Opinion

OUR VIEW

Amidei’s checklist

Forest Park still suffers from its inexplicable decision to stick with the obsolete commissioner form of government. Yes, we know, inside baseball. Who cares if the town has a city manager form of government, a commissioner form, or strong mayor form?

We’ve always cared because the form of government says a lot about what the community’s elected leaders have in the way of vision for the village. The commission form, which to this day gives specific commissioners sway over individual departments, was designed for one-stoplight farm towns of a century ago. This is not how a complex urban-suburban community should govern itself in 2022.

A key indicator of this backward view is that Forest Park operated without any sort of central administrative leadership until 25 years ago when it hired its first village hall administrator. That fellow, Jim Thomas, served for three years and was followed in short order by a string of professionals who never quite fit in with Forest Park’s ego-centric mayors and a form of government that confused the organizational chart.

The midground was reached when then-mayor Anthony Calderone hired his boyhood friend and political ally Tim Gillian as administrator. Gillian had served two terms as a commissioner and knew plenty about Forest Park government. He wasn’t a book-trained manager and never pretended to be.

When Gillian retired midway through the first term of Mayor Rory Hoskins, the search — like most searches for top talent during the pandemic — was sparse. The person finally chosen was Moses Amidei. He’d been the manager for 14 years of an exurban Chicago suburb so small we had to go to Google to find it. Wadsworth, the Village of Country Living, has a population of 3,517 souls.

We were not optimistic when Amidei arrived a year ago. And time will tell. But there are indications that he is steadily moving Forest Park’s government through a series of planned steps that professionalizes and prioritizes important issues in town.

This week we see a plan put forward to make Forest Park compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act as it relates to all public ways. Yes, Forest Park has been installing curb cuts as streets are redone but the new plan applies a system and a tracking mechanism to the work.

Also laudable was the tree inventory issued last week which detailed the condition of Forest Park’s urban forest. Done in conjunction with, and partially paid for by, the Morton Arboretum, the inventory reported the condition of the trees on public ways is good while specifically dictating that a handful of trees must come down and 175 more that are in worsening shape. The inventory also reported Forest Park is overstocked with maples and needs to further diversify its plantings if it is to avoid some potential future scourge such as the ones that took out so many elm and ash trees in America.

These are the sort of projects a well-run community executes as a matter of planning and purpose.

We’re impressed to see Forest Park on this path.

OPINION

Is he evil or just crazy?

Last Saturday, Pastor Walter Mitty couldn’t believe what he was hearing. As the men were filing into the Main Café for their weekly fellowship breakfast, Alice pulled him aside and whispered, “I hate to admit it, Reverend, but what you’ve been saying about Trump is true. The guy is nuts.”

It seemed Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney weren’t the only conservatives in the land who thought that Trump’s train had just hit a dump truck at an unrestricted railroad crossing.

On the way home, he remembered hearing the conservative columnist Michael Gerson saying on a news program that he thought 45 was evil.

And then his mind flashed back to one of the January 6 Commission hearings when William Barr stated in a video that the president who had appointed him was “not in touch with reality.” To Mitty, that was a polite way of saying that the former president was, in fact, nuts.

“Evil,” thought Mitty, “is part of my vocabulary. It’s a religious term with which secular folks often feel uncomfortable. They’d rather deal with empirically verifiable concepts like mental illness, included in something like the Physicians Desk Manual.”

But still, Pastor Walt liked to feel that his faith was at least partly defensible to thinking people.

He would hold debates in his mind with his humanist friends about subjects like sin, evil, prayer and the existence of a divine being … and, of course, in his fantasies he always won.

But this was real life, and the existence of democracy might be at stake, so as he usually did when he was wrestling with a complicated issue, he called his friend Michael Rosenthal.

“You’ve been watching the Jan. 6 Commission hearings, right, Michael? Do you think Donald Trump is an evil person or just unhinged?”

Mitty’s neighbor started laughing and said, “Where did that come from, Walt?”

“Seriously, Michael, I’ve been trying to figure out the difference. It just seems that the behavior of Trump, Giuliani and the supporters of the Big Lie can’t be explained just by bad potty training.”

“So psychology can’t provide plausible explanations for everything?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I can tell you what Rabbi Levine says about that. He says that in every person there is a struggle between Yetzer ha-tov and Yetzer ha-ra, the good and evil urges that compete with each other inside each of us.”

“And that’s different from mental illness, right?” After a moment, Michael said, “That makes me think of an image in some Native American religions of a bad wolf and a good wolf existing in each of us. “Right,” Mitty responded, “and it depends on which one you feed.” They got onto other subjects like Michael’s sciatica and his neighbor’s allergies. After hanging up, Pastor Walt called

TOM up Bernie Rolvaag at the History/HerHOLMES story bookstore. “Bernie, this is Walt. Do you have a copy of Obama’s Hiroshima speech anywhere in your books?” Bernie came back with the text of the speech in five minutes. “Got it Walt, but I’d like to know what you’re looking for.” So the pastor explained he was wrestling with the concept of evil and seemed to recall that President Obama had mentioned something about it in that speech. “Got it, Walt,” Bernie replied. “It’s a short speech. Give me a minute. I think I know what you want.” When Bernie returned, he said, “I think this is the core of what you’re looking for. Obama talked about humanity’s ‘core contradiction, how the very spark that marks us as a species, our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our toolmaking, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will — those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.’” Bernie added one more quote: “The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.” Mitty thanked Bernie and started thinking about how so many people took the concept of evil seriously. They used different metaphors — bad urges, bad wolves, humankind’s core contradiction — but they all pointed to an aspect of human nature, which, although impossible to verify empirically, was still plausible for many. That’s when the pastor of Poplar Park Community

Church had to chuckle. We religious folk have been comfortable with the concept of evil for thousands of years, he thought, and we might apply the idea to the Nazis in

Germany and the Hutus in Rwanda, but we also feel compelled to scrutinize our own souls. It’s not just an inner contradiction, he concluded. There is also a battle going on between powers greater than we mortals can deal with on our own, and that’s one of the contributions religious folk have to make to the debate over what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 .

How to save our democracy

The best way to protect democracy is to participate in it. The simplest way to participate is to vote. Although access to voting has increased, overall turnout for the 2022 primaries was lower than two years ago. Voter turnout for Cook County hovered around 20%. Turnout wasn’t low due to the weather. Election Day offered pleasant temperatures and plenty of sunshine. So why did 80% stay home?

Some believe their vote doesn’t count and feel powerless. Instead of experiencing how empowering it is to vote, they are suppressing their own. For the first time in my life, I requested a Republican ballot because I wanted to support a candidate from Forest Park. It was easy to fill out the ballot. Cook County is such a Democratic stronghold, many of the races lacked a Republican candidate.

This didn’t feel like democracy. A major political party unable to even field candidates. It’s a widespread problem, though. A friend of mine lives in a heavily Republican county. The local Democrats only fielded one candidate for office. They persuaded someone to run for coroner. As for myself, I like every aspect of voting, including the “I Voted” sticker you receive afterwards. Voting is like the “comfort food” of democracy. It’s an easy, painless way to support candidates and causes. It’s especially gratifying, when you consider the sacrifices many have made to even cast a ballot. Efforts to suppress voting are still underway, so the struggle to cast a ballot continues in many areas, but we can’t claim this to be a problem in Cook County. Apart from voting, there are many ways to participate in democracy. We can write to our congressional representative. We can also man a phone bank for a candidate. We can protest in the streets, like we have done to support organizations like Forest Park against Racism.

We can register people to vote. My late friend Mark Rogovin joined me to register voters in Indiana. We spent about eight hours registering around 20 voters, but it felt gratifying to do even that much. We also conducted our own protest against the Iraq War by displaying signs on highway overpasses. We either received a honk, or a finger, depending on the driver’s political views.

We could join a political party. I seem to have been predestined from birth to vote

Democratic. As a kid, I remember the Democratic precinct captain visiting our home to remind us to vote for their candidates. My grandmother served as a Democratic precinct captain in the hostile environs of River Forest. We can volunteer to help a campaign. One of the happiest days of my life was spent canvassing voters in River Forest for a candidate from Forest Park. When we JOHN knocked on their doors, residents were so friendly and receptive. Unfortunately, our RICE candidate lost a close race. only around 20% on an 80-de Turnout was gree Election Day. Finally, we can run for office ourselves. We all witnessed the political miracle 209 Together pulled off to be elected to the District 209 school board. Tragically, the progress and policy making they initiated is being undone by the current board. Our local politics can be such a quagmire that it prompts some voters to ask, “Why bother?” However, we have had so many earthshaking changes on the national level, voting seems more important than ever. Policies that are favored by most Americans are under attack. There are assaults on everything from reproductive rights to protecting the environment. Wearing an “I Voted” sticker will not just make us feel good as a citizen. It’s essential to protecting democracy.

A L OOK BA CK IN TIME Where’s the beef?

In 1984 Wendy’s aired a commercial where three elderly women were remarking on how big the bun of an enormous hamburger was in front of them. When the top bun is lifted and a tiny patty of beef is revealed, octogenarian actress Clara Peller calls out, “Where’s the beef ?” Her famous voice and catchphrase became an instant cult phenomenon across the United States. Clara Peller, who was a manicurist in Chicago, was hired on a temporary basis for a commercial set. The agency that produced the commercial recognized the value of her unique voice and no-nonsense personality, so they signed her up as an actress. She would be the star of commercials for Wendy’s and other products through her early 80s. When she died in 1987, this extraordinary woman was laid to rest in Forest Park’s Jewish Waldheim Cemetery .

Jill Wagner

Clara Peller

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