How times change, while some try to keep things the same no matter what

Thinking back to my own years in high school just over three decades ago, I can’t help but wonder how different the reaction would have been had anybody brought up the idea of transgender students.

District engaged in confusion over transgender issue

I suspect that back then, the knuckleheads of the class would have thought they were doing all of us some sort of service by taking such a student and sticking his/her head in a toilet. If not just administering a beating.

THE SAD THING is that the school’s administration likely would have taken their side, and figured that the transgendered student already going through enough confusion in life brought all the abuse upon themselves!

So learning about the situation in Township High School District 211 in suburban Palatine makes me wonder just how far have we as a society progressed?

For it seems there is a transgender student who wants to be able to use the locker room facilities of the gender that the student identifies with – rather than the one the student was actually born to.

I could envision officials of the past wanting to think that student a trouble-maker and trying to find an excuse to suspect the student. It seems as though this high school wanted to try to cooperate.

ALTHOUGH THEIR LEVEL of cooperation comes in so low that it seems to be insufficient. Making it highly likely that federal authorities will wind up having to resolve this situation.

For that student already had filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s civil rights office, seeking the right to use the locker rooms at the high school. The school had suggested the student could use that locker room, but only if that student changed clothes and showered in private.

Locker rooms are now more than just a smelly place to change

The Chicago Tribune reported Monday that federal officials notified the school district their solution is inadequate. Supposedly, a written, more-detailed explanation will be forthcoming.

Although the district said in its own statement that the federal government hinted that their proposed solution is “inadequate and discriminatory.”

PERSONALLY, I’D BE inclined to say it’s just convoluted – because the idea of banishing this particular student to use of the locker room in private probably would do nothing more than reinforce the sentiment of some who want to think this particular person is some sort of freak who needs to be kept in isolation.

It even brings to mind the old “separate, but equal” status that used to be used to justify separate restroom facilities for non-white people.

I’ll be the first to admit this is an issue that confuses many people. It’s not one that I particularly identify with – since I have never had any real confusion about my own gender or any desire to be opposite of what I was born with.

But my own personal sentiment of thinking that people have a right to mind their own business – and not have other people mind it for them – makes me think we ought to sympathize with such people.

ALTHOUGH THIS ISSUE gets confused by the fact that most of the law concerning the rights of transgender people is geared toward adults. Someday, this person will have the law on their side.

Until then, they’re going to be stuck with suffering even more than the typical teenager does. Which is a real shame.

A ;major league' fossil?

Particularly since there are those who will want to interfere and “turn back the clock” so to speak. Take the attitude of former Houston Astros ballplayer Lance Berkman, who is opposed to an equal rights ordinance that Houston is contemplating, calling it a “bathroom ordinance” that would, “allow troubled men to enter public bathrooms, showers and locker rooms.”

Maybe he would think the Palatine high school district is justified, perhaps not even tough enough. Although he strikes me as someone who thinks he’s still in high school – and that the way of thinking from some two decades ago still applies.

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‘Mongo’ for mayor? It could happen

It’s a shame that Walter Payton isn’t with us any longer. Because we’d probably have some people proclaiming “Sweetness” for president instead of a Chicago White Sox fan!

I couldn’t help but have that reaction to learning that another former Chicago Bear, Steve McMichael, has his own political aspirations.

NOT THAT “MONGO” and his crazed-bordering-on-insane personality would want to be in the White House. Or at City Hall. Or any other such place.

But it seems that ESPN is reporting that McMichael wants to be the chief executive of the local government in Romeoville – the suburb in which he lives and operates the Mongo McMichael’s sports bar.

Which makes me wonder if the late baseball star Moose Skowron should have taken advantage of that Cicero tavern named “Just Call Me Moose” and tried running for public office himself.

For the record, McMichael said during an ESPN 1000 radio interview (a.k.a., WMVP-AM in Chicago) that his sports bar customers have complained to him about the way their local government works, and planted the idea in his head to run for the top post himself.

ALTHOUGH I WONDER how McMichael will react when he learns that he would actually be a “village president” (although most of these suburban village presidents go about calling themselves “mayor,” thinking it makes them sound more impressive)?

Also, how will he react to learning that Romeoville has a form of government in which there is a village manager who does the day-to-day duties of running the village.

That person works at the pleasure of the village president and the village trustees. But being the village president/mayor/chief executive essentially is a figurehead position. Will McMichael comprehend that fact? Or will Romeoville turn into a municipal circus?

“Mongo” will get to wield a gavel with the best of them – if he can manage to win the next municipal election cycle (with Election Day scheduled for April 9).

PERSONALLY, IT WOULDN’T shock me to learn that McMichael could win. There will be a number of people who will get off on the novelty of voting for a celebrity for government office.

As for those people who will argue that it is embarrassing to put the one-time Bear/pro wrestler/Chicago Slaughter coach/football broadcast pre-game analyst in office likely will come across as fuddy duddys for wanting to have someone actually knowledgeable about government in office.

Besides, it is amusing to hear McMichael say he will consult the village president of Palatine – who happens to be one-time NFL linebacker (including a Chicago Bears stint) Jim Schwantz.

It might be the first time that Romeoville and Palatine had anything in common, or were thought of as a pair in any way.

BUT TO THE best of my knowledge, Palatine isn’t governed the least bit irresponsibly by Schwantz.

Then again, Schwantz didn’t have anything resembling the wacky personality that McMichael has – although he told ESPN radio that the whole “Mongo” personality, “was a character I played when I played for the Bears.”

I’m not sure I buy into that. Which makes me think that the one-time Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura (as in a former professional wrestler, just like Mongo) would be a more apt comparison.

Because, let’s be honest, Illinois Supreme Court Justice Robert Thomas (a former Bears kicker) was unique in that he actually followed up an athletic career with a law school education and time as an attorney before he went for that seat on the high court.

ULTIMATELY, IT WILL be up to the people who live in Romeoville and have bothered both to register to vote and to turn out on Election Day to decide if they want to have a “Mayor Mongo.”

They will prove to us the truth of the old adage, “Every country has the government it deserves.”

And I suspect that the rest of us will enjoy the novelty – although it would be amusing to see if Romeoville could pay neighboring Joliet in football. Just think of how McMichael could run roughshod over his home village if they lost?

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Suburban hostility toward Chicago is silly

My perception of Chicago and its surrounding population is a bit different from many others – I didn’t grow up in a single house my entire childhood. I can say that I lived in the city (far south, near north and northwest sides), assorted suburbs and a couple of downstate towns.

If anything, I am a suburban-type person who is a bit more comfortable with the city than many of my neighbors are, and who expects someday to again live in Chicago proper.

SO MY REACTION is to see the humor in a pair of recent incidents where suburban Chicago types are so desperate to maintain their separation from “that urban rathole” that many of them perceive when they think (at all) of the city.

How else to explain the reaction of people from Indiana who on Wednesday learned that some of those “evil Chicagoans” may have tried to cast ballots in their presidential primary on May 6.

Illinoisans (including those who identify primarily with Chicago rather than their home state) had their chance to vote on Feb. 5. Yet elections officials in Lake County, Ind., told local reporters that there were “several” instances of people at polling places in Whiting and East Chicago who asked to cast ballots – and produced Illinois driver’s licenses or other identification indicating they live west of State Line Road.

The Times of Northwest Indiana newspaper reported that none of those people were permitted to vote, and officials are trying to figure out if it was just confusion on the part of people or if there really was some sort of criminal plot to get ballots cast by non-registered voters.

SOME PEOPLE MIGHT think it ridiculously naïve to think that someone would not realize they should not be venturing across the state line in order to try to vote in a presidential campaign. Yet I also have been made aware on many occasions in my life as a reporter-type that not everybody pays strict attention to the specifics of government and electoral politics.

There are many otherwise intelligent people who do not understand the concept of jurisdiction, and can resent it when they are told by a local government official that some facility that sits within a village’s boundaries is actually a Cook County-controlled facility or is a road or other building that falls under state government’s control.

I once had a person (loosely affiliated with the ’92 presidential aspirations of Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot) that all government is really the same, and that one of the “reforms” that ought to be imposed is elimination of various levels of government control.

So could there be some people from Chicago who heard all the intense news coverage of the Indiana primary campaign activity and figured it was their civic duty to make a trip to the Land of Hoosiers so as to cast a ballot?

IT’S POSSIBLE, EVEN though a part of me finds it scary to realize that some otherwise hardworking, decent people in our society are clueless enough to not immediately realize the difference between an Illinois primary election and one in Indiana.

Of course, I couldn’t help but notice that the sources of these stories about “Those People” from Illinois coming east to Indiana were members of the Republican Party organization in Lake County.

How weak is the GOP in the northwest part of Indiana? Almost as weak as the GOP in Chicago proper, I would think. At least the Hoosier GOPers in and around Hammond, Ind., know they have the bulk of the rest of their state on their side, whereas the GOP in Illinois has become so weak that it can offer the Chicago Republican Party no moral support whatsoever.

So making scurrilous charges about Chicagoans coming to Indiana to try to stuff ballot boxes with their “outsider” way of thinking is probably the most attention the Lake County Republicans will get in a long time. And there are too many local people who are willing to believe it because they want to think the isolated ways of their town are the ways of the world.

MY POINT IS that while I don’t doubt there are some people clueless enough to try to vote in an Indiana election, I’m not sure the problem is anywhere near as extensive as Indiana Republicans want us to believe it is.

But the notion of wanting to maintain separation between Chicago and its suburbs is not just an issue for the people who live in the part of the metropolitan area that spills over into Indiana. Sadly, even some of those people fortunate enough to live in Cook County, Ill., don’t truly appreciate the benefits their towns derive from being so close to the Second City (it’s really third), which remains the transportation hub of the nation.

Why else would some residents of the northwest suburb of Palatine be seriously looking into the concept of secession?

Some people up there do not like the idea that they are a part of Cook County, which they feel is totally dominated by Chicago. They would rather be able to say they are in a separate county – one of which Palatine would likely become the county seat.

A BILL IS pending in the Illinois General Assembly (sponsored by Palatine’s member of the Illinois House of Representatives) to make it easier for communities to secede from their counties, although it is far from certain that anything will ever happen to advance that bill.

Earlier this week, county board President Todd Stroger held a hearing at Harper College, where he confronted the masses of Palatine (about 200 people, according to the Chicago Tribune) and listened as they blamed his urban ways for causing the problems that confront Cook County government.

“I think Cook County represents the residents of Chicago,” and “I don’t trust you guys,” were among the lines of rhetoric tossed out at Stroger by people who likely wish they lived in some rural burg without any significant city in or near its boundaries.

I only wish these people could take a look at rural life sometime, particularly the sense of isolation that occurs when one’s home is far from anything and when such daily necessities as grocery shopping requires lengthy automobile drives.

THEY’D SEE PLACES like some tiny communities in Southern Illinois and rural Indiana where overall population is on the decline, and where local officials have to seriously address issues related to the drain of young people with talent and skills from their populations.

A place like Palatine can claim some stability in large part because it is so close to a place like Chicago, which serves as a drawing card to the region, and to which some of its working population spills off into the surrounding suburbs.

If the unique set of circumstances required for secession were to ever occur, we would see a place like Palatine engage in celebration for a day at the thought of their independence.

Then, after realizing just what they lost by not being directly tied to the largest county in Illinois (at 5 million people, it is five times the size of the second-largest county – DuPage), we likely would see a mass movement to undo the damage they had just done. It would be interesting to see how quickly they would clamor to come back to Cook.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: And we wonder why some Indiana and Michigan residents make disparaging remarks about (http://nwi.com/articles/2008/06/18/news/top_news/doc08777d7ebc2032a18625746c0000e8c6.txt) “F-I-P’s.”

Palatine wants to think of itself as a world separate from the rest of the Chicago (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-stroger-17-both-jun17,0,1327158.story) metropolitan area.