When it comes to politics, more often than not Mayor Richard M. Daley is on the money with his assessments. The mayor criticized those who would have launched a recall a few months ago targeting Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Immediately, talk of the recall stoppe
Cole is the NIU building that houses the lecture hall where a young gunman killed five NIU students and then killed himself. The NIU shootings will always be a matter we must handle gingerly, out of respect to the victims and their families. The governor’s choice to politicize the killings opened up the doors for it to be treated as something other than the tragedy it is.
This time Daley was on the opposite side of the governor. The governor’s rationale is that because of the extremely unpleasant memories that building holds for the NIU community, the best way to eradicate those memories is demolishing the structure. At best, that’s flawed logic. Unfortunately, it also is logic that says the governor is missing the entire point of shielding folk from violence.
If he was concerned about getting the most value for state money, the governor would have left the funding for CeaseFire in place. He gutted the funding for the anti-violence organization citing the leanness of the state’s budget, but he can unearth $40 million for a proposed project that will not saves lives or prevent anyone from being the victim of violence. CeaseFire kept statistics verifying its work, but unfortunately wasn’t diligent about its bookkeeping.
Hence some legislators focused on the ledger rather than the work the CeaseFire team members were doing. Now the organization is just a shadow of what it used to be because most of its workers couldn’t afford to continue without being paid. When Gov. Rod can magically came up with nearly seven times the amount of money it took to sustain CeaseFire, one has to wonder if he was disingenuous with his assessment of why the organization couldn’t be funded any longer.
He could have taken half of the demolition money and helped CeaseFire take its programs statewide, and use the other half to help prevent campus shootings. Chicago and the Black community here, particularly, are on track to lose more youngsters to gun violence than the 34 Chicago Public Schools youth who died last year. There have been 16 CPS young people killed in the first three months of this year – about half of the number who died from gunshot wounds last year.
Is there a plausible reason why the governor couldn’t look under the state’s seat cushions and find some dollars to try to stem the tide of violence, or at least fund the implementation of some strategies to help these shooters understand there are better ways to resolve conflicts? It’s not beyond the realm of belief that the governor simply didn’t know what was and wasn’t in the budget.
Last week we had a real life demonstration that he seems to have difficulty tracking state dollars, just like CeaseFire was accused of doing. An ancillary operation of the Pilgrim Baptist Church on the city’s South Side was promised $1 million by Blagojevich when the church was destroyed by fire two years ago.
The state money wound up going to a school near the church but not to the intended target. The governor scurried to the church with another $1 million on his lips, and, of course, those associated with the church said they never doubted the governor would keep his promise. ‘Duh, I’m not sure what happened to the first $1 million’ paralleled the governor’s response when asked about the missing dollars.
His unawareness begs the question of how many more millions have been flushed away. When Daley pushed the city council and got them to agree to make the curfew sooner, did Blagojevich bring any of the phantom millions to help put more officers on the streets to make the curfew more meaningful? Nope.
But the governor ignores the fact that teens in Chicago are killed when the curfew laws say they’re not supposed to be on the street; and has no problem proposing $40 million for a demolition project.
Money won’t cure all of our problems, but it most certainly will help move us in a direction of having fewer of them. Rather than the governor throwing it to the wind, he should confer more with the ones who saved him – Daley and Black state legislators representing Chicago – on how to address our urban ills. It’s time that Chicagoans demand more from Springfield, particularly from the occupant of the executive mansion.
We have more than two years to live with Blagojevich and we need him to use his state resources for those things which improve our lives and the conditions in which we live.
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