Stop the presses! I gotta mourn the REAL Ernie Banks!

Ernie Banks was a spectacular ballplayer and special guy.  But, Ernie, with all respect, I'm getting the idea from media response your passing, and the recent passing of Mayor Byrne as well, that Chicago is living in the past. Makes me wonder: have Chicagoans (and/or its media) simply given up on the city's future? Instead of informing, inspiring and mobilizing Chicagoans to solve critical problems like youth violence, media spend so much time these days celebrating fallen heroes and merely mourning murder after murder of innocent teen victims like Hadiya Pendleton . . .

Anyway, so does it feel high up there in firmament of the media-driven Star System that gives Chicagoans such an imperfect idea of how people actually think about the issues of the day? It listens only to you stars, seldom to the people. And it remembers you only in certain idealized, superficial ways. In your case, you were always smiling, always full of love, always boosting baseball, the Cubs and Chicago. That was you! Of course it was a role you played, and played to perfection, no doubt enjoying it most of the time. But Ernie: did you want to be remembered only for this role?

Your own words, below, reveal the man behind the role, a black athlete deeply concerned with the issues of the day. But before hearing them, let's pay homage to your deification in Chicago's daily newspapers. In the Tribune in began on Saturday:

And in  the Saturday Sun-Times:

Then I saw the Sun-Times front page for Sunday:

The Sunday Tribune did likewise. But its front page was missing from Newseum site. So here's the front page of the Sports section:

Get the idea? Seen enough? Was this the REAL you? I'm sparing you soupy clips of reverential talking heads on TV news and talk radio shows. It was all the same thing, over and over again.

Isn't all this hoopla overdoing it just a bit? Makes me wonder: are Chicagoans living in the past - or is it just Chicago's media? At the poll at the toolbar on the right, you (and others) can vote your opinions.

And now, for anyone who wants to see and hear the REAL Ernie Banks, here are two clips from a terrific 2004 interview. You are looking fine and sharp as a tack at the ripe old age 73. These clips? We certainly aren't seeing them anywhere in Chicago's media today.

In the first clip you talk admiringly about what you yourself did not do: about how Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood stood up and made a difference and fought and paid the price - Flood especially for challenging baseball's reserve clause - for what all of you knew was right and just. You also discuss the cautious "Listen and Learn" image that you picked up from Robinson, an image that white Chicago chose to interpret as your joyful affirmation of a status quo about which you actually had severe misgivings.   

In this second clip you bring us up to date about alarming changes in American culture that have resulted in fewer blacks in baseball and given us gangs and drugs: what today we call "youth violence".

Your thoughts in these and other great Visionary Project clips of Ernie Banks on YouTube make me think that in addition to the media-driven Star System that pretty much calls the shots in Chicago you would have liked to see a future-oriented, media-driven People System committed to informing, inspiring and mobilizing young people and adults in Chicago to address and resolve gigantic, systemic problems like youth violence.

"Let's Play 2!"  

R.I.P. the REAL Ernie Banks

Top Ten Reasons why Chicago needs a Comprehensive Chicago Directory of Youth Violence Resources - Part I

Printable version (1800 words)

Here's a question that will either put you to sleep or strike you as a crucial first step in Chicago's long-term goal of making itself a safe city for all Chicagoans, not just some. The idea would be to make Chicago the safest big city in America (as any Chicago mayor would be proud to call it) not just in terms of low crime rates but in terms of low levels of youth violence of all kinds.

The question: In Chicago how great is the need for a searchable, accessible, comprehensive and current directory of resources that all Chicagoans, young and old, can use to reduce violence in their families, neighborhoods citywide and even region-wide? This would be a multimedia, multi-device, neighborhood specific list of resources made specific to all 77 Chicago neighborhoods. It would be made available in versions designed for five audiences:

1. Young people
2. Adults: parents, teachers, community leaders 
3. Donors (foundations, individuals, businesses) and Advertisers (businesses)
4. Chicago's media
5. City Hall and other policy makers at local, state, national levels.

This directory would gather, publicize and constantly update all resources and kinds of resources - educational, public and mental health, criminal justice, jobs and careers, recreational, cultural, spiritual - relating to the reduction of youth violence in Chicago.

Most everyone who's working to reduce youth violence in Chicago tells me the need for such a directory is urgent. Why? I see all kinds of reasons, all of them, when you think of it, stemming from the information bottleneck that denies every Chicagoan including policy makers full awareness of existing youth violence resources! (BTW, the term information bottleneck came from a smart young man - I  never got his name - who spoke at the June 25 meeting of the Parents' Political University in Austin.)

I've been thinking about this topic recently and came up with a Letterman-style Top Ten list of reasons for it:

Very funny Dave,  but what matters in Chicago is children and kids' lives, not dogs and pet peeves.

So here goes: Chicagoland needs a comprehensive directory of youth violence resources so it can

10. Begin to do what the Bears, Bulls, Cub, Sox and Blackhawks already do in spades for the entire Chicagoland region: unify city and suburban residents alike. A comprehensive youth violence directory of city/surburban resources will be a crucial first step in the ongoing process of empowering all Chicagoans to be as committed to their city and region's future as they are to the futures of their pro sports teams. 

Note. This directory would not only list suburban as well as city resources but also list resources for all kinds of youth violence: bullying, sexual, self-harm, and domestic. All of these in addition to the gun/gang/drug kinds of violence that are usually associated with the city. (And don't forget that the suburbs now have 15,000 gang members, as compared to the city's 100,000 or more, according to Chicago Crime Council's 2012 Gang Book.) 

Note 1. Drug use in the suburbs is about the same as in the city, as the authoritative Illinois Youth Survey confirms. For many years, the Survey has found that past 30-day use of marijuana, for instance, has been almost 30% for city and suburban high school seniors alike (though the 2014 findings for the city appear to show a higher rate in the city.

Over the years there's been some (but not enough) good reporting on the link between city/suburban drug use and drug distribution:

Here (Chicago Tribune, Jean Latz Griffin, 1986, terrific article)

Here (Chicago Tribune, Robert McCoppin, 2009

Here (WBEZ radio, Chip Mitchell, heckuva story from Mexico in 2013)

Here (Huffington Post, with links to Mike Dumpke's WBEZ/Chicago Reader series about West Side heroin dealing as a business proposition, 2014)

Here (Chicago Tribune, John Keilman and Matt Walberg, 2014)

Note 2. About the suburbs: I've lived in suburban Glenview for the past 16 years. My experience of suburban public schools - including several top-ranked Illinois high school schools, at one of which my son is now a junior - has been that up 30% of students at these schools suffer from forms of violence for which students see drug abuse, initially at least, as a way to reduce pain or simply to get to sleep. And because media pay almost zero attention to these kinds of youth violence, there are almost no community-wide efforts to address them.

9.  Give all Chicagoans, city and suburban, some hard evidence that Chicago is at long last  beginning to address all forms of its systemic youth violence problem systemically,

8.  Give researchers in area universities data for use in developing city and region wide strategies for addressing youth violence. For instance, for determining which city neighborhoods are underserved or overserved with youth violence resources.

7.  Give Chicago's elementary and secondary schools neighborhood-specific resources that teachers and staff can use in two ways: to help individual students and to give entire student bodies a sense of belonging to their local communities,

6.  Generate volunteers for the mostly non-profit organizations that provide these resources: volunteer tutors and mentors, for instance, for the approximately 200,000 CPS students who currently need them,

5.  Connect existing violence reduction groups with each other so they can interact more efficiently and cooperatively with each other, including creating collaborations to raise funds or to improve program outcomes.

4.  Give Chicago's media reliable, detailed information for their use in supplementing their existing Crime Story coverage of youth violence with Full Story (use this link, not the screenshot below) coverage that empowers Chicagoans to be problem solvers as opposed to mourners or victims of youth violence,

How Chicago's public information system - its media - can give Chicagoans the tools they need to reduce youth violence in their neighborhoods.

3.  Give prospective funders - foundations, business groups and private donors - comprehensive information about existing violence reduction resources. The need here is to remedy the drastic shortage of funds that currently hampers the efforts of all but a very few existing violence reduction groups.

2. Inform government leaders at city, state, and national levels whose often astonishing ignorance of existing resources, including the absence of resources in the neighborhoods that need them most, prevents government at all levels from addressing youth violence effectively,

1. Remedy the information bottleneck that denies Chicagoans living in the city's roughest neighborhoods access to existing violence reduction resources already available to them in their neighborhoods. The tragedy here is of lives lost because Chicagoans did not know about resources that could have saved lives: likely hundreds or thousands of lives had all Chicagoans had access to a reliable and comprehensive directory of these resources five or ten years go.

OK, so why hasn't Chicago had a directory like this for decades? Good question for our Aldermen and State Representatives and Senators. And our Congressmen and Senators in Washington. And for City Hall and citywide organizations like Chicago Community Trust and United Way. Better question: what will it take for Chicago to get one?

Two people I know - Becky Levin of Strengthening Chicago's Youth (SCY) and Dan Bassill of the Tutor/Mentor Institute - have worked hard to create a directory like this. Their answer? You guessed it. It's money. But to my knowledge, no one has ever attempted even an informal cost estimate for directory like this, let alone advanced strategies for underwriting the costs of creating one, keeping it current, and disseminating it to all Chicagoans.

So Part II of this post will do three things. It will

• Give a rough estimate of the three costs of creating, disseminating and maintaining such a directory. By "rough" I mean really rough: to the nearest million or even five million. After decades of failed, piecemeal efforts to empower Chicagoans to reduce youth violence and save lives citywide, I expect that this directory, with its life-saving, city-unifying capabilities, would easily be worth $20 million. But I bet costs would a fraction of that amount.
• If this estimate sounds off the wall, bear in mind the $51 million cost of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), a magnificent and epic survey of Chicago neighborhoods conducted between 1995 and 2005 that was underwritten by the MacArthur Foundation and the U.S. Department of Justice. 
• The tragedy of PHDCN and its splendid finding of the value of neighborhood collective efficacy is that, upon completion, nothing ever came of it. Nothing! 
• As PHDCN's Lead Investigator, Felton Earls, said (discretely) at a 2013 Harvard Club of Chicago presentation, Chicago simply dropped the ball on PHDCN after its completion. $51 million down the drain, so far as Chicago was concerned. Undaunted, Earls went to successfully implement collective efficacy in Tanzania and Costa Rica, focusing on children as change agents.

• Part II will also throw out some ideas as to how a Citywide directory might be funded. These will focus on:
• A multisource or "rainbow" spectrum of funders based on mutually beneficial partnerships created among existing violence reduction groups, funders, City Hall, Chicago's media, major and local advertisers and the people of Chicago, including Chicago's young people.

• Finally, Part II will list two kinds of aggregators of existing youth violence reduction organizations in Chicago: convenors of these groups and creators of (partial) directories of them. Here are three groups that fullfill both functions:
• Strengthening Chicago's Youth (SCY) has aggregated some 200 groups. And it holds quarterly meetings to connect them on topics of mutual concern.
• Mayor Emanuel's Commission for a Safer Chicago is doing likewise. Here's the six-page Executive Summary of its Strategic Plan for 2015, which lists 130 participants.  Here's the full 68 page Plan which, among other things, proposes a mobile-device accessible directory of community resources for young people to be housed at the Chicago City of Learning site: 

• A third convenor/aggregator group is the Tutor/Mentor Institute. T/MI convenes existing organizations at its bi-annual Tutor/Mentor conferences (next one: May 8, 2015) and aggregates scores of organizations. Director Dan Bassill is a systems thinker whose blogs and websites will give you free and full access to hundreds of his hyperlinked maps. This one, below, instantly links you to some thirty local groups. And it's current to January 15, 2015. (To access an organization's website on it, just click on the little gray box, then click the link that shows up)

How I CAN'T BREATHE Can Become I CAN BREATHE in Chicago (and elsewhere)

Printable version of this 2500 word post.

Derrick Rose started it all with a tee shirt worn without comment on December 6 during warm ups before a Bulls game with Golden State. Beautiful gesture. Reminded me of Muhammad Ali refusing draft induction with the words "I ain't got nothing against the Viet Cong".

Soon Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg would set Rose's silent protest in the tradition of athletes like Ali who spoke out on racial issues when no one expected them to.

Soon other superstar athletes were following Rose's lead. Why? Because most had grown up on rough neighborhoods. They knew all to well how police treat people there.

If you haven't seen it, here's the disturbing "I can't breathe" video that culminates with Staten Island/New York resident Eric Garner repeatedly saying "I can't breathe" to the police officers who held him on the ground and in a choke hold. Garner died. The video, below, begins with a lengthy standoff argument:

And leads to this still shot:

Hard to watch. Derrick Rose surely had it in mind when he wore the tee shirt that echoes Garner's last words. 

But guess what: Rose's protest hit Chicago like a summer squall: riveting for a few minutes, then forgotten as it blows over. So chalk up yet another lost opportunity for the city to improve police/community relations and reduce youth violence. Opportunities like those that followed the murders of Chicago innocents Hadiya Pendleton, Dantrell Davis, and, most recently, Demario Bailey. 

Youth violence and police violence? They're two sides of the same coin. Where you see one,  you see the other.

Question: will the time ever come when Chicago publicly and definitively commits itself to reducing the police and youth violence that for decades has plagued its poorer, nonwhite neighborhoods?

A few weeks after the Eric Garner incident, all hope for productive public discussion of police/community relations in Chicago (and elsewhere) was dashed, for the time being at least, when media were flooded images of New York's finest turning their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio. The mayor's comment that "centuries of racism" fueled the Garner incident had outraged them.

All this left Chicago frozen like a deer in headlights, awaiting the next Eric Garner, Michael Brown or Hadiya Pendleton incident. Amazingly, the January 11 episode of The Good Wife, taped before the Michael Brown incident in Ferguson, Missouri, prophetically affirmed (more on this below).

It's time for new ideas and new solutions. Specifically, it's time for new uses of media aimed at de-polarizing and unifying citizens (including police) instead of polarizing them as media have done for decades.

A couple weeks ago the ever-observant Dan Bassill of the Tutor/Mentor Connection sent me a link to his comments an interesting opinion piece about youth violence in Chicago. They are well worth reading. Here, however, I want to give my own thoughts on this piece.

The piece is "The lies about murder in Chicago" by Dan Proft, a political commentator, Republican candidate for governor of Illinois in the 2010 election and, until recently, a talk-show co-host on WLS-AM.

The above "fixed, not broken" message carries through in Proft's Chicago Tribune piece. His solution?

"Stop the lying," Proft says. "The politicians lie to us. We lie to each other. We lie to ourselves."  

Hate to say so, but these thoughts pretty much sum up my own experience of Chicago's efforts to address youth violence since I moved to the city 30 years ago. We've fooled ourselves into thinking of soluble problems as insoluble ones.

Proft doesn't hold back. "In short, Chicago's civic institutions are structural failures. City government has failed. The police department has failed. Nearly everything we have tried has failed."

It would be interesting to see their opinions measured in a citywide poll on these questions.

But what does Proft say needs to be done? "We need to contemplate and debate deep, transformative, difficult change", he says. Makes sense to me.

But where to start? Proft insists that he doesn't "pretend to possess the secret knowledge as to how to stop the slayings on our streets". A curious phrase, this "secret knowledge". It implies something hidden from public view.

I will reach to Dan Proft. I want ask him if he thinks the arena that holds his secret knowledge is in fact hidden in plain view for all Chicagoans to see: it's Chicago's media. To my mind, Proft himself confirms this fact with his insightful satire of the hollow rituals for media that invariably constitute Chicago's response to the murder of an innocent child:

Proft sees Chicago's media, and in particular the  24 hour news cycle of news media, as the stage for tediously repetitious performances that serve only to express and confirm the city's utter helplessness to deal effectively with youth violence.

But Proft fails to take this invaluable insight to its logical conclusion: namely, that Chicago's news media are themselves part of the problem. After all, their constant ritualistic depictions of this helplessness are instrumental in demoralizing the public and creating the state of civic apathy that holds Chicago in its grip today. When Proft he concludes his satire by asserting that "Everyone moves on", "everyone" necessarily includes Chicago's news media.

There, I submit, you have the secret knowledge of which Dan Proft speaks. It's a knowledge of which, paradoxically, he seems to be imperfectly aware. As a former radio talk show host, he's a member of the media. Chicago's news media, I've long felt, are able to hold up mirrors to just about everyone but themselves.

So let's hold a mirror up to news media with a view to seeing how they can put their resources to constructive use. To this end, Chicago, including its media professionals, need only to acknowledge media's extraordinary power to shape public opinion and behavior for good or ill. Then they will be in a position to use some their communications tools accordingly.

It's as simple as that. And I've often said, media can profit handsomely from constructive uses of their resources. But then things get tricky. Why? Because media's attention span - the 24-hour news cycle, described at Wikipedia that meets audience demand and delivers audiences (consumers) to advertisers - is so short. EXTREMELY short!

The 24-news cycle, marketers, advertisers and media professionals alike tell us, is driven by incessant public demand for latest developments, by an insatiable appetite for constant newness.

In this context, Derrick Rose's startling "I can't breathe" moment riveted the attention of Chicagoans for several days. It was truly new and completely unexpected! So also was the spontaneous support of other big-time athletes who wore the same tee short in support of Rose.

But what happened next? "I can't breathe" soon faded from the evening news and from public view. Why? Because it was followed by no subsequent newsworthy developments. And, to borrow Proft's image, because Jay Cutler was benched.

So let's ask ourselves: what would a sequence of newsworthy developments following Derrick Rose's "I can't breathe" gesture look like?

Well, here's one. Get ready, it's a bit of a newsflash. CPD Superintendent Garry McCarthy could tell all Chicagoans what he's repeatedly told West Side residents since 2009: namely that African-Americans have reason not to trust their police. (McCarthy said this, by the way, in at least one press that was covered by major news media.)

Next, Mayor Emanuel and Superintendent McCarthy could jointly commit to developing programs committed to reducing inflammatory language and conduct of both police and citizens in every one of Chicago's high-crime neighborhoods.

Not just some. In every high-crime neighborhood. Chicago needs a citywide project, not yet another pilot project.

The YMCA's "Bridging the Divide" program is currently working to improve youth/police relations in high crime neighborhoods. But it's not a citywide. And - surprise, surprise - it's not getting attention in Chicago's mainstream media.

So what to do? Well, once a city leaders (including police) and media have mapped out an effective citywide program, Derrick Rose and other Chicago Bulls (if they wished) could wear I Can Breathe tee shirts during warm ups for Bulls games.

How beautiful would that be? NBA teams in other cities would likely follow suit. Good things resulting from I Can Breathe in Chicago could begin to happen nationwide. 

But all this would be just a beginning. We must keep good things happening. To this end, a coordinated, citizen-participatory sequence of newsworthy activities occurring on the street and in the media would have to be in place.

One useful media activity would be for news media to give all Chicagoans what they presently lack: access to resources in their neighborhoods that they can use to prevent and reduce youth violence. One promising technique for disseminating these resources has been set forth in this Full Story proposal that Chicago Civic Media is now advancing to several groups in Chicago:

Another would be the routine airing on the TV evening news of dynamic video footage telling the ongoing story of young people and police striving and struggling to improve communication. Striving and struggling, in other words, to help each other, and their communities, to breathe.

To get through to the African American teenagers who are coming of age Chicago's violent neighborhoods, audio footage of these efforts could be broadcast on hip hop radio stations like WGCI-FM 107.5 and WPWX 92.3 FM.

These first steps would do something, but not nearly enough, to rouse Chicago from its 50 year nightmare of youth violence. Much more would need to be done in order to inspire and mobilize Chicagoans - including Chicago's finest - to step up and take responsibility for improving police/community relations and reducing youth violence.

For help all this to happen, a network TV series - a reality TV series, I'm thinking - could tell the ongoing story of the successes and failures of Chicago's ongoing I Can Breathe efforts.

Sound unrealistic? Bear in mind that two successful mainstream TV dramas have already dramatized the story of youth violence in Chicago. The first aired last January:

It was the eight-segment Chicagoland series, produced by CNN in part as a response to "vagaries of the news cycle", as the Hollywood Reporter said in its review of the series. As the above image suggests, it struck many in Chicago as propaganda for Mayor Emanuel.

The second program is The Good Wife. Now in its sixth season, it airs Sunday evenings at 9:00pm on CBS. The January 11 episode entitled "The Debate" is a must-see from the standpoint of its depiction of the breakdown of police/community relations. It tells a story in which Chicago is torn by citywide protests that unmistakably echo those of Ferguson, Missouri.

This episode opens with a jumbled, cell-phone video of a fatal incident of possible police brutality over which is layered the following astonishing statement:

This statement gives this entire episode a quality that is nothing short of prophetic. After the video comes a TV news anchor's account of the incident as seen on someone's laptop computer:

These two media accounts of a Michal Brown-type incident - a cell phone video of it and a media newscast account of it - are the first of several media accounts of this episode and its aftermath that, among other drivers, drive the complex narrative of this episode. It's well worth watching.

I think of Chicagoland and The Good Wife as strong precedents for future network TV programming that will take Chicago to the next level in its quest to solve youth violence and improve broken police/community relations. The next level? The possibilities are limitless. But consider the following. Careful, it will surprise you.

Consider a Chicago-based I Can Breathe Reality TV series. Think of a reality-based and reality-driven documentary television that is committed to a truthful reporting and telling of the ongoing story of Chicago's efforts to do what no other American city has ever dared to do: use its media - the city's public communications system - for the constructive purpose of defining and solving, with full citizen input, a problem that threatens the city's and region's future.

This ongoing documentary could air weekly over a full 15 or 20 episode season, just like American Idol. Better yet, it might air year-round, with weekly, bi-weekly or monthly episodes. Occasional televised Chicago Town Hall meetings could commit Chicago to placing on the public record the success or failure of the city's collective I Can Breathe efforts.

Would this programming catch on with Chicagoans? Would they watch it? Ask yourself: what could  possibly be more powerfully dramatic to Chicagoans and their city's future than the life and death issues of youth violence and the underlying issues of gangs, guns and drugs.

The story of these issues would furthermore of necessity be grounded in history: in that of the growth of drug-dealing gangs in Chicago since the 1960's and in that of the successes and failures of the so-called War on Drugs.

To get through to Chicagoans and to dispel the polarities that set us against each other today, I believe that the drama of the city's I can't breathe efforts would have to be told in a certain way. It would have to be tragicomic in tone. This needs explanation.

First, this drama would have document the sheer tragedy of the fact that "Chicago has lost two generations of young people to gangs and drugs", as Mayor Richard M. Daley put it in 1992. (Today, of course, that total is three generations and counting.)

Second: into this tragedy would be infused rich veins of the dark, gallows humor that Chicagoans - police, young people, politicians, community activists and journalists - have developed in the face of the city's often laughable attempts to stop youth violence.


Now let's take a look at this Chicago scenario from a national perspective. For years national news media have pilloried Chicago as the Murder Capital of America. But when Chicago's media-driven I Can Breathe efforts begin to succeed in making good things happen, national and international media will rush to extol Chicago as the first city in America to use its mainstream media to improve police/community relations.

How beautiful would that be? Today, however, none of these good things are happening. Not one is even on the horizon. So what is happening instead?  Dan Proft has answered that question to my satisfaction.


So then: what will it take for Chicago to jolt itself from its 50-year nightmare of youth violence? The answer sure ain't rocket science.

And the answer sure isn't blowing in the wind. For decades it's been staring us in the face from dawn to dusk on our TV screens and in our newspapers. Alarmist images like this Sun-Times logo only sink us deeper into our nightmare of apathy and helplessness.

I betcha anything Derrick Rose would agree with all of this.

Pro Football and Youth Violence: What Do They Have in Common? (Papa Bear George Halas had the right idea)

Nothing, you might think, nothing whatsoever. Chicagoans live for pro football. And they run like hell from youth violence. Case closed.

But look again. Look at Chicago's media. Think about how they make money: how they use both pro football and youth violence to create huge audiences of consumers - of sports fans and frightened citizens - which they then deliver to advertisers. That's how they make money. And they don't do it individually. Media do it collectively! 

But there's more. Ask yourself: what are Chicago's media doing collectively today to empower Chicagoans to solve youth violence and to create safe neighborhoods? All this by contrast with the  nonstop disempowering accounts of dangerous neighborhoods that presently dominates media coverage of youth violence in Chicago.

Not much. Next to  nothing. You see little bits and pieces here and there: the Tribune's commendably citizen participatory New Plan of Chicago. But not even other Tribune Corp media have shown any interest it it. Then, there are stories on Chicago Public Radio, but nonwhites in Chicago's rough neighborhoods don't listen to WBEZ. Finally, there's nothing meaningful on the city's mainstream TV stations, all of which are licensed in the public interest by the Federal Communications Commission.

Now contrast neglect of solutions for youth violence in Chicago's media with media's obsessive coverage of the search for solutions to the Bear's dismal 2014 season. It's mountains to molehills.

So here's my point: With all this in mind, would you believe that there was once a time in Chicago when George Halas' Chicago Bears couldn't beg, borrow or steal coverage of any kind in Chicago's media?

George Halas, back in his semipro days when media completely ignored pro football

The link of media neglect pro football and youth violence reduction hit me several weeks ago as I reading Tribune sports writer Don Pierson's terrific article about George Halas and the early days of pro football in Chicago. There was a time, Pierson says, when  

Bears founder George Halas, who practically invented play for pay, was his own press agent, writing articles in the 1920s for newspapers that thought the college game was the only pure and true football worth covering.

Pierson's source is Halas on Halas, Halas' 1979 autobiography. Thanks to Pierson, I just read it. There are books. And then there are Books. Books convey soul the writer. Halas on Halas is a Book. And a remedy the Bears' sorry 2014 season.

Get it for a buck at Amazon.com!

But Halas on Halas is much more than that. It shows how George Halas was able to create a symbiosis betweeen his Chicago Bears and Chicago's media. So do you want to work for safe neighborhoods in Chicago? Then do what Halas did: create a mutually beneficial symbiosis between the city's media and Chicagoans who want safe neighborhoods.

Halas, quoted by Pierson below, does a beautiful job of telling the story of how he himself initiated this symbiosis:

"At last the newspapers discovered the Bears. I kept writing articles about upcoming games, and by reading the papers I learned editors like superlatives. I blush when I think how many times I wrote that the next game was going to be the most difficult of the season, or how a new player was the fastest man in the West. I would write how fearless they were on the field, but what fine gentlemen they were at all other times.

"One glorious Monday I awoke to find the Chicago Tribune had made our game its top sports story. I went to the Tribune and thanked the young sports editor, Don Maxwell."

Leave it to Halas, of course, to point out the symbiotic relationship between his enterprise and newspapers: "Maxwell said, 'The Tribune and I should thank you. Sunday in autumn is a dull sports day. We need something exciting for our Monday pages.' "

Halas, in short, did the Tribune a big favor. He gave it a new way to sell papers. That's what proponents of violence reduction in Chicago can do with Chicago's media today: help media make violence reduction a profitable proposition.  

Sound impossible? Think again. This possibility could be inevitable.

OK, so there's no denying that "Pro football gives advertisers more bang for their buck than anything else, not even close", as Pierson observes. But that's only where things stand today.

So why would citizen-participatory violence reduction efforts give advertisers the more bang for their buck in years to come? There are lots of reasons. At this blog I talk them. Here's just two.

First, ask yourself: what really and truly matters more to the man on the street in Chicago and to the future of the Chicagoland region: the fantasy of a winning sports teams or the hard benefits, social and economic, of safe, prosperous, happy neighborhoods?

Second: Don Pierson concludes his piece by pointing to certain unsavory truths about pro football. These now threaten football's once-untouchable symbiosis with media. He identifies several: concussions, off-field violence and "Is football the next tobacco".

He calls them "cracks in pro football's golden egg, exposing an ominous core".

And he asserts that "truth always prevails, eventually".

What would George Halas say to all this? George Halas, who on page 321 of Halas on Halas lamented the decline of physical fitness in America and charged "Schools [with creating] elaborate sports programs, unfortunately designed not for the participation of all students but to develop the few super players. The great masses of students are moved from the playing fields to bleachers."

George Halas announces Mike Ditka as head coach, Jan 20 1982 (Tribune File Photo)