A few green shoots poke up from the dry lawn near Lake Street, as if to question the sun, "Is it spring, yet?"  I see them on my way to class.  Something stirs underground.  Soon, in the words of Gerald Manley Hopkins, the green will "shoot long and lovely and lush."

 

        After class, a student asks me about social change, as if to question the age into which she was born.  Something begins to stir in her soul.  She is fortunate and recently arrived from one of our latifundias to study in the city.

 

        Anxiously, she asks me what changes I saw in my lifetime, and what movement there was towards a more just society.  Social justice is her passion.  She can hardly wait to graduate and change the world. She is unaware the FBI has more agents investigating political corruption in Chicago, Cook County and Illinois than anywhere in the nation.

 

        I try to answer her question about change by making reference to advances in technology, especially computers and the Internet, to stories about how gasoline was thirty-five cents a gallon when I bought my first car, or to disco music and living through the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter.

 

        Not satisfied, she wants to know more.  She senses we've reached the end of a bumpy road now that the communists and the capitalists agree that multiculturalism is a good thing. 

 

        Not yet able to put that realization into words, she asks, "How does the Vietnam war compare to the war in Iraq?"  I tell her that question is for another time.  The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the attack on the Twin Towers sprout from different seeds.

 

        The next morning comes bright but chilly.  Spring on the calendar still does not yet match spring in the air.  At breakfast, I mull over my student's questions and my answers.  Those answers seem inadequate, now.  They are a few small patches, but not the larger pattern in the quilt.

 

        If I had another opportunity I would have answered differently.  I should have told her that growing older often comes with disappointment.  Both men and ideas wear down over time.  I should have explained that in my lifetime I have come to see how political liberalism leads to the shadow of death stretching across the land.

 

Heirs to Revolution
 
        Like it or not, most of us are heirs to revolution.  If you were born in Moscow, Paris, Beijing, or Chicago, then the scent of liberalism is in the air you breathe.  Is that scent the perfume of life or the stench of death?

 

        That is a difficult question to answer, because it is difficult to know when to call an end to a revolution. Do we want a constitution or a guillotine at the end?  Does the revolution end with grace or greed in abundance?

 

        For the past forty years I have seen the end result of policies furthered by political liberalism in Chicago, a liberalism that has abused its revolutionary heritage and forgotten its purpose.  These failed policies cast a shadow of death on many levels.  There is the death of a person's livelihood, the death of the family, the death of schools and neighborhoods, and the death of communities and cities.

 

        Like an illustration in a medieval manuscript, the ladder of death that is liberal politics ascends from the individual and goes up to an abstract utopia.  This ladder extends from the catacombs of Chicago politics to multiculturalism and national decay.  Someone should tell Terry Eagleton that he is wrong.  Nations don't go to Marxist heaven when they die from multiculturalism.  They go to hell.

 

        But why stop there?  After the defeat of nationalism, why not the death of humanity?  Human beings are the cause of all our problems according to some moribund liberals.  Listen to the wealthy Ted Turner who says, "Too many people are using too much stuff."  In Turner's apocalyptic view, global warming leads to cannibalism.

 

        It's not enough for some to turn off their lights for an hour one night.  "Let's just turn off humanity," they argue, "and give the world over to the polar bears and Asian arowana fish, whose environment we have raped."  Given these claims, the world may well end with a liberal whimper and not a conservative bang.

 

 

        There are many reasons why contemporary liberals tarry in the shadow of death.  One reason is that today's liberalism is a form of materialism and an echo of atheism.  Take God out of the equation that describes life and all is relative, all is a matter of degree, and all is a tendency toward death.

 

        Another reason is that few students these days read the works of Sigmund Freud.  He's not politically correct, especially when it comes to some of his views on women.

 

        Nevertheless, Freud's secular Talmud of the mind is good springtime reading in the catacombs. Freud's idea of the life instinct and the death instinct competing in our unconscious mind helps us see the long shadow of winter is both in the world and in the self.

 

        If few students read Freud, then even fewer know about the "yetzer-ha-ra," or the "evil inclination" the old Rabbis wrote about.  That evil inclination fights against our "yetzer-ha-tov," or the "good inclination."  It is important to know about this struggle, but such an ancient dichotomy is often too judgmental for the modern relativists among us.

 

        In spite of the relativists, these are powerful ideas, ideas rooted in tradition.  They help explain how our best intentions go awry.  The apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans, said as much: "For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do."

 

        Perhaps the old idea of original sin, an idea our secular society wants to ignore in spite of St. Paul's reminder, comes back to memory, as well.  It never really could be ignored.  That first sin persists like the one red tulip in a field of yellow tulips the Park District planted last fall and now blooms with its imperfect exclamation.

 

        Maybe these ideas are simply the confessions of the disappointed.  Look at old Freud, realizing there was little hope as he gazed from his London room and knew the Nazis were on the rise and he could do nothing about it.  It was then the springtime of death in Europe, to be followed by the Marxist spring of Joseph Stalin.

 

        Before that, there was a springtime of death during the French Revolution, too, where death came disguised as freedom.  Those red seeds of death planted in Paris bloomed into the killing fields of Phol Pot in Cambodia and on and on.  But nothing like that barbarism could happen in Chicago, could it?  Or in the United States?  Let's see, the Civil War was "like so long ago."

 

 

        Because liberalism begins in the clouds, liberals are often more interested in affairs far away than they are in affairs close to home.  They'd rather protest hunger in Darfur than the high cost of riding public transportation in Chicago. 

 

        Many liberals have never seen a neighborhood change from better to worse because they are prosperous or they haven't lived in one long enough to notice.  Especially in big cities, it is hard to find someone in a trendy bar or downtown club who hasn't migrated there.  A complaint about the loss of traditions sends them to their Blackberries to google the word "root."

 

        The "Communist Manifesto" started with a few words on paper.  When put into practice, these words lead to the conclusion that death is the only way all men are equal, so let's hurry death along.  If you don't want to go that far, then there is always higher taxes.

 

        In Chicago taxes have become a kind of slow death.  Beginning this July the sales tax in the city will increase to ten percent. That's one dollar for every ten dollars you spend.

 

        Businesses die when city taxes are high and people go to the suburbs to buy what they want. Then, jobs are lost, and the city begins to die, too.  That does not trouble liberal politicians in Chicago.  They do not care if taxes mean death, because in Chicago there is a long tradition of the dead voting.

 

        The first step into the shadow of death may be a small step.  Just a few extra cents here or there. Then, take away a man's job because he does not believe in affirmative action, and you may kill his spirit with a pin prick.  The government founded to overturn discrimination, now has a policy of discrimination.  Just don't call it that.  Never to call death by its real name is a liberal maxim.

 

        The loss of a job may also mean the loss of a house.  My father's house is gone.  On bad days I believe it was the fire of failed liberal urban policies and not the fire of neglect that destroyed his house.  On good days I realize he failed because he was not a son of patronage.

 

        Easy divorce, abortion on demand, and same sex marriage are all social policies promoted by the Chicago Democrats.  These, too, lead on to the death of the traditional family.  When a Democratic candidate for president says he does not want his unmarried daughter to be "punished" by having a baby, the shadow of death has certainly settled on his quest for votes.

 

        "So what," a liberal politician argues, "the family is an archaic lump the state cannot digest.  Best to get rid of the family and replace it with a government agency."  The superintendent of Chicago's schools now wants to open dormitories and remove some students from their families.  He believes the state can give them better care.

 

        Of course, there must be room for those who are different in a society that values freedom.  A bent tree sometimes cools us better than a straight one.  Yet, as St. Augustine warns us, we must make sure our freedom is not just the freedom of a runaway slave.  Political freedom, like religious grace, should not destroy nature, but perfect it.

 

        After the family is covered by the shadow of death, the local public school may be lost, too.  This is not unusual in Chicago where fifty years of Democratic rule have done little in some city neighborhoods to protect school children from being murdered.  This violence is then blamed on easy access to hand guns. That's the way the unconscious masks death.  It projects blame on a false cause.

 

        Some of the worst schools in the state of Illinois are in Chicago.  So far this year twenty school children have been shot and killed in Chicago's inner city.  Newspaper reporters are aghast.  Now, students are marching in the streets to protest the killings.

 

        They blame everyone for these deaths except the inner city subculture that gives rise to murder, and, of course, the murderers.  A few days later the Chicago Sun-Times reports in an ironic headline, "Scuffles break out at anti-violence rally."

 

        When the shadow of death settles on a local school, then it usually stretches to the neighborhood. There is no better example of this than the Chicago neighborhood of Englewood.

 

        The Democratic politicians who control Chicago saw this neighborhood dying and did little.  It was in their interest to segregate voters in Chicago rather than integrate them and save Englewood, or other Chicago neighborhoods for that matter.

 

        Already, a funeral is planned for the southwest, Chicago communities around Daley College and Midway airport.  They may go the way of Englewood.  Even with that death, Democratic politicians will be on hand to look for votes.  Here is change you can believe.  Just change the word from English to Spanish. "Muerte" equals death!

 

        After a neighborhood and a community dies, the city may be next.  See what Democratic rule has done to New Orleans or Detroit.  Is Chicago to follow these cities to become an urban graveyard?

 

        Few in the Chicago media ever ask this question.  They do not want to see the shadow of death stretching from Lake Michigan to the prairie.

 

 

        Who knows if a social movement changes a life for better or worse?  A Russian peasant wants only bread, but is cut down by the gunfire of a Bolshevik charge.  A Chinese woman looking for rice is drowned in a river by the Red Army.

 

        Two hundred years ago lilacs bloomed while a hapless aristocrat was lead screaming to the Paris guillotine; these are the ways of the world caught up in the hope for change.

 

        Some people nowadays look to politics as others look to the hope of spring.  I remember when I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois in Urbana.  Spring came to Champaign County with the vigor of adolescence then.

 

        The windows in the classroom where I studied Spanish literature were open.  We could hear birds chirping above the drone of my professor who had a withered arm.

 

        Then, he stopped lecturing and looked out the window.  "Spring!" he said.  "Spring is a lie."  I still wonder about that moment.  Did he warn us because he had a withered arm or because he knew the truth?

 

        Today, some of my students wonder what is the meaning of our nation's prosperity if it is not anchored to the past.  Their hearts are in the right place, but their memories are short.  Is prosperity like a golden tree without roots, soon to lose its leaves and wither?  Likewise, will a nation that looses its past lose its way?

 

        This loss of direction may happen after open borders allow millions of illegal immigrants to drive down wages and not assimilate.  Does the nation die, then, and a new North American Union rise from its ashes?

 

        Call it what you will, the segregation that exemplifies Chicago may be imposed on the nation.  The Democrats will call it multiculturalism.  Finally, they breathe a sigh of relief.  The sore that was America is healed.

 

        Why is it that fifty years of civil rights agitation has done little to heal the sore of segregation or to integrate Chicago?  The answer should be obvious to those who spend their life here.  The Democratic Party in Chicago, the party of "civil rights," wants nothing to do with integration.

 

        It is only with continued segregation obscured by the rhetoric that the Chicago Democrats can maintain their urban voter base.  You have to wonder if this is what Garrison Keillor means when he writes, ... "power employs deceit and is so fond of it."

 

        Come what may, this is what I have seen from first being a student and then being a teacher.  The blond boy becomes the gray man.  The son of a traveling salesman becomes president, while virtue does not always advance as the hairline recedes.

 

        I have seen the wearing down of good intentions to where these intentions become their opposites.  I have seen how civil rights become civil wrongs.

 

        Perhaps integration and assimilation won't work.  The past fifty years of Democratic policies has lead me to doubt it.  But if integration does not work, than America can't work, either.

 

        Freud may have foreseen this when he wrote, "America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen ... but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success."

 

        Liberal politicians, motivated by theories and resentment, have more grand ambitions.  They are not content with changing just one man, they must change the world.

 

        Why should one man have a spring garden when the rest of the world is paved?  Consciously or unconsciously the deceits of the powerful will change the world.  They are driven to turn theory into practice and make a new citizen in league with death.

 

        If we borrow from the poet Yeats, then we may describe our new citizen of this most grandiose, liberal experiment for change as a gray-clad multiculturalist, a zombie, slouching towards Bethlehem.

 

        Against these efforts, we hope somewhere safe from the barbarians, a boy waits.  He bends over the yellowed pages of his Latin grammar and repeats, "hic, haec, hoc."  Something stirs underground.