The political scene around these parts continues to depress. Particularly gruesome is the latest news about the head of the Chicago Public Schools being under Federal investigation. But that’s only a part of the ugliness—the conflicts of interest and big-money corruption is rife in a place that has profound ramifications for kids in the system, and for those who work for CPS.

But. But! I did run across one thing that buoyed my spirits last week. In my last post, I wrote about the masters of the universe who lose touch with the world inhabited by those who aren’t as fortunate as they are, and who never seem to have enough of everything.

Well.

Back in 2004, while still in college, a 19-year-old named Dan Price founded a Seattle-based credit card payments processing company called Gravity Payments that now employs 120 people. Price happened onto a study that Beth read about some time ago that looked at the relationship between emotional well-being and wealth. The short version of the results: As you might expect, being poor causes stress and unhappiness. As incomes rise, so does emotional well-being. But that well-being plateaus at around $75,000 annual income. In other words, people don’t get happier if they make $175,000. They can do more and buy more stuff, but their fundamental emotional state does not improve.

Price also looked into what living on less than 70k in Seattle was like–and it was harder than he’d imagined.

And so Price did something kind of remarkable: He raised the minimum salary of his employees to $70,000. (Not sure why not all the way to $75,000, but who’s going to complain?) To cover the cost, he’s reducing his own salary from $1 million to … $70,000, and putting a greater share of  annual profits toward salaries.

Here’s a quote from Price in the NY Times article about him and his company:

“The market rate for me as a C.E.O. compared to a regular person is ridiculous, it’s absurd,” said Mr. Price, who said his main extravagances were snowboarding and picking up the bar bill. He drives a 12-year-old Audi, which he received in a barter for service from the local dealer.

I’m sure some people think he’s crazy—but I hope you’ll read the whole article. Price doesn’t seem particularly political, he just seems to me to be a capitalist who practices it against the backdrop of a larger set of values. Thanks, Dan Price, for reminding us that’s possible. And for brightening my week.

Yesterday Whitney and I took a train to River Forest, a suburb of Chicago, to do two assemblies at Willard Elementary School. One was for all the kindergarteners, first graders and second graders in the school, and the second was for all the third and fourth graders there. Some examples of questions the kids asked during the Q & A part of the presentations:

• Does Whitney like other dogs?
• How do you know when it’s days and when it’s nights?
• Can you draw?
• Can you swim?
• How can you cook?
• How do you write books?
• How do you drive?
• When you dream, do you dream in colors?
• How do you know if it’s a taxi cab or a car?
• How do you get through a door?
• How do you know what you look like?
• So are your dreams just in black and white, or in other colors, too?
• When it’s time to get off a plane, and your dog is there underneath, how can you get off the plane if you don’t have your dog with you?

Dog is my co-pilot.

That last question gave me a chance to explain the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Department of Justice’s ADA regulations define a service animal as any dog that is individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability. “Guide dogs don’t have to fly under a plane as cargo,” I said, explaining that Whitney is a service dog, so she comes right on the plane with me. “She sits with her butt under the seat in front of me, and her head between my feet.” Want a measure of how mesmerized the kids were by the magnificent Whitney visiting their school? I didn’t hear one single snicker when I said the word “butt.”

Well, Chuy Garcia lost the Chicago mayoral runoff election, despite the endorsement of the prestigious Mondays with Mike blog.

It wasn’t a bad showing considering Garcia got into the race very late, had no name recognition, and was widely considered the second or third best choice of possible opponents to the incumbent Rahm Emanuel.

Nelson Algren

That Chuy got 46 percent of the vote speaks to the depth and breadth of dissatisfaction with Emanuel as much as anything. Rahm is behaving as if he’s been chastised into turning over a new leaf. I’m not holding my breath for Scrooge on Christmas morning, though.

Meanwhile our new governor, Bruce Rauner, is doing his best Scott Walker impression. Whether he can enact some of the stuff he’s talking about is yet to be seen. I’d implore Rauner to read this piece comparing Walker’s policies to those of his Democratic counterpart in Minnesota, Governor Mark Dayton. It’s about as close to a scientific experiment as you can get in politics, and it does not speak well of Walker’s choices.

The governors of Wisconsin and Minnesota are both wealthy, Dayton probably the wealthier of the two. Which only goes to show, you can’t generalize too much based on wealth.

And it is too easy to generalize about “the rich” and “the poor,” glorifying or vilifying as we see fit. Of course, defining rich is problematic. Compared to lots of people I walk by on Chicago streets every day, I’m filthy rich. But to coin a phrase, some of my best friends are rich, and these friends are…rich. They are also thoughtful, caring and generous people. They pay attention to the world around them, outside their comfortable existences, and understand that they had some advantages as well as hardships, they understand themselves to have some responsibility for the well being of others, and of the country as a whole.

That doesn’t mean I always agree with them on government policy, or that we always vote for the same people. It does mean we have respectful conversations where I always learn something for my trouble, and hope they do, too.

But there is a particular subset of people who do worry me. They come in multiple political stripes. They’ve done well and interpret their doing well as meaning they know everything. And they get insular. They can afford to buy their way into priority everything, they don’t rub elbows with people unlike themselves. They forget they had support. That they got breaks. They develop a distorted view that assumes that those with less most certainly deserve to have less.

In the restaurant of life, these are the people who behave as if, because they’re paying for a meal, they own the servers.

In real life, these people are buying public office. They’re appointing their friends to positions in education, transportation—you name it—even though those pals have no experience in those fields. They’re doing it confidently because, well, they think they know everything. And they seem never to have enough.

It is this group—the self-appointed “masters of the universe,” to borrow from Tom Wolfe—that scares me. I’d like to think they’re acting in good faith, and that we just disagree. Instead, I’m afraid that this quote from the great Nelson Algren applies:

When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don’t have enough.

Losing my sight meant losing a lot of things I’d taken for granted. One of those was The ability to vote independently, without anyone knowing how I voted. I relied on Mike to help me with a ballot. One time Mike was out of town during elections, so a polling judge from the Republican party and a polling judge from the Democratic party squeezed into the booth with my Seeing Eye dog and me — they both had to be there to confirm the ballot was being marked the way I’d asked.

After we moved to Chicago I got word that the city was sponsoring a free class at the Chicago Public Library to learn how to use new assistive technology that would allow voters who couldn’t see to vote independently. I signed up, put headphones on, and was introduced to a special handheld contraption the size of a cell phone that I could use to maneuver the screen and hear my choices. I sat at the library for hours, getting a feel for the machine and practicing pushing the big button on the middle of the device to mark my ballot.

I was very excited to use this new technology to vote for president in 2008, and my polling place had the special equipment on hand, but no one there knew how to make the sound work.

My experience in subsequent elections has gone something like this: I sign in, and poll workers scramble. All of them seem to want to do right by me, but few of them know what “right” is. Where are the headphones? How do you start the talking machine? Why isn’t the audio working? I wasn’t able to vote independently in the 2012 national election,
either. That time a special poll worker was called to the scene. She said I was the first blind person she’d worked with at a polling place. After flipping through the troubleshooting handbook, she plunked it down on the table next to me, announced there was “nothing in this book about talking machines,” and that was that.

Mike was done voting by then, so just like back in 2008, he signed an affidavit, guided me to a voting booth, read the choices out loud and I told him (and anyone else near enough to eavesdrop) who I wanted to vote for.

That time I called the National Federation of the Blind voting hotline when we got home. The kind woman on the phone sounded surprised. The sort of assistive technology they had at my precinct usually works, she said. She took down my information, and then suggested I call my State Board of Elections. I did.

After a fair amount of time on hold, someone from the Illinois Board of Elections finally answered and listened to my story. “Were you able to vote in the end, then?” Yes, I said, making sure they understood that I wasn’t able to do it independently, and that the Help America Vote Act of 2002 mandates that voting systems provide some way for people to vote independently and privately, including those of us with disabilities. “You got assistance, then?” they asked. I told them yes, that my husband had signed an affidavit, that Mike had helped me in the voting booth. “So you were able to vote, then?” I said yes. “Okay, then, you’re all set,” they said, and hung up.

I cried after that election. The results hadn’t gone my way, I was disappointed in the low voter turn-out, and I wasn’t even allowed to vote independently like everyone else. I wasn’t angry at the poll workers at my precinct – they wanted the technology to work for me, they just didn’t know how to make that happen. In the end, I guess my feelings were hurt. It seemed the whole idea of people with disabilities voting independently in elections was a ruse.Fast forward to yesterday’s special runoff mayoral election in Chicago. I’d researched the issues. I’d studied the two candidates. Nothing else on the ballot. Just who I want for mayor. This should be a breeze.

And you know what? It was! Whitney led me to the polling place across the street, I signed in, a poll worker led us to the special voting booth, she handed me the special contraption, I put the headphones on, the sound came in loud and clear, and…abracadabra!I voted. All by myself. A small thing for some, but huge for me. And for all of us who are blind and want to vote independently.

Come on Chicago. We can do this. There’s precedent.

For most of my lifetime, Chicagoans have voted for mayors who could be described as domineering and dictatorial and most often named Daley. Why they have is hard to figure. A friend offered the notion that the electorate is like the victim in an abusive relationship who keeps going back. Another friend offered that it’s like Stockholm Syndrome.

It sure doesn’t make sense, especially given that the one break in the chain of strong-arm mayors in my lifetime was an unqualified success. Harold Washington’s term as mayor showed Chicagoans that city government could work for everybody, and it didn’t have to be a zero-sum game pitting neighborhood against neighborhood for resources. It also provided a short-lived window of city government transparency, and it made inroads on the pay-to-play cronyism that once again is malignant in Chicago.

Washington won partly because two white candidates, one a Daley, split the white vote. The requirement that a candidate get at least 50 percent of the vote—which forced the runoff election tomorrow was adopted to prevent any such “horror” from happening again. That requirement is why current mayor Rahm Emanuel is in a race with insurgent candidate Chuy Garcia.

A lot has changed since Washington ran, but a lot hasn’t. During that campaign a lot of people (well, mostly they were white people) were scared to death. The folks who lived in neighborhoods that had been favored by the old political machine expected reprisals. In general, a lot of white voters feared some racial payback. Other skeptics condescended that someone like Washington couldn’t deal with difficult financial and political decisions. And that there would be an exodus of businesses on the scale of the residential white flight that had already occurred.

Washington’s reign proved the fears were unfounded. But I hear a lot of the same kind of stuff being said about Chuy Garcia as the election approaches and it’s become clear he has a real chance. With some people there is an implication that unless you’re an absolutely ruthless bastard like Emanuel, you can’t be up to the job. That only the ruthless likes of Emanuel or Daley can run this city. That they get done what others can’t precisely because they are dictatorial, make backroom deals with buddies, and are not particularly democratic. That democracy and clean government are too messy to bother with.

In reality, the second Daley has been exposed as a horrible manager incapable of responsible fiscal oversight. (It was actually clear in real time, but Chicagoans looked away.) Just ask Rahm about the mess Daley left him.

But here’s the thing: Rahm has been no better. He has arguably been worse. He’s swapped Daley’s group of cronies–who donate money in exchange city business, contracts and influence–with his own. It used to be more of a shot-and-beer club of insiders, now it’s wine sippers.

People have expressed doubt that Garcia is up to addressing Chicago’s substantial financial challenges. That he doesn’t tell us how he’ll solve problems. (In fact, if you’re willing to work harder than the Chicago press, you can find detailed positions and plans at his web site.)

But here’s the thing: The incumbent has had four years and I still don’t know how he’ll solve those problems. No one does. He has been no better and probably worse than his predecessor in terms of pay-to-play corruption. If you have any doubt about that, I implore you to read these two pieces:

• The Case against Rahm outlines in great detail the long sting of corrupt deals and bad financial management Chicagoans have suffered on the Emanuel administration. It also makes a persuasive case that Emanuel is no better than Rod Blogojevich.
• The Moral Bankruptcy of Chicago Elites painstakingly connects the pay-to-play dots under Emanuel’s administration.

Read them—and don’t worry, they’re not ideological screeds. They’re just cold looks at how bad Chicago’s politics are.

At the end of the day, though, whatever we think about the elected officials, Chicagoans need to find some backbone. In the past, voters have spent four years bemoaning a crooked city government, and the very real corruption tax we all pay as a result. And then they go to the polls and say, “Hey, let’s do this again.”

They somehow allow themselves to be brainwashed that without the backroom deals and the cronyism, Chicago would be in trouble.

Wake up! What is great about Chicago has been accomplished in spite of our series of dictator mayors, not because of them. Decades of Daleys and now Rahm have seen a steady shrinking of the city—it’s down from 3.6 million residents to 2.7. These guys have not delivered. Period.

They and their corrupt practices are in fact a drag on the rest of us. Don’t be afraid of democratic (small “d” emphasized) process that allows—that requires—more of us to participate. I’ve lived in places like that—let me tell you, it’s possible and it works.

Four years ago we had the opportunity to vote for a very solid candidate who understood what needed (and still needs) to change.

But Miguel del Valle came in a disappointing third.

We’ve got another chance. Let’s not blow it again. Don’t be afraid. Vote for Garcia Tuesday.