemeteries. The entity that cuts checks to pay the state’s bills has a few regulators who can impose fines and issue orders if they find cemeteries that are ill kept or otherwise poorly maintained.

When it comes to such instances, we’re usually talking about old graveyards that no longer accept human remains and where the owner either does not properly maintain the grounds, or perhaps so much time has passed that there is legitimate confusion as to who is responsible for keeping the cemetery from turning into a weed field.

The point is that cemetery maintenance is a local issue. It is one that involves people who are actually in the community making sure that the space used for burials does not somehow provide a health threat to the surviving public, and that the deceased’s remains are being accorded the respect they are entitled to.

After all, these were once human beings whose families put them there out of the belief they would have some sort of “eternal rest,” so to speak.

I JUST DON’T see the federal officials answering to people on Capitol Hill as being the best qualified to address the issue.

If anything, this might be an issue where the county governments are the ones best able to provide oversight. After all, they have a sense of being able to look at the “big picture,” while also being close enough to the situation in the communities to sense the local mood.

Yet within Cook County, we have our officials complaining about the cost of the investigations thus far (as of last week, the sheriff’s police said they had already spent $326,000 because of Burr Oak, expected to spend much more, and were already trying to figure out how to get some other government entity to reimburse them for the expense).

That entity is the state, which already has limited oversight authority through the comptroller’s office.

YET WE HAVE a state government complaining about how tight its finances are, and has already managed to show it can’t come up with a balanced budget for the complete fiscal year. Why else will they have to return in January to approve a budget for the rest of Fiscal ’10 – which runs through June 30?

This could very well become one of those areas where the state ought to provide some funding, but will use its financial problems to get out of it – thereby sticking the county with the bill.

In fact, that might be the only logical reason to get the federal government involved in this issue. It is an area where the state and county are likely to battle over who gets stuck with the bill for investigating who did what – and was it criminal in nature, or just venal? But that seems like a poor reason to get the feds involved in a local matter.

In short, this could wind up becoming a classic political situation – everybody wants to appear as though they are concerned about a problem, but they all want someone else to have to deal with it.

-30-

How secure is a cemetery, really?

From a purely legal standpoint, I can appreciate (and share in) the outrage felt by people who have family members whom they laid to rest at Burr Oak Cemetery in southwest suburban Alsip.

Those families paid good money (and let’s be honest, in many cases it may have been money they really didn’t have to spare, but paid out anyway to provide for a dignified burial) for a cemetery plot, with the legal understanding that it was theirs.

THAT PLOT OF land would provide the final resting place, so to speak, for their deceased love one, and now they could quit worrying and get on with their lives.

So imagine how outraged they must be to learn that some workers at the cemetery were emptying out some grave sites so that the land could be resold to other people in need of a “final resting place” for their loved one.

That is just outrageous. It is a scam, and it is one that the courts and prosecutors will address in coming months, now that four people face criminal charges for their actions at the cemetery.

But that is purely a business issue. Somebody sold something to someone that they had already sold to someone else. Technically, it wasn’t theirs to sell.

THAT LEGALISTIC CONCEPT isn’t the reason so many people are finding this story morbidly intriguing.

It has to do with the way in which the bodies that were removed from their graves were then dealt with. Bones and other remains from about 100 different individuals were found piled up above ground in a portion of the cemetery that was fenced off from the public.

I suppose the cemetery officials would claim they were being somewhat dignified by putting the remains in a place where they weren’t exposed to the public. But why they didn’t think to create some sort of mass grave, instead of leaving the body parts out in the open air, is something I don’t understand.

Not that such a mass grave would be acceptable to anyone. After all, people paid money for those gravesites, only to find they were being resold.

NOW I KNOW this next statement is going to tick off some individuals. But I am having a hard time sharing some of the revulsion that people feel about this particular story (which was the dominant one on Chicago-area news reports and broadcasts on Thursday).

I suppose it has to do with the idea that I have always thought it incredibly unrealistic that a gravesite was somehow “safe” for all eternity.

With modern-day embalming techniques and other preservation methods, it is very possible to create human remains that won’t turn to soil once they are buried. Cemeteries literally provide limited spaces in which to bury people.

What does happen when space “runs out?”

TO ME, THE idea that a body was moved isn’t all that offensive, provided that people understand such an act can take place.

After all, take the concept of Lincoln Park. That so-called jewel on the north lakefront of Chicago that is the focal point of one of the city’s most elite neighborhoods was once the city’s cemetery.

But back in the 19th Century, officials saw the potential for development and didn’t let a little thing like human remains and eternal rest stand in their way.

Admittedly, that case differs in that those bodies were removed with permission of the surviving families, and there actually remain a few bodies buried in Lincoln Park in cases where people refused to allow the remains to be removed.

BUT NOW, CHICAGOANS with a sense of the quirky about our home city will cite that fact as an off-the-wall bit of trivia, rather than as some grotesque fact.

As far as the fact that bodies at Burr Oak were found dismembered, that is a different story (although I find it interesting that the criminal charge for such an act is classified as a Class X felony – the only thing worse is the crime of murder itself). We’re talking about cemetery workers who, if found guilty, have the potential to spend a couple of decades in a state prison.

Now I don’t know if I want to go as far as a friend of mine, who once argued that cemeteries were a waste of land and that all bodies ought to be cremated. I appreciate that some people have religious beliefs that demand a burial in order to be accommodated, and I’m not looking to pick a fight with them.

But while I’ll be the first to admit that the situation at Burr Oak is an extreme, is it really all that gruesome to have to accept the thought that perhaps a gravesite is just a temporary resting place, and that expecting that tiny plot of land to be yours for all eternity was probably about as realistic as believing that the WMAQ was ever gonna make you rich.

-30-