The SCOTUS nominee hearings play out in Washington while, here in Chicago, the murder trial of a police officer proceeds. In a literal sense, they have nothing to do with each other. To me, though, their juxtaposition speaks volumes about what’s wrong with us.

Caution: Not for the faint of heart.

In D.C, a man is about to be given a lifetime appointment to one of the most important and powerful government positions in the world. Caution would seem to be in order. He is not on trial; therefore innocent until proven guilty does not apply. Because there are so many other qualified candidates (say, Merrick Garland) about whom there would be no reasonable doubt in terms of disposition or character (see Gorsuch hearings), I would not consider moving onto one of them in light of sexual abuse allegations any great injustice. The current nominee would continue with his cushy life. He would get over the disappointment.

Here in Chicago, a police officer faces years—maybe the rest of his life—in prison for shooting a teenager named Laquan McDonald 16 times. McDonald, needless to say, did not survive. All the usual subtext is there. There is video of the horrible event. By my judgment, there is no justification for one bullet, let alone 16. But Laquan, you see, was not one of us. He was in court countless times, he could be aggressive, he was a hot mess. That’s because he was also abused, moved around in foster care situations, attended schools that the city of Chicago neglected—in neighborhoods it also neglected.

He did not enjoy the advantages that the SCOTUS nominee enjoyed. On the spectrum, my upbringing was somewhere between McDonald’s and SCOTUS nominee, lying closer to the nominee’s, but pretty far from both extremes. I committed crimes as a teenager—they were not violent, they didn’t involve sexual abuse. Nonetheless, but for luck, I could’ve faced charges. And who knows what spiral would’ve ensued.

But I would’ve had a good chance to avoid the spiral. I knew who to call. And I knew I could count on the wrath and, in the end, ironclad support from people I know cared for me.

McDonald didn’t have what the nominee and I had. And part of the police officer’s defense is, on the surface, to suggest that of course a troubled guy like McDonald really was a threat to the officer (even though the officer had no knowledge of the kid’s past when he shot).  Watch the video. A bunch of other cops somehow didn’t see the same threat. Eric Zorn of the Tribune wrote what I consider to be the truth: Some people think the officer should get off just because he got rid of a kid we’d all already written off. From the piece, he articulates what he suspects is in the minds of some:

“that he may not have been a danger to police or bystanders that night but someday he was going to be, so what’s the harm in a little pre-emptive vigilantism.”

Having advantages—like I had and the nominee had to an even greater extent—creates a kind of upward momentum. If you have the advantages, you are apt to be presumed innocent, or granted forgiveness, and advanced to the next level because, well, that’s where you belong. If you don’t have those advantages, the reverse is true, and you’re driven into the ground. It’s a kind of human inertia.

The gap between advantaged and burdened is enormous and getting worse. I’m sort of a survival of the fittest liberal, if there can be such a thing. I don’t resent other people’s success–it’s just that more and more, I feel like that success buys privileges that have not been earned. I want every kid to be thrust into the fray with a set of advantages and challenges that are at least on the same planet as other kids. That’s the only way we’re going to get the best people in important positions. Right now, that’s not happening. And we’re nowhere near the meritocracy we imagine we have.

If you need evidence, just watch the hearings. The Senate is a Confederacy of Dunces. The whiny nominee says his life is ruined. Waaaah. Getting shot 16 times by someone who is sworn to serve and protect you—that’s a life ruined.

Nancy and I celebrated the interview at our local, Half Sour. (Photo: Joe Jenkins.)

At this time one week ago I was in a StoryCorps booth in Chicago interviewing renowned retired White Sox baseball organist Nancy Faust. A producer at StoryCorps Headquarters in New York City had been hounding Nancy for months,  urging her to get in a StoryCorps booth to record her story.

StoryCorps is a non-profit that was set up to “record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives,” and Nancy had no idea why a radio producer in New York City would take such interest in a Chicago baseball organist. “My life story is not that interesting,” she told me. “What would I say?” The NYC producers kept hounding her, though, and she finally told them she’d to it “as long as my friend Beth Finke can be the one doing the interview.”

How about that?

Aside from their studio in New York City, StoryCorps only has two satellite sites: one in Atlanta and the other in Chicago. We asked sound producers at the Chicago site if they knew why StoryCorps Headquarters in NYC had taken such a big interest in Nancy. They didn’t know. But when that happens, they said it means the piece is very likely to be produced into something that will air nationwide on NPR.

How about that?

I’ve done a couple StoryCorps interviews with writers from my memoir classes before, but this one was different. The NYC producer called me ahead of time to check me out, and to let me know they’d be emailing me specific questions to ask Nancy during the interview.

I had to explain I wouldn’t be able to read a list of questions while we were recording, and she was reassuring. “Do your best to memorize them ahead of time,” she said. And if you forget some, that’s okay, too.” Know what? Last week in that recording booth, Nancy Faust and I hit it outta the park! You’re all going to have to wait until the interview airs to hear our answers. Trust me, I’ll let you know if/when it really does get scheduled on NPR, but to whet your appetite, hear are the questions they requested:

Beth to ask Nancy:

How did you feel about baseball (or sports in general) when you were growing up?

Can you tell me the story about how you learned to play the organ?

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Tell me about how you ended up getting the organist job with the White Sox?

What was your first day playing for the White Sox like?

How did you come up with songs for players?

Do you have any song choices you’re especially proud of? Are there any song choices that you regret?

Tell me about the first time you used “Na Na, Hey Hey Goodbye.”

Tell me about the most memorable game you ever played at.

What were the White Sox fans like?

Are there any fans who’ve made an impact on you? People you still keep in touch with?

Can you talk about the most difficult part of doing this job?

Why did you decide to retire?

What do you miss most about the job?

What was your last day at the White Sox like?

What lessons has your time at the White Sox taught you?

How would you like to be remembered?

Nancy to ask Beth:

How did we meet?

How would you describe me?

How did you feel about baseball (or sports in general) when you were growing up?

Did you ever come to a White Sox game and see me play?

Were there any song choices of mine that you liked? Ones that you didn’t like?

If you could pick songs for me to play at a game, what would you choose?
What does baseball mean to you now?

Is there something about me that you’ve always wanted to know but have never asked?

You may have heard earlier this month that the Texas School Board recommended the removal of Helen Keller from its required Grade 3 social studies curriculum. The story of Helen Keller’s childhood is well-known. She lost both her hearing and her sight after a childhood illness, and after the breakthrough moment when teacher Anne Sullivan communicated “water,” young Helen Keller learned to read, write and even speak.

I had the honor of speaking at the Perkins School for the Blind early this year. Helen Keller attended Perkins–the courtyard garden is named in her and Annie Sullivan’s honor.

What many people don’t know is that Helen Keller became a radical activist when she grew up. She joined the Socialist Party in 1909, when she was 29, and then the Industrial Workers of the World. She supported Communist Russia and hung a red flag over her desk. The FBI opened a file on her. She advocated for women’s suffrage and for access to birth control. She helped found the American Civil Liberties Union.

Through all that Helen Keller remained the darling of newspaper reporters and columnists, the amazing blind and deaf girl who talks with her hands. When she came out in support of Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs in his campaign for the presidency, though, that was the last straw. Newspaper columnists who had earlier praised her courage and intelligence started calling attention to her disabilities.

One newspaper claimed “the poor little blind girl” was being exploited by the socialist party for publicity’s sake, and the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that Helen Keller’s “mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development.”

No matter where you stand politically, I’m sure you can appreciate what a blow this must have been to Helen Keller. She had waited to formulate her opinion until after procuring and reading books about socialism in German Braille, and then asking a friend to come three times a week to spell articles from The National Socialist into her hand. From an Essay by Helen Keller:

She gives the titles of the articles and I tell her when to read on and when to omit. I have also had her read to me from the International Socialist Review articles the titles of which sounded promising. Manual spelling takes time. It is no easy and rapid thing to absorb through one’s fingers a book of 50,000 words on economics. But it is a pleasure, and one which I shall enjoy repeatedly until I have made myself acquainted with all the classic socialist authors.

Helen Keller responded to that Boston Eagle article and referred to a time she’d met the editor years earlier:

At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him…

Helen Keller was a saint until she ruffled feathers, and then they said she was limited intellectually. Instead of addressing her arguments, her critics took pains to discredit her, herself. Sound familiar?

The personal attacks and general nastiness in our public discourse and politics is nothing new. Lots of folks who eventually came to be revered by the broader society — Martin Luther King, Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, even Muhammad Ali — were reviled as marginal troublemakers and suffered hateful treatment in their own time. I suppose they’re not on the Texas Board’s list of required third grade curriculum, either. If so, Helen Keller is in good company.

Note: the September 14 vote was preliminary, and the Texas Board can amend the curriculum changes further before taking a final vote in November.

There is a lot of drivel on social media and I own up to having contributed my share of it. Usually it’s best to just let stuff go because, really, it evaporates as an issue in hours. (Unless you enjoy some celebrity and some stupid thing you said years ago comes up—but that’s another story.)

Still, I’m troubled by a little Facebook meme that has popped up more than once in the past couple days. It’s related to the allegations that have arisen about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Basically it goes like this:

Boys report priests molestation after 30 years = public outrage. Girls molested by guys are ridiculed for waiting too long.

Where to start?

First, how about reality. The Boston Globe’s Spotlight reports, made famous in the Oscar winning film, came 16 years ago. Two things about that: As we have learned, it’s still going on. And as we have also learned, it was going on for decades—decades before that. Which is to say, even after these men were heard, boys continued to be molested. We owe them more than complaining that somehow their plight is less awful than young womens’.

We also know that though most boys were afraid to speak up, it’s been documented that many boys did speak up to a parent or other adult. And they were disregarded and even chastised or punished for doing so. Just as many girls and young women who have the courage to speak up today are treated.

Instead of engaging in a “who’s more oppressed” derby in times like these, I think it’s better to recognize that these two situations have a lot in common. The boys (and there were lots of girls, too, btw) in the Catholic church scandal faced oppressive norms and power structures that enabled and covered up for horrific behavior.

Sound familiar?

That’s a human issue, one we all have a stake in and we all need to face, together.

During the current six-week session I’ve given a writing prompt about name changes, and two seasonal prompts as well: “Back to School” and “Rite of Passage.” This essay Audrey Mitchell wrote could have qualified for all three! Hearing it read in class taught us what a gift her mother, Leila Goodwin, had for solving the big problems her youngest daughter brought home from school.

by Audrey Mitchell

I never gave much thought to my name until I was in the third grade and learned how to write cursive. I would copy my cursive letters and write them very neatly on the prepared scripts trying my best to imitate my third-grade teacher, who wrote very beautiful cursive.

That’s Audrey being recorded for a video about our class.

My capital letter “A” was a disaster in my eyes. I could not make the letter “A” in cursive to my satisfaction. I practiced and practiced. The rounded part of my cursive capital “A” was too big, too little, too fat, too thin, too oblong, too square…I could never get it to look right.

It was then and there I decided I wanted to change my name.

I settled on the name “Elizabeth.” How did I pick Elizabeth? Elizabeth Taylor was popular at the time.Queen Elizabeth, or Princess back then…No. I picked the name Elizabeth because I could make a fabulous cursive letter capital “E.” I made a big loop at the top of “E,” continued with a backwards number three and then elegantly connected it with the next letters, all of them flowing on to complete my chosen new name. My letter “z” in Elizabeth, though lower case, wasn’t bad either.

I asked my mother what I needed to do to change my name. She tried to discourage me, but I guess my childhood zeal took over. She said she’d support my efforts. She helped me write a letter to the “powers that be,” whoever they were, and said she would mail the letter to them. She told me that it would take some time. That was OK with me.

She probably was hoping I would forget about it, but in the meantime, I went to school the next day and signed all my papers “Elizabeth Goodwin” using the most beautiful cursive letter “E” that I could make.

And then I got my papers back.

My new name was crossed out in red pencil and my old name was written up above it, also in red pencil. Those red pencil markings really frightened me. I always got good grades, and this was the first time I ever had so many corrections in red pencil.

Going to the teacher was not an option. Back then the only time we had a one-on-one with our teacher was when we got in trouble.

I was devastated, and I wasn’t about to push it any further. Red correction pencil markings on my papers discouraged me from continuing the process of changing my name. And since I did not mention it again, my mother did not bring it up, either.

But I made alternative plans on how to write my old name. I continued using the printed version of the letter “A” and embellished it by making the “A” with an imposing loop starting at the bottom and extent the line leading to the top to an extreme point before I brought my pen down the other side. Then I extended the line up again to the middle and made another loop before crossing the center with a line. Then I brought the line back across the center. At that point, the line went down again on the right side to attach to the next letter. Quite a fancy “A.” It was good enough for me.

If I had been persistent about my name change and not intimidated by the red pencil marks on my school papers, today you might know me as “Elizabeth.”