My post suggesting that clearing snow off sidewalks should be as important as clearing streets after a snowstorm got a lot of comments from empathetic pedestrians. Many wondered if any local organizations are working on issues about keeping Chicago sidewalks walkable in the wintertime.

Check out the Better Streets Chicago site and sign the petition.

And the answer is…yes! circulating a petition now demanding that the City of Chicago prepare a plan and allocate resources to make municipal sidewalk snow clearance a higher priority. I learned about this after a friend signed that petition — once you’ve signed, you have the option to have this letter sent to friends who might want to sign, too. I contacted Better Streets Chicago this morning, and they generously agreed to let me share that letter with you Safe & Sound blog readers here. I hope you’ll sign!

Create Walkable Winters in Chicago

Hi there,

I signed a petition telling Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Streets & Sanitation Commissioner John Tully, CDOT Commissioner Gia Biagi, CTA President Dorval Carter, Chicago City Council to create walkable winters in Chicago.

By failing to clear sidewalks of snow and ice, the City is failing its many residents who rely on pedestrian infrastructure to get around. Often these are some of the most vulnerable residents. The piles of snow and ice effectively traps people who use wheelchairs or other mobility supportive devices. It impedes parents with strollers. It makes accessing the bus difficult to impossible, especially if you have limited mobility. It leaves every user at risk of slipping and falling. The City has chosen not to take responsibility for public infrastructure during the winter.

Act now and sign this petition demanding that the City of Chicago prepare a plan and allocate the resources to make municipal sidewalk snow clearance a reality by next winter.

Can you join me and take action? Click here to sign the petition: https://betterstreetschicago.org/walkable-winters?source=email&
Thanks!

Watch it!

I thought “Defund the police” was a dumb term for a stupid idea the first time I heard it. I’m all for “fund our schools,” but the idea that it’s a zero-sum game between police and schools or other social investments is nonsense.

Clearly though, it’s time to change how police do their policing. It’s long overdue. Video cameras have laid bare the truths about policing that Black and Brown people have known forever.

I believe we can change policing for the better, but after watching the documentary film “Women in Blue,” I think it’s a little more complicated than rooting out racism. (As if that’s not a big enough ask.)

The PBS/Independent Lens production starts in 2017 when the filmmaker, Deirdre Fishel, begins to track four women in the Minneapolis Police Department. (Yep, Minneapolis.) Her impetus was the appointment of MPD’s first woman Police Chief. I don’t want to be a spoiler, but I will say that the movie obviously wasn’t about an incident in the future—George Floyd—but it kind of was. At least if we’re talking about changing the culture around policing.

These women did just that in their very finite spheres just by thinking and acting differently than their male counterparts. The filmmaker had incredible access, and the timeline runs from 2017 through police violence crises and ultimately, to the Floyd killing.

Now, if you’re defensive of cops, don’t jump to the conclusion that this is anti-police. The film makes painfully, frighteningly clear how hard their jobs are. I think regardless of what you think about cops, gender equality in the workplace, or Black Lives Matter, you should see this thing. The female cops struggle and they absolutely shine. And though it’s a rough subject with a rough ending, they give me optimism that we can and will do better.

Dr. Ashenhurst.

I am pleased to introduce Dr. Jody Ashenhurst as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. Dr. Ashenhurst grew up in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood and attended medical school at University of Illinois at Chicago. She trained in Internal Medicine at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital under renowned physician Dr. Quentin Young and credits him for teaching her as much about social activism as medicine. “Along the way I created some ‘good trouble’ myself,” she says with a smile. “Including helping organize a doctors’ union at Oak Forest Hospital.” After years of practicing Hematology/Oncology in various teaching hospitals in the Chicago area, Dr. Ashenhurst retired in 2017. She joined the memoir class I lead at The Admiral at the Lake in 2020 and generously agreed to let me share this essay with you — with the Senate Impeachment Trial going on this week, I assigned “Guilty” as a writing prompt.

Guilty

by Jody Ashenhurst, M.D.

I spent my internship and residency at Cook County Hospital and that required me to spend 3 separate months at the Cook County Jail. I was assigned to the Medicine ward at Cermak Memorial Hospital, the Jail’s small hospital.

Only a small proportion of the prisoners were serving sentences, and most of those sentences were under a year. The rest of the inmates at the Jail were awaiting trial. To see whether a prisoner was oriented to time and place, we would ask two questions: “When is your court date?” and “How much is your bond?” I never asked what a patient’s crime was. I knew that these men were not guilty, but they weren’t “not guilty,” either.

We met every morning to discuss problems that had arisen the day before, and then again at lunch. The food in the cafeteria was so horrible that Cook County Hospital sent over sandwiches of “mystery meat” for us. We were not sure whether we or the prisoners and employees had worse food for lunch.

My first day on the ward found me working alone, since my resident was in clinic back at the County. I went around the ward introducing myself and asking how my patients were feeling. As I was finishing up, I came across a burly, unshaven and bedraggled white man who looked up at me and said, “How would you feel if you found out you had killed your mother?” I learned that the Medicine ward occasionally took in some Psychiatry patients when their ward was full.

The nurses taught us to distinguish real from fake seizures. The radiologist only came for a couple of hours every morning but he taught us to read X-rays of facial bones so we could detect orbital fractures after fistfights. If there was something we couldn’t handle, such as chest pain, we could send the patient to County, but we had limited resources. Each prisoner at County was guarded by a sheriff’s police officer, which meant that the County Jail provided three officers for each prisoner, one per shift. There were a limited number of sheriff’s police available. We took great pride in sending very few patients to County, managing them in our jail hospital with limited resources: laboratory tests were unavailable after 7 pm and X-rays were unavailable after 11 pm, like in a small, very rural and unsophisticated hospital.

Because life on the ward was infinitely preferable to that in the tiers, the psychiatry patients found creative ways to get admitted to our little hospital. They seemed to know when a fresh batch of interns arrived to work at the Jail.

One guy was admitted for depression after his mother died. In fact, his mother died every month. Another fellow would be brought to the infirmary wearing tinted wire frame glasses while chewing on a broken light bulb. Crunch, crunch. The first time we panicked and admitted him to the hospital. After that we developed a routine: we had him rinse the broken glass out of his mouth and then subjected him to a very rough rectal examination. He would then be sent back to the tiers.

Were we a little bit sadistic with the rough rectal exam? Guilty as charged.

Luna and I posing in snowy Printers Row Park., That’s me in the red coat, Luna in the black coat.

Every winter here in Chicago I find myself questioning why it is that when snow plows clear passage for cars, the snow mounds they leave on curb cuts and crosswalks go unshoveled. What about the pedestrians? This article in Forbes says it well:

Plowing equipment exists that can clear sidewalks at least as efficiently as streets are cleared by conventional plows. College campuses and companies with large and complex facilities use them. But very few cities take full responsibility for clearing sidewalks the way they all do for clearing streets. And by and large, either taxpayers don’t want to fund it, or politicians don’t want to risk asking. So while some winter weather cities and towns are better than others for winter accessibility, very few do a genuinely good job of it.

Temperatures are hitting record lows (and are staying there) in many parts of the country this week. With so many people working or attending school classes from home due to COVID-19 regulations this winter, many Americans are spending less time in their cars and more time walking or bicycling outside. In our neighborhood, the city has plowed bike paths, but walking on snowy icy sidewalks to take short breaks from work, run errands, help neighbors, or just get exercise has been difficult. For friends who use wheelchairs, it’s been impossible.

We appreciate city services plowing the streets, but if they don’t clear the crosswalks, curb cuts and sidewalks , how can pedestrians get safely across to the other side? In addition to people with certain disabilities, other parts of the U.S. population do not drive, including:

• Children
• Many people age 65 or better
• Those who cannot afford a personal vehicle
• A growing number of people who simply choose not to drive.

Sidewalks and crosswalks are necessary for all of us who don’t drive. More from that Forbes article:

If this was purely a weather problem, then disabled people would have no choice but to endure, or somehow find a way to move to warmer climates. But winter weather accessibility barriers are also a policy and practice problem. Winter weather would be substantially less of a problem if cities and towns made it a higher priority.

Maybe we pedestrians all need to band together?? In the meantime, hang in there — it’s all gotta melt sometime.

A longer version of this post appeared on the Easterseals National blog earlier this week.

He should be featured in Goop.

Super bowl over

Brady male Gwyneth Paltrow

True sport baseball soon