Here’s a thoughtful post from Gapers Block political writer Ramsin Canon: “Modeling an Open Chicago: Taking The City Back“. Key passage:
Forget “the Washington coalition” as an electoral strategy. It was a moment in time. If Chicagoans truly want to take our city back, we need to forget electoral strategy altogether. An Open Chicago doesn’t mean “It’s Our Turn.” It means making sure we never need another Washington moment again.
He pokes at what might help get us there. Groups of solid citizens that have formed to solve specific problems or jab at large indecencies:
It may well be that the tools are already there. Institutions like local school councils (LSCs) and park Local Advisory Councils (LACs), and the potential for TIF advisory boards could form the cornerstone of placing development and economic policy creation to the neighborhood level. There’s no easy answer, obviously, nor does the answer necessarily live somewhere waiting to be found.
He doesn’t have the answers. And this is just the first in a series of posts toward figuring it out.
But personalities are making announcements and shaking hands and hiring strategists and going on (g)listening tours. And making phone calls and cutting deals to freeze out whole sections of the city like they’re meat.
It feels like those crisp cold days of December 2008 the Feds seized Blagojevic out of Ravenswood, when we sat back in glee and wonder what the political class would do next. Will the Senate impeach him? Will Jesse White sign the document?
And all the while, all we had to do was surround his house with a couple hundred people to stop him from going to work. A few hours of chanting, a couple tough moments of arm-locking when he tried to leave. Stand up for ourselves. Have enough innate dignity to deny him a ride to work.
But we didn’t. I didn’t. And I’ve been mildy ashamed of that since then. As he clowned around the national media and made us the fool.
And later, a good man, my friend and former client David Hoffman, couldn’t gain enough traction among the outraged to keep ethics-challenged Alexi Giannoulias from winning the Democratic nomination for US Senate. We just couldn’t catch him.
And now strongman Rahm comes out to listen. Gratefully, people came out to give him shit:
Johnson introduced Emanuel to Bill Bradshaw, 48, and pulled the collar of Bradshaw’s shirt back to reveal a bullet wound in Bradshaw’s right shoulder.
“This is what’s happening when you don’t send any of those federal funds to this neighborhood,” Johnson told Emanuel. “Welcome to Chicago!”
The men with the banner shouted through much of Emanuel’s conversation and followed him outside but Emanuel still managed a few productive conversations with diners, including 21st Ward aldermanic candidate Sylvia Jones.
This is where I want to live. With the messy and the unorganized. Uncomfortable and freelance, with people I don’t know yet, figuring out where we’re going, and how.
But it feels like we’re pressed for time, because the organized and the monied are moving in their methodical, rote ways. I may join one of them someday, if I hear what I want to hear or I get pinned in by election calendars; seduced by the doable. I want to be a better person than that, a better Chicagoan, but I might not be.
But right now I’m with Ramsin. Fuck electoral strategy. Let’s roll.
