I rang the village president’s bell last night, unwittingly.  Discussion was of widening Eisenhower vs. extending the Blue Line.  50 or so in audience at Irving School, prez in audience with his two small kids.  I asked cost over the decades of the Austin Blvd. bottleneck (where four lanes each way become three) — the cost to us, I explained, the metropolitan area. 

Up popped prez (David Pope) asking for time.  You’re the prez, said speaker, a transportation expert and former village trustee, ceding the space.  Prez stood facing us and gave 5-10 minutes to rebutting a metro-area argument because it ignores special needs of the Austin community to the east and Bellwood, Maywood, and other towns to the west, some with economic development plans on which widening the Ike would put a kibosh. 

At one point he looked over at his two kids and with a word quieted them down.  I hadn’t realized he had kids with him and at first thought he was making like the Jesuit in Cincinnati who stopped his sermon in the university chapel to ask a woman to remove her crying baby.  (Later, chastised privately by a father of five, he admitted he’d been wrong.  And later became provincial!) 

Elise Pope with David

At another point, one of the prez’s two came up and wrapped her arms around his legs, then, holding on with one hand, circumambulated him several times.  Didn’t faze him.  He continued, expanding on his main point by stating his preference for extending rapid transit, including to Oak Brook, with its many jobs (he said how many, but I forget), currently inaccessible to non-auto-owning residents of those towns — who presumably would remain unaffected by metro-area economic benefits maybe tied to a widening. 

The transportation expert had argued against its making much difference anyhow, taking the question seriously on its face.  But it had been enough for the Prez that I raised the concept of metro-area benefit, as if metro can take care of itself and it’s up to Oak Park and others to care for the economic also-rans — Austin, Maywood, etc. 

We are at the heart of something here, the belief that direct relief of, special attention to, a segment will help the segment and will do no harm to the whole.  It’s a belief felt wholeheartedly by some, even after decades of special attention that has produced no results for the segments — consider academic-gap programs in the schools and continuing economic malaise in the face of government aid and stimulus programs — and have one way or another been a drain on the economy and well-being of the whole, including the very segments we are talking about. 

I had no idea what I was about to stir up in the mind and heart of the village prez (whose fatherly instincts and behavior I greatly admire, by the way) when I asked the cost to the metro area.  But he apparently identified my question as signalling an approach to, even a philosophy of, how to achieve the best for the most which runs counter to prevailing concepts that call for special treatment.  It did, but it still deserves an answer.

(WBBM-AM’s Bob Roberts has coverage of an earlier part of the meeting, with discussion of rapid transit-Blue Line extension vs. widening of Eisenhower, or even in conjunction with widening it.)