On Valentines Day, Chicago musician Chris Saathoff was the victim of a hit-and-run after leaving The Empty Bottle, a club on Chicago’s Northwest side. About 26 hours after Chris, and about a half mile to the north, a man in his 50s was killed. Across town, a woman, age 44, was killed by a vehicle in the parking lot. One local listserv dubbed the sequence of pedestrian killings St. Valentine’s Massacre 2004.” The deaths have helped to rally local pedestrian advocates who are planning a protest/memorial styled after the widely popular bicycle ride, Critical Mass, and similar pedestrian protests in California. I plan to attend the memorial because I believe pedestrian rights are the bedrock to mobility and absolutely essential to a healthy community. Some laugh at the idea of pedestrian rights. How could something so mundane need to be defended? But it is its banality that is its strength. If any group needs to be radicalized, it is pedestrians.  

625 Illinois Compiled Statues 5/11-1002. Pedestrians’ right-of-way at crosswalks. (a) … the driver of a vehicle shall yield the right-of-way, slowing down or stopping if need be to so yield, to a pedestrian crossing the roadway within a crosswalk…

Here’s a description of the pedestrian protest in California from the Menlo Park Almanac, Feb. 11, 2004:

Tempers flared Friday on Santa Cruz Avenue near the Menlo Commons retirement community as angry drivers clashed with a group of protesting pedestrians exercising their right to cross the street — and re-cross it at what they said was a decent interval.

From about 11 a.m. Friday, February 6, until sometime after 1 p.m., about 30 friends and relatives met to commemorate the one-month anniversary of the death of Atefeh “Amy” Bijan, a 75-year-old Menlo Commons resident who, on January 9, was struck by a car and killed in the crosswalk midway between the intersections of Alameda de las Pulgas and Sand Hill Road.

Benjamin Helphand

Sj at the blog, polis-Chicago, reflected yesterday about Howard Dean’s legacy. He concluded that the Vermont governor’s lasting impact on the Democratic Party will not be his use of the Internet, but rather the way his campaign showed disenfranchised Democrats, earthfirsters, and finicky academics that it is okay to step into the political ring. It has been said that the unintended results of history are often greater than the expected outcomes. I think Dean’s candidacy will prove to be a case in point.          

Most of the commentaries about Howard Dean’s lasting role in the future of Democratic politics has centered on his web-fundraising, but I think that his campaign did something much larger to the architecture of the party. Certainly it has been noted that the Dean campaign excited previously non-political groups (i.e., young people), but I don’t think enough has been made of the potential long-term benefits his efforts have germinated. His campaign has redefined the political for a large section of voters who were either apathetic or unattractive to the process, and this may have huge implications for future election cycles.

Yes, he was there at the right time: Bush’s domestic and foreign policies easily enraged even the mildest of liberals, and Dean was there to voice their anger by standing up to Bush when no other candidates would. But beyond just being a conduit for the left, Dean also taught far left liberals what it meant to be political. Yes, he would continue to lash out at Bush and the me-too Democrats, but he would also lay out a rather centrist fiscal and social agenda to make his campaign more than just a platform for minority views. And the amazing thing is that the far left ate this up: from the earthfirsters to the academics, his supporters learned to compromise their own agendas enough to get into the political ring and take a stand.

Being in academics, I know what an accomplishment this is. I’ve been frustrated for a long time with so many of my colleagues, who, despite their intelligence in the world of academia, refused to sully themselves in the world of politics. One of the brightest students in my department summarized his participation in the 2000 elections as voting for Nader “just to record his protest vote” (and not because he had any affinity with Nader’s message). What a waste of a mind, and that’s just one. Imagine if he took his smarts and applied them to the realm of politics, even just a little. And then multiply that by thousands of other bright people who don’t want to dirty their intellect with electoral politics.

Greens and Naderites often counter back that the Democratic Party doesn’t represent them, so why should they support the party’s candidates? Even beyond the fact that a third party vote is a vote for Bush, I think third party strategies are completely wrongheaded. If everyone who felt his or her voice wasn’t represented in the Democratic Party participated in the party, then accordingly, the party would shift its agenda, however so slightly. But the real problem is that this hasn’t been good enough for the far left. They haven’t been willing to get their hands dirty in the realm of politics, which requires that they concede that their position is not the only one on the table. Such political purity has produced an aloof left that has effectively neutered itself politically. And as they stand and watch, the Democratic Party has crept to the center more and more.

It’s obviously too early to tell at this point, but Dean’s campaign may have shaken that constituency out of its dogmatic slumber. Now the left is a potent force (both in terms of numbers and campaign dollars), and with Dean’s speech today, he is planning to employ them through to the general election. The results could be decisive. Hopefully, that effect can be one element of Dean’s legacy.

Benjamin Helphand

“I’m not interested,” said the annoyed man, eager to return to the din of the television behind him. He wore a concert t-shirt of a half-rate band and smirked as if to say, “Are you kidding me? I came to the door for this?!”

“Thanks anyway,” we replied, forcing ourselves to smile as the annoyed man shut the door in our faces. “Not interested?” I asked my friend and fellow door-knocker, Brent. “Not interested in what, contributing to society?”

Part of Howard Dean’s “Perfect Storm,” we had caravanned with three carloads of volunteers, all the way from Chicago, past what claimed to be the “World’s Largest Truck Stop,” to Iowa City. There we met up (no pun intended) with other Deanites at the Super 8 Motel for a quick training and our assignments. We had all come to help win Dean the Democratic nomination, but many of us would leave humbled after confronting the raw face of the voting and non-voting public.

Brent and I were sent out to go door-knocking at a low-income housing project near the University of Iowa. It was one of those mid-70s complexes designed more to prevent free assembly than to live in. Each building was like a small hive of ten or so apartments encased in an abundance of fire doors and surrounded by way too much parking.

Using our outdated list of registered Democrats and Independents as a guide, we started knocking on doors. “Hello, this is Brent and I’m Ben,” I’d say. “We’re volunteers for Howard Dean. We’re out today to see if you’re planning on attending the caucus on Monday?” Then we’d wait for some sort of response to see how to proceed. The vast majority of people were not at home. Of those that were home, many had a response similar to our annoyed man, brushing us off as if we were trying to hawk satellite dishes. While this was disheartening, we kept our spirits up by composing witty comebacks for each apathetic, non-voter (of course we’d do this after the door had been closed).

Thankfully, we were rewarded with some  interesting, even politically engaged characters. I was about to knock on one door when I was greeted with a loud, “Oh yeah, you like my cock inside you, don’t you?!” We decide not to knock on that particular door. But down the hall, a man answered the door and, for a moment, restored our hope in the future of the democratic process. He was a tall, gray-haired, black man dressed in a light blue kaftan. When the door opened, out wafted what smelled like lamb stew. As we gave him our standard Dean pitch, a big smile grew across his face. “I support Dean,” he responded in a thick accent we’d later learn was Sudanese. “But I cannot vote yet because I am not a citizen. Perhaps next year,” he added confidently. Delighted to find someone with a genuine appreciation of the unique freedom we have in our electoral system, we shook the man’s hand and thanked him.

In the end, our trip to Iowa didn’t do much for Dean. In fact, it’s possible that our presence hurt the campaign. What it did do was afford us, and countless other volunteers, a glimpse of both the full potential of our democracy as well as its greatest disappointment. I returned to Chicago humbled by this vision but determined to return as often as I could to the doorsteps of America.

Benjamin Helphand

New York Times columnist David Brooks recently attempted to map the best route for an immigrant community to succeed in America. He did this by juxtaposing the pre-1960s Jewish and post-1960s Puerto Rican experiences in the Humboldt Park neighborhood on Chicago’s near northwest side. To represent the Jewish experience, he taps Saul Bellow’s Augie March, a fictional character whom Brooks applauds because he “never settles for the near at hand.” To represent the Puerto Rican experience, he looks to Jose E. Lopez, a community organizer who heads the Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional Puertorriqueño (or MLN), the public face of the FALN, a group devoted to ending Puerto Rico’s U.S. commonwealth status. “The biggest difference between the neighborhood in Bellow’s day and now,” concludes Brooks, “is that then, the path to success was through assimilation, whereas now it is through ethnic self-determination.” Brooks votes decidedly in favor of the former. “Instead of encouraging people to spend their lives around the same few streets,” he argues, assimilation “opens up the wide possibilities of America.”

As evidence of the pitfalls of resisting assimilation, Brooks recounts the story of “Paseo Boricua,” a mile-long stretch of Humboldt Parks’ Division Street, which was re-invented in the 1990s as a space that would be “permanently Puerto Rican,” a barricade to the tides of gentrification that had already forced the Puerto Rican community west for decades. Chicago already had its Chinatown, Greektown, Little Italy, and La Villata (Mexican), so why not a “Little Puerto Rico?”

Today Paseo Boricua is a reality. Just west of the trendy new Division Street shopping strip the scene changes abruptly. As you pass under a giant Puerto Rican flag forged into a gateway of steel, the high-end restaurants and hipster boutiques give way to the Puerto Rican “walk of stars,” salsa music, and cement tables for playing checkers. While Brooks concedes that the street is now “clean and safe,” he goes on to report that “stubborn problems remain,” such as gangs and poor school performance. The reason for this failure, he argues, is that “few venture out.” Downtown Chicago is only 10 minutes away, he laments, “but is also a foreign country.”

On the surface this may seem like a pragmatic argument in favor of the American Dream — go to the big city, kid, and make something of yourself. Indeed, Brooks credits Bellow with nothing short of “Redefining American heroism.” But beneath the patriotic mythologizing (remember, Brooks uses a fictional character as his poster child), he seems to say that organizing around community and identity is a path to stagnancy. The key to success, rather, is to shed your community bonds, or better yet, to physically move away from those “same few streets.”

As it turns out, however, Brooks’ advice may in fact be a recipe for failure. Those community bonds, those traits that set groups apart, may in fact be intrinsic to a community’s ascent. “Immigration is a network-driven phenomenon,” explains UCLA Sociologist Roger Waldinger, “with newcomers naturally attracted to the places where they have contacts….” The power of ethnic networks cannot be underestimated. To varying degrees they form the bank, realtor, employment agency, school and social club for new arrivals. Yet, it is just such networks that Brooks ignores when he presents Augie Marsh’s supposedly steady march of assimilation. The problem is that he looks at Bellows’ character in isolation, while treating the Puerto Rican community as a whole. Only by glossing over the vital role of Jewish social networks in the success of that community and by downplaying the very real successes of the Puerto Rican community, is Brooks able to argue for assimilation.

What he misses in his heavy-handed polarization are the manifold ways in which differences (ethnic, religious, national origin, race) actually produce and support successful communities. He presents the story of the Jews of Humboldt Park as if they all caught a bus downtown and then sublimated into a colorless, creedless America. What he neglects to say is that the Jews of Chicago still largely reside in a handful of enclaves and still maintain an impressive array of cultural, religious, and political institutions. It’s just that they’ve shifted from the west side to the far north suburbs.      

Benjamin Helphand