By David Rutter
1. Wieners and wieners, WTF?
Here’s another difference between Chicago and New York: In Chicago we put them on buns, add mustard and then litigate. In New York, they also elect them.
2. Roger Ebert’s tweet, WTF?
If you are famous for an entertainment franchise built on spiraling daredevil indifference to common sense and then die drunk-driving your Porsche at 140 mph, can you still lay claim to posthumous sensitivity?
Guess so.
Revered Chicago movie critic Roger Ebert leaped past the sensitivity turnoff this week. Okay, Roger, you’ve been imperfect.
But Ebert got the royal Twitter Bronx cheer, which these days means obscenity-laced diatribes, for saying, “Friends don’t let jackasses drink and drive.” He resisted an apology but acknowledged his timing was somewhat abrupt.
But this was not a tragedy.
When a child suffers from cancer, that’s a tragedy. Ryan Dunn dared the world of probabilities to kill him if it could. It could.
3. Cost of injustice, again, WTF?
The cost of prosecutorial malfeasance and police perfidy now has a dollar value to Illinois taxpayers.
That $215 million would come in handy for schools, wouldn’t it? And the tab will get much higher. But the bigger cost is that the credibility of justice itself has been lost.
4. Lake County, again, WTF?
Can anyone rationally explain why the U.S. Department of Justice has not landed there with a fully unfurled civil rights investigation?
Makes you wonder if they ever prosecute anyone who turns out to actually be guilty of murder.
5. Toni Preckwinkle, WTF?
The Cook County board president probably is completely accurate in her assertion that the war on drugs is a failure.
World leaders say it, as did Walter Cronkite.
But here’s the catch. If all the cokeheads, meth freaks and OxyContin warriors are released from Cook County jail this week, would Chicago be a better place to live? If we don’t jail drug offenders for drug use and sale, do we have to keep them high so they won’t rob us for a hit on the coke pipe?
Must we christen an official Pot Hilton? Everybody is stoned and room service is mostly Fritos, ding dongs and pizza at 4 a.m.
If the drug culture is flawed only because we apply a harsh and arbitrary judgment of an addiction, maybe the act isn’t the problem; maybe we have a nomenclature glitch.
Maybe we solve the burglary problem by demanding burglars must take more than $500 of your stuff before we call it burglary. Below that figure, it’s just Misdemeanor Borrowing Your Stuff Out of Your Home when you’re not there.
While the War on Drugs is a lost cause, so is the War of Poverty. That’s a greater failure.
In either case, people without jobs and without hope will do drugs because they really work, if only for a few hours. Putting druggies in jail might not be a sustainable policy, but filling the streets with stoned punks isn’t either. Maybe we should think harder about jobs.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on June 24, 2011