Just because it hasn't happened yet...

Politics is just like a basketball game and crime is an epicurean passion of mine, or so it seems this week…

• Not an average Joe. I met a guy who cried when Stalin died. He was in a Soviet grade school and his first years were filled with adoration for the man who created all that was good in his life. He knows better now, but his tale is a reminder that you’re not really an adult until you’ve unlearned a whole buncha stuff that you soaked up as a child.
  
• Truly Speck-tacular. I know cities appear as dots on a map, but I’m still surprised at how many people think Chicago actually is the size of a dot. I keep getting questions about pretty much every news item out of this town, with people wondering if it happened in my apartment.
  
• Death takes a holiday.  One of the sad facts of life in Chicago is that we have shootings every day, but wouldn’t that mean that shootings aren’t news? Maybe we should only report on crime when nobody gets shot or killed, which would have the added benefit of making us less nervous about our daily existence.
  
• Connoisseurs of Crime. Speaking of which, all the news coverage has made me a bit of an expert on the different types of crime in our town, and around the country. Just as the Inuit are supposed to have 4,000 words for snow and British comedians have 5,000 words for butts, local experts here have different classifications for crimes, and they do make a difference. There is often some overlap, but gang crimes are different from domestic disturbances, which are not the same as bar fights, hate crimes, drug crimes, generic street crime or one-offs. Some crime here is more common than in the rest of the country and some is very rare in comparison with other cities and states. Cable news treats it all the same, but that’s just laziness at work. 
  
• Double dribblers. Now that basketball season is starting again, I’m reminded how much an election race is like a basketball game. There’s all kinds of ups and downs and back and forth—and fouls—and the lead changes every two minutes. Nothing really matters until the final seconds, after all the fouls.
  
• Yes, we can. Every so often, a friend will point out something really crazy and claim, “You can’t make this stuff up.” I always wonder if they’ve ever logged onto Twitter.
  
• Decision time. A friend of mine said he cannot understand how anyone is still undecided about their vote at this point, but I run into those folks all the time. Mostly, they’re in front of me at McDonald’s, agonizing over whether to supersize their meal.
  
• Not yet. One of the most important and underused words in the English language is ‘yet.’ There’s a first time for everything and we seem to have an accelerating pattern of firsts in our unstable world. So, when people tell me social media hasn’t caused the collapse of civilization or that AI hasn’t caused nuclear power plants to explode or poor people haven’t rebelled and killed all the elites hobnobbing in in Davos, I feel compelled to remind them. Yet.
  

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