Roger Wright – Chicago

You’re the victim. 90 seconds before the attack.

A sparkling summer twilight on the shores of Lake Michigan. The city rhythm of serenity. As if you’re in a metropolitan front yard where everyone is welcome.

You’ve just locked your bike. Texted something trivial to a friend. Later you won’t even remember what it was. All you’ll remember is that there was no reply.

The thought drifts through your mind, there was no reply. . . . and a baseball is whipped at your face, from three feet away. A crackle splintered pain goes off in your head. Searing hot pain is your whole world now. You are slammed to the bloody scratched sidewalk. There is a sickly sweet smell of liquid iron as you take the kicks and the stomps and you float till it isn’t really you anymore and there is no real way to fight back, no idea how many people are engulfing you in this gauzy dream of scratched cement pain and your last thought is when you reached out to your friend, there was no reply.

A trembling question hovering faint in the raging waters of the pain, “Why was there no reply?”

You live through it. Scars, private wounds you don’t share with anyone. The irony that this happened yards from a hospital. The refrain floats in and out of a medicated garden that smells like alcohol that could disinfect the very world, “Why was there no reply?” You keep asking that same question till you’re not even sure what it means. Or why you’re asking it now?

While 4 blocks west, along Michigan Avenue, the premier shopping district of the big city, another assault is being planned. A gang of 15 is coordinating, via twitter, with military like precision, how they will swarm the racks of a high-end fashion retailer. Shadowing, distracting, shimmering through the confusion to walk out with thousands of dollars of goods.

And this is all while Ruth, a career retailer, a woman very good at what she does, checks her email behind the counter. Sales had been down. Lay-offs were in the wind. Probably not Ruth. Course quality customer service and loyalty didn’t matter anymore. Neither did revenue when you got right down to it. People hang on to jobs the same way they get jobs, through the people they know. What matters is who you know. So Ruth was emailing an old friend. Making sure to stay in touch. The first two emails had gone unanswered. She was watching the floor. The good retailers, the real pros, do that without thinking. It’s like breathing. When you love what you do the way some retailers love their work, then the store is almost an extension of your body. You’d never actually say that. And you’d make fun of anyone who did. But there is an unseen connection between people and their stores. It’s what drives them to come in early, to stay late, to clean, and to face the shelves, to protect.

Ruth was always protecting to some degree or another.

But her guard was just a little bit down that exact split second when she had the thought, “Why was there no reply?”

And that was the second the mob poured in and began the attack on her store.

When it was over, when the cops had left, when the adjusters, the corporate people had left to go do whatever corporate people do, Ruth checked one more time, and as she flicked the alarm and set the lights for the night she thought again, why was there no reply?

And as she walked out her door, cops were all over the neighborhood, looking for the next flash mob. The little brother of Smashing Pumpkins founder Billy Corgan would tomorrow be attacked by a small mob on his 4:30 train ride to work. Dispatches from the class war were being written. Commentators commentating. Easy answers abounded. All sprinkled with blame and 24 hour news cycle wisdom. Tensions of a society where the differences between the vulnerable and the wealthy keep stretching like a giant invisible life force had put one hand on either side of the Grand Canyon and began to pull.

Night came. The light beam grid of communication amped up and if you listened real hard you could hear it. In the uncountable conversations, virtual and real, it kept happening with greater frequency. Someone would not reply. It didn’t cause the flash mobs. No one thing ever caused anything. But it kept happening. This new rule that it was OK to not reply. And the rhythm of the world’s conversation sputtered. There was just too much to do. We were just too busy. The stranger simply didn’t matter anymore.

That was it. The stranger simply didn’t matter anymore. So there was no reply. And that bled into those who we do see as mattering. And with that thought came a distant glowing light and these words:

“One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became the greatest of all.”

Expecting the impossible. Like a new kind of rhythm to the way we communicate. Make it look like a jazz band. Set the tune in 9/8 time. Flying on some sort of magic carpet above the highways along which we speak with each other. Like some Blue Rondo dream.

Expecting the impossible. A rhythm of reply.

What if the impossible started singing? In a new, yet ancient, rhythm?

And then even to a stranger. We replied.

We expected the impossible reply.

What then?

I was never alone.

In the fraction of a second just after my steel-toed boot came down through the Afghan dust and scraped the buried oily spring of the landmine, I turned first to see my unit. Their eyes in shock like a piano chord hanging in the air after the song has ended. To a man. To a woman. They rushed towards me. The cries of “No!!! . . . . blending into a silence that had colors brighter and bluer than the Afghan sky.

In that fraction of a second I could see across time. I could see she’d have a good life. Keeping me always at twenty-one. Holding that drop of sorrow inside her like a tiny drop of golden honey. That honey colored sorrow would prompt so many to say, as she marched across the decades of a long, long, life—they would say of her, “She really understands.’ And because she really understands, I was never alone.

In that fraction of a second I saw a stranger getting ready for a journey that would sweep him across the entire endless morning of the American horizon.

The stranger could be any age. Might be a woman or a man. I couldn’t tell. I only knew that the stranger had it in them to move. To keep moving. He was allowed to do that. I heard him sing.

“I bid farewell to the state of Old New York.

My home away from home.

In the State of New York I came of age.

When first I started roaming.”

And in the harmony of the song I knew that he could keep moving, he not only had a home, he had a home away from home. He not only had a family, he had a family he could choose. He could travel. Set out on the open road. Maybe not move a foot. But he’d still be moving. He could do that.

He could do that. And as I lay dying in the Afghan dust I could see it. I could hear the song of where he started.

‘And the trees grow high in New York State

And they shine like gold in the Autumn

Never had the blues from whence I came

But in New York State, I caught ‘em.”

I was never alone. I was on the journey too.

As if I had helped make it possible.

As if the stranger could do this because of me.

Across a new American land we travelled. The stranger and I.

No longer bound by the fight I’d left behind,

Now the point was on what we had been trying to defend. And that thought was new. It wasn’t a cliché. And empty phrase. A politician’s speech. It was like the song of the journey.

And it’s on to South Bend Indiana

Flat out on the western plain

Rise up over the Rockies

And down on into California

Out to where but the rocks remain

Off goes the stranger.

In that last split second as I lay dying, I could hear in the ocean waves off Mendocino, where the stranger and I had arrived together.

The stranger on a Greyhound. Me in the winds. I could hear a new America. One where we turn from the new and better ways of fighting, new and scarier “Others” to fight. And cast our golden promises on what it is we’re defending. Not a concept. Something real. The journey we’re protecting. Making it flourish. Making it sing. In infinite, individual ways.

That journey with the stranger. Our common journey from the moment of death. To each our own Mendocino.

Like a prayer we sing,

Let the sun set on the ocean

I will watch it from the shore

Let the sun rise over the redwoods

I’ll rise with it till I rise no more

Talk to me of Mendocino

Closing my eyes I hear the sea

Must I wait

Must I follow

Won’t you say ‘Come with me?’

I was never alone.

http://youtu.be/2fcBEGjK3cM

The story of how Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and GE Capital CEO Jeff Immelt recently created 1,000 new jobs in Chicago has already been reported. What’s new here is a story of the 1,001st new job.

———————————————-

The shadows from the elevated train tracks criss crossing the booth in the back of the darkened bar made me almost spill the drinks on both the Mayor and the CEO. Club sodas. For both of them.

Their people were scattered in the dim light front amongst the regulars. You couldn’t have picked them out. And the name of the bar doesn’t matter. It’s the kind of place where people mind their own business. I’d been working there for 6 or 8 months. Long enough to serve back booth customers. To usher them in with just a look and a nod. To know when to talk and when to keep quiet. To make sure the back booth customers knew they had a home here.

So I was there to watch the deal go down. 1,000 new jobs for Chicago. I saw the Mayor, Rahm Emanuel, ‘do the ask.’ I saw the CEO of GE, Jeff Immelt, nod his head and say yes.

They were putting the final touches on what they had already talked over and emailed over the past 3 months. The Mayor’s quote to the newspapers later would be, “I think that Jeff will now change his email and his phone number because I have both.”

The new jobs are skilled technical, commercial and regulatory positions to support GE Capital. There is no government subsidy to prompt the move. GE Capital sees the move as good business.

With the deal done, the electricity in the back booth dialed down. Everybody relaxed a bit. The Mayor and the CEO started talking about how they wanted to get the thing moving quick. They needed another round. So I brought it without being asked and as I put the two drinks on the table said, “So what if I told you that I can get your people up and running, in an on-boarding program, that would cut 20% off your hiring and training costs?”

“Jesus Rahm. Everybody in this town got a deal going down?” said the CEO.

But the Mayor held up the palm of his hand and said, “Wait.” Turned to the CEO and said, “No, but a lot of people are doing whatever they can to get by.” Then he turned to me and said, “Talk.”

“I’ve been building on-boarding programs for years. Lot longer than I’ve been hustling drinks.” I shrugged. Looked at the Mayor straight in the eye and said, “My programs work.”

The CEO said, “If you’d like to send a resume, I’ll get it to our HR person and. . .”

“I appreciate that sir. And no disrespect to your HR people. But the likelihood of them moving the process along any faster or even seeing what they want in my piece of paper is slim to none.”

I saw the Mayor stifle a quiet smile. And nod almost imperceptibly towards me. He then asked very softly, “How do I know your programs work?”

“Because I measure them. And the measures correlate to the metrics of the business. Turnover costs go down. Revenue rises. Productivity rises. I can even tell you about a measure that will correlate to stock price.”

“So where did you get your MBA?” asked the CEO.

“Don’t have one,” I said.

“Well,” asked the Mayor, can people from the businesses you’ve helped, tell us you’ve helped?”

“Going back 25 years, people can tell you that.”

“And when can you have a 30, 60 and 90 day plan on what will change and how it will be measured on Mr. Immelt’s desk?” asked the Mayor.

“Two weeks?”

“Why not tomorrow?” shot back the Mayor.

“Because no one makes a plan alone. I’d have to check in with the right folks at GE.”

That’s when the CEO smiled.

“OK, then,” said the CEO. Looks like we can announce 1,001 new jobs in Chicago.”

And as the Mayor jumped up, glanced at his watch, and grabbed me by the right shoulder all in one fluid motion, he said to the CEO, “You don’t mind if I have a copy of the plan this gentlemen is making for you, do you Jeff?”

“I don’t mind at all Mr. Mayor. I don’t mind at all.”

Mayor Daley. At the end of 22 years on the job.

It’s a story is about a person who was a perfect fit for the job. Not a perfect mayor. Not a perfect man. Not in this rusted steel bridge rising city.

Perfect fit means you were born to do the job.

Cheer him. Damn him. Decide you don’t care. The adoration or the damning isn’t even the point. It’s the fit between the between the person and the job that always took center stage.

That and his love for the place. Really loving where you live.

Look beyond Chicago. Stay with the idea of the perfect fit. What if “perfect fit’ became the lens through which we viewed any leader?

A touchstone for what really meant to be Mayor?

What if “perfect fit” was the real legacy of Richard M Daley?

This rough hewn fire plug of energy, who has lectured at Harvard and in Beijing, stood as the Dean of America’s Mayors.

What did I learn from watching him?

That “Fit” is what connects the soul to the work.

Start with Mayor Daley’s voice. High pitched. Staccato bursts of red faced, steaming raw energy. Loud.

You got to be loud here. In the teak paneled boardrooms where the big decisions are made, you can speak softly. But not when you are speaking to the city. Not on nightly jousts with the press, knowing full well that for a drama to come alive there must be conflict.

Not when the tired, beaten down Chicagoan is just getting home from work or trying to find work, and Mayor Daley is on TV being outraged. His rant with a signature phrase of “It’s like anything else.”

Like some wound up Uncle yelling in the kitchen. Your Dad might be watching the White Sox game in the living room, but Uncle Rich was yelling in the kitchen. And somehow Uncle Rich’s yelling made the day bearable.

Course it’s not just about talking. There was that time he decided to rip up an airport. In the dead of night. Bulldozers rumbling in military formation towards what once was called Meigs Field. Slashing the concrete runways where rich guys once landed their planes. And now that airport is a park. A beautiful lakeside park.

Because the Mayor wanted it that way.

There is horror at that kind of power. But there is also a park.

And in the quiet, just before going up to bed moments of a man and a woman standing at the front window of their red brick bungalow on the Northwest Side of the city, the woman says, “How about that Mayor Daley?” And the man softly chuckles and says, “You know, we haven’t been downtown lately. Maybe we should go Saturday?”

In those quiet moments was the work of a man who was a perfect fit for his job.

That same man and woman from the bungalow hop on an elevated train that Saturday.

And as they wind their way towards the city, gliding over the rooftops of the homes where people just do the best they can to live their lives, they are surrounded by the trees! Everywhere you look there are trees. Even on the roof of City Hall, a giant garden. And as the boulevards come into sight they see flowers. Running down the middle of the boulevards there are flowers. They get off their Brown Line train, walk downstairs to the street and then east to Millennium Park, and this island of collective, peace just rises up and grabs any weary heart who wanders in and its as if the park had a voice that says, “Here. Right here. There is beauty. And you can have some too.”

Once Millennium Park was a rail road yard. Now it’s an Urban Park to rival any in the world.

Once Chicago was a study in grey toned, smoky belching steam tunnel, cut you now and cut you bad. Now there are flowers and trees. Not enough. Or in all the needed places. But there are flowers where their once were none.

All that on Mayor Daley’s watch.

Of course the death spiral income disparity rampant across the country isn’t any different here than anywhere else.

And with struggle comes sorrow. There are still the ancient, unchangeable winds of deeply rooted sorrow.

But he communicates sorrow in the midst of the everyday business of doing his job.

Here’s what it looks like.

He walks through crowds every day of his working life. He roams the city in his car looking for pot holes, abandoned buildings, tell tale signs of drug dealing and violence, he writes down the problems and the addresses, barks out orders on the phone to get stuff fixed.

And when he encounters the deeper sorrows that come in the midst of 8 million people together, his wild Irish heart will remember out loud his two year old son Kevin, passed away so very many years ago. The man has known sorrow. So we share that with him.

In Mike Royko’s classic book on Mayor Daley’s father, “Boss” one finds a master writer of writers doing the work of peeling back easy labels of “corruption.” Not to romanticize, slam or cast any judgment—good or bad. But to tell the full story.

And telling the full story will be harder for whoever writes “Son of Boss.” Because the sweet temptation of the instantaneous judgment and label is now such succulent fruit.

Was there looking the other way? Taking care of friends?

Is there a club? And can that couple walking through Millennium Park be members?

With all those questions, there is also a whole way of life. A spaghetti bowl of highways carrying politics, business, money, power, heritage and a troubling strain of the powerful preying on the weak now moving on to the next generation. There is more to it that just this man out front. The one everybody looks at. The man in charge.

There is a way of life.

And finally there is Maggie.

There is grace personified in his wife Maggie. Already quadrupling the life expectancy of one with her kind of cancer. Grounding The Mayor like no king or prince ever could. Maggie in a billion tiny moments over the years sharing that grace with her neighbors here, on her block and around the world. Moments like:

I’m in the second floor lobby of The Goodman Theater. Deserted except for the bartenders. And the elegant blonde woman standing alone at the elevator. The second act has started. I go to wait for the elevator with her. She smiles. I’m amazed that there is no security around the First Lady of Chicago Maggie Daley. I almost feel as if I should volunteer to walk her back to her seat. But in her smiling eyes an iron fisted strength making clear that this is a woman who can take care of herself. I say, “Great show!”

She says, “Yes. The acting is exceptional.”

“My father in law is playing the lead,” I say, trying to contain my boasting.

Her smile shows me she sees my boast. And understands my pride.

“Oh my,” she says. “He is superb. When he’s on stage, no one looks anywhere else.”

“He’s always that good!” I say,

She laughs. Nods. Walks off to her seat and me to mine.

So as Mayor Daley closes this chapter of his story, I remember the time Maggie Daley said about my father in law “When he’s on stage, no one looks anywhere else.”

And I think, pretty good description of Mayor Daley too.

In this building. On 95th Street in Chicago. Here is where President Obama first learned how to answer the question, “In authorizing the death of Osama bin Laden, did I morally do the right thing?”

In this building. Yesterday. As the late afternoon sunlight streamed through the two stained glass windows bathing the sanctuary of Trinity United Church of Christ in orange tinged colors of swirling joy, the ocean sized choir swayed up front, and visitors from the other side of town were cordially welcomed; this church’s most famous former member, President Barack Obama was getting ready to tell the world that the mission to kill or capture Osama bin Laden was now complete.

Leaked first, as reported in the New York Times, by a former aide to Ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and then exploding across the internet and into the grinning, mustache spectacle of Geraldo Rivera, on Fox, giggling with glee; the President, as we all know, made the announcement that the hunt for bin Laden was over.

But it was in the twenty years of attendance at Trinity, a place the President hasn’t been in awhile, that he first came to know the “Just War Debate.”

As the President’s team notified all the proper people, as the crucially important message was crafted, the President’s early schooling in a debate by two theologians, who happened to be brothers, back in 1932, spoke to a question much deeper than the glee in Geraldo’s grin. That question being, with the power of death I hold in my pen, am I doing the right thing here?

The surface answer to that question is of course a no-brainer. We were attacked. We must fight back. We must serve justice. End of story.

And of course there is always the obvious danger in over thinking anything. But what if what I’m doing is morally wrong? Should violence prompt violence? Will this help remove us from the endless cycle spinning since the beginning of time?

In answering those kinds of questions, the President turned to the “Just War” debate played out by the brothers H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr in the pages of Christian Century Magazine. In 1932. An historical moment in the history of Trinity’s denomination, The United Church of Christ.

The idea of “Just War”—when is it right to fight? —had been a staple of theological discussion since ancient times. There are 6 basic tenants of a “Just War.” Millions of books, but 6 key ideas. A “Just War” must be:

1. A last resort. Nothing else has worked.

2. Waged by a legitimate authority. Individuals don’t count.

3. Fought to address a previous wrong. (That was an easy one)

4. Fought with a reasonable chance of success. Hopeless causes don’t cut it.

5. Have peace as an ultimate goal.

6. Be proportional to the injury suffered

H. Richard was the more philosophical of the debating brothers. He, in essence, argued against the “Just War,” as a legitimate expression of Christian morality. An oversimplification of a complex moral position, but that’s the gist of it.

Reinhold saw it differently. “It is the business of true religion,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “to destroy man’s moral conceit.” Which perhaps can be paraphrased as:

Sometimes you can’t be ‘holier than thou.’ Sometimes you just gotta get the bad guys.

President Obama saw it like Brother Reinhold. Sometimes, war is the right answer.

So, late yesterday afternoon, on 95th Street, just outside Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, parking was, as always, tough. People streamed into the church, the radio and web streaming broadcasts revved up, and the impeccable precision of a well run organization went to work singing the songs of holy praise. The work of this church went on.

While 1,000 miles east in Washington D.C., the son of this church, Barack Obama, got ready to give whatever comfort he could to grieving families, to praise the heroes of the American military, to send the message to the world that this step in this war was over and to minimize the danger inherent in letting bin Laden go down in history as a holy martyr. To do it in a way that wasn’t boastful. Sending the message that wars and celebrations are strange bedfellows.

The President delivered the message with confidence, clarity and a call for unity.

The confidence and clarity of a leader schooled in the brothers Niebuhr.

A leader who did the heavy lifting thinking he first began in that building on 95th Street in Chicago. The president is no longer a member of the church. Officially. But it was here that he grew up.

And made a decision of world shaking gravity, accepting responsibility and personal self doubt, and coming to rest knowing . . . . .

That he’d done the right thing.