heading into chapter five

When I worked for the state we had meetings, the worst of these were something called process meetings in which we would go over in exhausting detail step by step of every operation we did.  Well the underlings had to do that, the boss just sat with his arms folded and mostly looked on disapprovingly.  Worst was the middle manager who used the opportunity to beat up on the underlings in front of the boss to look good in his eyes. 

I guess if you have a large enough operation you have to have middle managers, maybe our fault was we were so small, about five people, that the middle manager just stuck out, but the worst middle manager, when she became top boss, was not so bad at all, and another temporary boss, demoted to middle manager, went from being a good guy to being a bad guy. 

I'm surprised that I can still be a big government democrat after my experience working for the government.  I'm surprised the lot of us didn't all just end up in jail, but then there is a high bar to pass before you go from the government to jail in the state of Illinois.

I'm surprised that your meetings went so well in the army.  Maybe it was because nobody could be fired.  What was the process for promotion?  Did your superior appoint you or was there a committee?

At that meeting with the parents maybe they expected you to give up something, even if just to say, well maybe I was too hasty kicking Bobby off the bus, something.  Usually both sides are expected to bend a little, even if it's just to throw the losing side a fig, just to be polite.  B ut you don't seem like much of a fig thrower when you think you are right.

Of course those segregation meetings were a farce, the white guys never intended to do anything.  I'm surprised that the black people thought they would.  Strange how they were trying to use the law to work for them when the enforcers of the law were dead set against them.  I have just finished Chapter Four, and now some of the hotheads are breaking with the established black leaders and doing things like holding demonstrations which don't seem that hotheaded today.

I guess the shit will really hit the fan when Martin Luther King comes to town.  You know I am a bit of an LBJ scholar and I remember when he wanted to do the war on poverty in Chicago he wanted his people to distribute the money.  Daley didn't mind the idea of poor people getting money, but he wanted to be the guy handing it out, and of course handing it out to his favorite poor people.  I think there is some connection to MLK in this.

There's still a lot of busing going on today.  When it came time to dismiss the kids
I always had to dismiss the bus kids early, and there were maybe five of them in a class of thirty.  And each school has special ed kids and generally a school will specialize in autistic or hard of hearing or whatever so those kids are all bussed in.  The busses take over the neighborhood during these times, but they are before the rush hours, and the schools are usually not on busy streets so it's not much of a traffic problem.

Tilden was just east of 47th and Halsted, the surrounding neighborhood was all white (still is), and didn't seem too bad, but just being close to the ghetto made us a little nervous.

One odd thing about Tilden was that it was an all boys school, so going from Tonti to there it was like they took all the girls out and replaced them with black boys. 

The cemeteries are a little segregated.  Walking through them and reading the names you can see where all the Irish are here and the Germans over there.  Some people like the Asians, had to fight to get in.  I don't know if you ever got to Bohemian National Cemetery, but that was formed when the Catholic cemetery refused to bury a Czech woman who committed suicide.  I think that was the story, though I have read one or two different ones, some kind of dust up between the Catholics and the vaunted Czech Freethinkers, that nobody wants to talk about anymore now that everybody is dead and all peaceful like.