Tire 'em Out! Revisited

Well, it was looking as if my father’s worst fear was about to come true. What if he woke up one day and everybody was acting normal? Nobody was looking for treasures in the sandbars of the Wisconsin River, or trying to memorize the Iliad so that he could recite it to inner city kids with the message that they too could be a hero, or teaching dance to convicts as a way to channel energy and foment creativity. So what would he write about?

This, Dear Reader, does not qualify as a sizzling newspaper story: Mary Smith woke up, took a shower, feed the kids, and headed to work.

Read that, and you instantly think—what’s gonna happen to Mary? Will someone shoot, will she see something she shouldn’t and go into hiding, are the kids all right?

Remember—this was before the electronic age. I’ve spent two hours on the Internet, trolling for anything, anything to write about. My father, in contrast, burnt up some shoe leather every day, poking around town, looking for news.

So he might have happened on Father Michael Pfleger in person, had Jack been loping around the South Side of Chicago these days, not as I met Pfleger—electronically on YouTube via Diane Sawyer and ABC News.

And Sawyer had this idea: get all the gang members—or as many as would come—together in a big room and talk. Set a goal: get one idea about how to end the gun violence that is plaguing Chicago.

Which has, as the NRA will tell you, some of the toughest gun laws in the country. It also has young men who can’t find jobs and lots of gang activity. So they have the meeting, and people start to talk. Then Sawyer meets Father Pfleger, who has an idea—a basketball tournament for peace.

Other things are happening: a guy is giving boxing lessons on the street corner; Sawyer dons her gloves and tries it out. People are organizing job-training programs, programs to get kids off the street.

And it may be that there is some hope—Pfleger notes that after the tournament, there hasn’t been a killing in the neighborhood. Twenty kids signed onto the training programs, the police are using new methods to focus on the killers, not the place.

Well, certainly an interesting bit of news. And what’s the deal with Pfleger? Who’s he?

Well, a guy whose natural element seems to be hot water. Which got him, as recently as 2010, suspended, which meant that he could no longer perform the sacraments, except for the Sacrament of Penance in an emergency, which even laicized or excommunicated priests can do. For a priest, that’s a big deal.

Pfleger had come out swinging for the ordination of women three weeks earlier, in a 70-minute homily in his church, St. Sabina, which has been his parish for an incredible 30 years. (Average tenure is five to ten years….) Well, the predictable happened, and the Archbishop of Chicago told him, essentially, to go to his room and not come out until he was sorry. So he apologized, and then went onto his Facebook page and recanted his apology.

Nor is it just ordination of women. The guy has adopted two kids, and is fostering a third. Cardinal Cody is apoplectic and threatens to fire him, but Pfleger goes ahead anyway. He fights against tobacco and alcohol, at one point getting up the ladder and defacing advertisement for cigarettes and booze. Then he gets into a little tussle with Hillary, during the 2008 campaign. Here’s Wikipedia again:

"I really believe that she just always thought, 'This is mine. I'm Bill's wife. I'm white, and this is mine. I just gotta get up and step into the plate.' Then out of nowhere came, 'Hey, I'm Barack Obama,' and she said, 'Oh, damn! Where did you come from? I'm white! I'm entitled! There's a black man stealing my show!'" He then pretended to wipe tears from his face, a reference to Clinton's emotional speech before the New Hampshire primary, and added, "She wasn't the only one crying. There was a whole lot of white people crying."[23]

Pfleger is German-American, the congregation is predominantly black. Right, so now it’s Obama who calls and asks him to apologize, so he does, saying slyly that his words “were inconsistent with Obama’s life and message.”

Then Pfleger invites Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor or ex-pastor who made an incendiary remark or two in the 2008 campaign, to come and speak and give a blessing when Maya Angelou comes to call. Wright, according to Pfleger, “is one of the great Biblical scholars of our country,” and has been “shamefully demonized.”

Right—Pfleger then takes on disrespectful-to-women rappers and hip-hop singers, and then turns to helping prostitutes. Oh, and did I mention that he invites Al Sharpton….

Granted, he’s had thirty years to do all this stuff, but just reading about it makes me yearn for an afternoon nap. The guy is the Schwarzenegger of muscular Christianity, a fly in the ointment of the diocese of Chicago, a straight shooter unafraid to take on anyone.

And two things strike me. First: the people, who are intelligent, articulate, and as children were filled with ambition—to be a doctor, a policeman, president. Now? They’re gang members.

Second thing: they may be sitting on a gold mine. I couldn’t see much, but you get glimpses of the neighborhood—the insanely wide streets (Chicago had all that prairie to cover, it seems—or maybe it was just a little scheme to use more concrete and up the kickback…), the mature shade trees, the architectural jewels that have fallen down, but could be wonderful again.

If they could get just one house, use it as a training lab for roofers, carpenters, electricians, turn it around and sell it, where would it lead?

Tire the young men out, says a nation builder. Give ‘em jobs and put ‘em to work and get them believing that they’re doing something right. Guys without jobs drink, pick fights, and take the guns out of their pockets and kill.

Tired guys are home in bed.