Latest news with #RichardJ.Daley
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Good News About Crime
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. You don't hear a lot of good news these days, and you hear even less good news about crime. In fact, this is a consistent structural problem with crime reporting. When crime is rising, it gets a great deal of attention—following the old newsroom adage that 'if it bleeds, it leads.' Most news consumers are probably aware that starting in 2020, the United States witnessed one of the most remarkable increases in crime in its history. Murder rose by the highest annual rate recorded (going back to the start of reliable records, in 1960) from 2019 to 2020. Some criminal-justice-reform advocates, concerned that the increase would doom nascent progress, tried to play it down. They were right to point out that violent crime was still well below the worst peaks of the 1980s and '90s, but wrong to dismiss the increase entirely. Such a steep, consistent, and national rise is scary, and each data point represents a horror for real people. What happened after that is less heralded: Crime is down since then. Although final statistics are not yet available, some experts think that 2024 likely set the record for the steepest fall in the murder rate. And 2025 is off to an even better start. The year is not yet half over, and a lot can still change—just consider 2020, when murder really took off in the second half—but the Real-Time Crime Index, which draws on a national sample, finds that through March, murder is down 21.6 percent, violent crime is down 11 percent, and property crime is down 13.8 percent. In April, Chicago had 20 murders. That's not just lower than in any April of the past few years—that's the best April since 1962, early in Richard J. Daley's mayorship. One of the great challenges of reporting on crime is the lack and lateness of good statistics. The best numbers come from the FBI, but they aren't released until the fall of the following year. Still, we can get a pretty good idea of the trends from the data that are available. The Council on Criminal Justice analyzed 2024 data from 40 cities on 13 categories of crime, and found that all but one (shoplifting) dropped from 2023. Homicide was down 16 percent among cities in the sample that reported data, and in cities with especially high numbers of murders, such as St. Louis, Baltimore, and Detroit, they fell to 2014 levels. Even carjacking, which suddenly had become more common in recent years, was down to below 2020 levels—though motor-vehicle theft was higher. A separate report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which gathers leaders of police departments in the biggest cities, found similar trends: a 16 percent drop in homicide from 2023, and smaller reductions in rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Another great challenge of reporting on crime is how vague our understanding is of what drives changes in crime. Even now, scholars disagree about what led to the long decline in crime from the 1990s until the 2010s. One popular theory for the 2020 rise has been that it was connected to the murder of George Floyd and the resulting protests, though that allows for several possible pathways: Were police too occupied with protests to deal with ordinary crime? Were they de-policing as a sort of protest (the 'blue flu')—or were they pulling back because that was the message the protests were sending them and their leaders? Did the attention to brutal law enforcement delegitimize police in the eyes of citizens, encouraging a rise in criminal behavior? Any or all of these are possible, in various proportions. A Brookings Institution report published in December contends that the pandemic itself was the prime culprit. The authors argue that murder was already rising when Floyd was killed. 'The spike in murders during 2020 was directly connected to local unemployment and school closures in low-income areas,' they write. 'Cities with larger numbers of young men forced out of work and teen boys pushed out of school in low-income neighborhoods during March and early April, had greater increases in homicide from May to December that year, on average.' Because many of these unemployment and school-closure-related trends continued for years, they believe this explains why high murder rates persisted in 2021 and 2022 before falling. The journalist Alec MacGillis has also done powerful reporting that makes a similar argument. Recognizing the real trends in crime rates is important in part because disorder, real or perceived, creates openings for demagoguery. Throughout his time in politics, President Donald Trump has exaggerated or outright misrepresented the state of crime in the United States, and has used it to push for both stricter and more brutal policing. He has also argued that deportations will reduce crime—with his administration going so far as to delete a Justice Department webpage with a report noting that undocumented immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native citizens in Texas. The irony is that Trump's policy choices could slow or even reverse the positive trends currently occurring. Reuters reports that the Justice Department has eliminated more than $800 million in grants through the Office of Justice Programs. Giffords, a gun-control group founded by former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, warns that this includes important aid to local police departments for preventing gun violence and other forms of crime: 'Trump is destabilizing the very foundations of violence prevention programs across the country.' The administration's economic policies also threaten to drive the U.S. into recession, which tends to cause increases in crime, as it may have done in 2020. Upticks in crime driven by misguided policy choices would be tragic, especially coming just as the shock of 2020 is fading. Good news isn't just hard to find—it can also be fleeting. Related: What's really going on with the crime rate? (From 2022) The many causes of America's decline in crime (From 2015) Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The mother who never stopped believing her son was still there The visionary of Trump 2.0 An autopsy report on Biden's in-office decline Today's News Some Republicans in the House Budget Committee, demanding deeper spending cuts, voted against President Donald Trump's tax bill. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from using a wartime law to deport a group of Venezuelan immigrants. Israel's air strikes killed roughly 100 people in north Gaza, according to local health officials. Evening Read 'We're Definitely Going to Build a Bunker Before We Release AGI' By Karen Hao In the summer of 2023, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and the chief scientist of OpenAI, was meeting with a group of new researchers at the company. By all traditional metrics, Sutskever should have felt invincible: He was the brain behind the large language models that helped build ChatGPT, then the fastest-growing app in history; his company's valuation had skyrocketed; and OpenAI was the unrivaled leader of the industry believed to power the future of Silicon Valley. But the chief scientist seemed to be at war with himself. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic The question the Trump administration couldn't answer about birthright citizenship The birthright-citizenship case isn't really about birthright citizenship. The new MAGA world order A different way to think about medicine's most stubborn enigma Culture Break Take charge. You may be fine with becoming more like your parents or hate the idea. Either way, it's something you can control, the happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks writes. Read. Amanda Hess's new book examines a surplus of experts and gadgets promising to perfect the experience of raising children, Hillary Kelly writes. Play our daily crossword. Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter. Explore all of our newsletters here. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Good News About Crime
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. You don't hear a lot of good news these days, and you hear even less good news about crime. In fact, this is a consistent structural problem with crime reporting. When crime is rising, it gets a great deal of attention—following the old newsroom adage that ' if it bleeds, it leads.' Most news consumers are probably aware that starting in 2020, the United States witnessed one of the most remarkable increases in crime in its history. Murder rose by the highest annual rate recorded (going back to the start of reliable records, in 1960) from 2019 to 2020. Some criminal-justice-reform advocates, concerned that the increase would doom nascent progress, tried to play it down. They were right to point out that violent crime was still well below the worst peaks of the 1980s and '90s, but wrong to dismiss the increase entirely. Such a steep, consistent, and national rise is scary, and each data point represents a horror for real people. What happened after that is less heralded: Crime is down since then. Although final statistics are not yet available, some experts think that 2024 likely set the record for the steepest fall in the murder rate. And 2025 is off to an even better start. The year is not yet half over, and a lot can still change—just consider 2020, when murder really took off in the second half—but the Real-Time Crime Index, which draws on a national sample, finds that through March, murder is down 21.6 percent, violent crime is down 11 percent, and property crime is down 13.8 percent. In April, Chicago had 20 murders. That's not just lower than in any April of the past few years—that's the best April since 1962, early in Richard J. Daley's mayorship. One of the great challenges of reporting on crime is the lack and lateness of good statistics. The best numbers come from the FBI, but they aren't released until the fall of the following year. Still, we can get a pretty good idea of the trends from the data that are available. The Council on Criminal Justice analyzed 2024 data from 40 cities on 13 categories of crime, and found that all but one (shoplifting) dropped from 2023. Homicide was down 16 percent among cities in the sample that reported data, and in cities with especially high numbers of murders, such as St. Louis, Baltimore, and Detroit, they fell to 2014 levels. Even carjacking, which suddenly had become more common in recent years, was down to below 2020 levels—though motor-vehicle theft was higher. A separate report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which gathers leaders of police departments in the biggest cities, found similar trends: a 16 percent drop in homicide from 2023, and smaller reductions in rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Another great challenge of reporting on crime is how vague our understanding is of what drives changes in crime. Even now, scholars disagree about what led to the long decline in crime from the 1990s until the 2010s. One popular theory for the 2020 rise has been that it was connected to the murder of George Floyd and the resulting protests, though that allows for several possible pathways: Were police too occupied with protests to deal with ordinary crime? Were they de-policing as a sort of protest (the ' blue flu ')—or were they pulling back because that was the message the protests were sending them and their leaders? Did the attention to brutal law enforcement delegitimize police in the eyes of citizens, encouraging a rise in criminal behavior? Any or all of these are possible, in various proportions. A Brookings Institution report published in December contends that the pandemic itself was the prime culprit. The authors argue that murder was already rising when Floyd was killed. 'The spike in murders during 2020 was directly connected to local unemployment and school closures in low-income areas,' they write. 'Cities with larger numbers of young men forced out of work and teen boys pushed out of school in low-income neighborhoods during March and early April, had greater increases in homicide from May to December that year, on average.' Because many of these unemployment and school-closure-related trends continued for years, they believe this explains why high murder rates persisted in 2021 and 2022 before falling. The journalist Alec MacGillis has also done powerful reporting that makes a similar argument. Recognizing the real trends in crime rates is important in part because disorder, real or perceived, creates openings for demagoguery. Throughout his time in politics, President Donald Trump has exaggerated or outright misrepresented the state of crime in the United States, and has used it to push for both stricter and more brutal policing. He has also argued that deportations will reduce crime—with his administration going so far as to delete a Justice Department webpage with a report noting that undocumented immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native citizens in Texas. The irony is that Trump's policy choices could slow or even reverse the positive trends currently occurring. Reuters reports that the Justice Department has eliminated more than $800 million in grants through the Office of Justice Programs. Giffords, a gun-control group founded by former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, warns that this includes important aid to local police departments for preventing gun violence and other forms of crime: 'Trump is destabilizing the very foundations of violence prevention programs across the country.' The administration's economic policies also threaten to drive the U.S. into recession, which tends to cause increases in crime, as it may have done in 2020. Upticks in crime driven by misguided policy choices would be tragic, especially coming just as the shock of 2020 is fading. Good news isn't just hard to find—it can also be fleeting. Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Today's News Some Republicans in the House Budget Committee, demanding deeper spending cuts, voted against President Donald Trump's tax bill. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from using a wartime law to deport a group of Venezuelan immigrants. Israel's air strikes killed roughly 100 people in north Gaza, according to local health officials. Evening Read 'We're Definitely Going to Build a Bunker Before We Release AGI' By Karen Hao In the summer of 2023, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and the chief scientist of OpenAI, was meeting with a group of new researchers at the company. By all traditional metrics, Sutskever should have felt invincible: He was the brain behind the large language models that helped build ChatGPT, then the fastest-growing app in history; his company's valuation had skyrocketed; and OpenAI was the unrivaled leader of the industry believed to power the future of Silicon Valley. But the chief scientist seemed to be at war with himself. More From The Atlantic Take charge. You may be fine with becoming more like your parents or hate the idea. Either way, it's something you can control, the happiness expert Arthur C. Brooks writes. Read. Amanda Hess's new book examines a surplus of experts and gadgets promising to perfect the experience of raising children, Hillary Kelly writes.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Engines of change: Chicago program puts young minds on the fast track to STEM
CHICAGO -- Growing up in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, Soyini Walton said she was directed into transcription and stenography classes while she watched her male peers walk around with slides and discuss algebra. She always preferred science but said she wasn't given the option to pursue it. At age 11, she remembers finding a dead bird and, out of curiosity, cutting it open with her dad's razor. 'Nobody really said, Well, what are you passionate about? Because you probably could go into anything you want,' Walton said. She worked as a teacher for years in her 20s before returning to Richard J. Daley and Kennedy-King colleges on the Southeast Side to enhance her math knowledge. Now, almost 80, she sets an example teaching earth science and algebra classes at the Chicago Pre-College Science and Engineering Program, also known as ChiS&E, a nonprofit that offers enrichment classes on Saturdays and in the summer for historically underrepresented students to pique and motivate their interest in careers in science. The program began serving first-grade students in 2009 and has expanded year by year. Today, ChiS&E collaborates with over 40 schools, both public and private, across Chicago, and is unique in that the students' guardians are required to accompany them to the classes until fifth grade. The program has served 3,972 students since its founding, according to its coordinators. The free classes are family-oriented and emphasize mathematics through projects like designing bridges and programming computers, breaking down systematic barriers such as limited exposure, financial constraints and underrepresentation in advanced classes. While a 2021 Pew Research study reported 'dramatic' growth in the number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates from colleges and universities since 2010, Black and Hispanic adults are still underrepresented among STEM college graduates compared with their share in the population. The study said Black workers make up 11% of all employed adults, compared with 9% of those in STEM occupations. Hispanic workers make up 17% of total employment across all occupations but just 8% of all STEM workers. The blueprint for ChiS&E is modeled after a Detroit-based program that began in a basement at the University of Michigan in the '70s, said Kenneth Hill, ChiS&E's president and CEO. That Detroit program has worked with tens of thousands of students. Hill has an extensive and wide-ranging background as a teacher, having worked in the Detroit public school system before moving to the Republic of Zambia in Africa, where he taught calculus and physics to high school students. 'This is a smaller program, but we're going to get there,' Hill said, looking around a room of students gathered at Kenwood Academy High School on a recent Saturday morning. 'It's high-quality.' ChiS&E's classes go beyond standard curricula, said Iyabo Pommells, 41, a former math and physics teacher who leads the Saturday physics class at Kenwood. It's different from the usual introduction to STEM, Pommells said. 'There's more time. There's a lot of space to ask questions and interact with others,' said Pommells, whose full-time job is with the city of Chicago. Walton, who calls Pommells her 'protégé,' watched her draw a table on the board at the front of the classroom to chart the densities of different materials and whether they would float or sink if placed in water. 'Anything else you notice? What about what we wonder?' she asked the class of middle-school students. Pommells said she discovered her love of math and science in high school and was inspired by Walton, a family friend. Pommells holds a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan and a mathematics degree from Spelman College in Atlanta. 'Seeing another Black woman doing that, it showed me that it was possible and that I could do it, too,' she said. 'There are many times, especially when I was (in college), where I was one of the few women or Black people in the class.' But because she'd had confidence in her abilities since she was young, she said she knew she 'could do anything in any room that (she) entered.' Gema Ramos, who attends Eli Whitney Elementary in Little Village, said she and her parents have been coming to the program since she was in kindergarten. Ramos, 13, wants to be a doctor. 'I like how we learn things that we wouldn't in school,' Ramos said of ChiS&E. Parents learn from going to class, too, said Tori Williams, 49. She attended the program with her 13-year-old son, Drelyn. 'Those classes helped me understand how important (science) is to just having a concrete understanding of the way the world works,' she said. Drelyn was able to enroll at a gifted school in Chatham and is now a grade ahead in math. He just decided he wants to be a computer engineer, his mom said. The ChiS&E curriculum inspired Williams, who is also the principal of Parkside Community Academy in South Shore, to apply for an unrelated $700,000 grant from Chicago Public Schools to focus on STEM. The money from the grant was used to build creative spaces and science labs, Williams said. ChiS&E alumni have gone on to careers in nuclear engineering or psychology at schools like Yale University, Purdue University, Howard University and Spelman, said Jeffrey Johnson, the program's chief operating officer. 'A strong foundation in mathematics builds confidence in young people,' Johnson said. 'This sets up young people to be competitive, to get into the top colleges and universities, and in the top fields.' The nonprofit relies on philanthropic support and has financial and programmatic partnerships with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Argonne National Laboratory. On a recent Saturday morning, Walton smiled at the students as they explained the findings of their experiments to Pommells, who she watched grow into an engineer. Walton expressed some concern about the program's mission in the face of President Donald Trump's attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion. 'Even though we have been getting funding from foundations, everybody is being affected by the changes,' she said. She was a mechanical engineer for the city under former mayor Harold Washington before starting her own engineering company. But she said she had to climb to be where she is now. 'Growing up, if I had had a program like ChiS&E … I would have been on my way a lot sooner,' she said. 'Right now, (the program is) little known. We hope more people find out about it.' ___
Chicago Tribune
29-04-2025
- Science
- Chicago Tribune
Engines of change: Chicago program puts young minds on the fast track to STEM
Growing up in Englewood, Soyini Walton said she was directed into transcription and stenography classes while she watched her male peers walk around with slides and discuss algebra. She always preferred science but said she wasn't given the option to pursue it. At age 11, she remembers finding a dead bird and, out of curiosity, cutting it open with her dad's razor. 'Nobody really said, Well, what are you passionate about? Because you probably could go into anything you want,' Walton said. She worked as a teacher for years in her 20s before returning to Richard J. Daley and Kennedy-King colleges on the Southeast Side to enhance her math knowledge. Now, almost 80, she sets an example teaching earth science and algebra classes at the Chicago Pre-College Science and Engineering Program, also known as ChiS&E, a nonprofit that offers enrichment classes on Saturdays and in the summer for historically underrepresented students to pique and motivate their interest in careers in science. The program began serving first-grade students in 2009 and has expanded year by year. Today, ChiS&E collaborates with over 40 schools, both public and private, across Chicago, and is unique in that the students' guardians are required to accompany them to the classes until fifth grade. The program has served 3,972 students since its founding, according to its coordinators. The free classes are family-oriented and emphasize mathematics through projects like designing bridges and programming computers, breaking down systematic barriers such as limited exposure, financial constraints and underrepresentation in advanced classes. While a 2021 Pew Research study reported 'dramatic' growth in the number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates from colleges and universities since 2010, Black and Hispanic adults are still underrepresented among STEM college graduates compared with their share in the population. The study said Black workers make up 11% of all employed adults, compared with 9% of those in STEM occupations. Hispanic workers make up 17% of total employment across all occupations but just 8% of all STEM workers. The blueprint for ChiS&E is modeled after a Detroit-based program that began in a basement at the University of Michigan in the '70s, said Kenneth Hill, ChiS&E's president and CEO. That Detroit program has worked with tens of thousands of students. Hill has an extensive and wide-ranging background as a teacher, having worked in the Detroit public school system before moving to the Republic of Zambia in Africa, where he taught calculus and physics to high school students. 'This is a smaller program, but we're going to get there,' Hill said, looking around a room of students gathered at Kenwood Academy High School last Saturday morning. 'It's high-quality.' ChiS&E's classes go beyond standard curricula, said Iyabo Pommells, 41, a former math and physics teacher who leads the Saturday physics class at Kenwood. It's different from the usual introduction to STEM, Pommells said. 'There's more time. There's a lot of space to ask questions and interact with others,' said Pommells, whose full-time job is with the city of Chicago. Walton, who calls Pommells her 'protégé,' watched her draw a table on the board at the front of the classroom to chart the densities of different materials and whether they would float or sink if placed in water. 'Anything else you notice? What about what we wonder?' she asked the class of middle-school students. Pommells said she discovered her love of math and science in high school and was inspired by Walton, a family friend. Pommells holds a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan and a mathematics degree from Spelman College in Atlanta. 'Seeing another Black woman doing that, it showed me that it was possible and that I could do it, too,' she said. 'There are many times, especially when I was (in college), where I was one of the few women or Black people in the class.' But because she'd had confidence in her abilities since she was young, she said she knew she 'could do anything in any room that (she) entered.' Gema Ramos, who attends Eli Whitney Elementary in Little Village, said she and her parents have been coming to the program since she was in kindergarten. Ramos, 13, wants to be a doctor. 'I like how we learn things that we wouldn't in school,' Ramos said of ChiS&E. Parents learn from going to class, too, said Tori Williams, 49. She attended the program with her 13-year-old son, Drelyn. 'Those classes helped me understand how important (science) is to just having a concrete understanding of the way the world works,' she said. Drelyn was able to enroll at a gifted school in Chatham and is now a grade ahead in math. He just decided he wants to be a computer engineer, his mom said. The ChiS&E curriculum inspired Williams, who is also the principal of Parkside Community Academy in South Shore, to apply for an unrelated $700,000 grant from Chicago Public Schools to focus on STEM. The money from the grant was used to build creative spaces and science labs, Williams said. ChiS&E alumni have gone on to careers in nuclear engineering or psychology at schools like Yale University, Purdue University, Howard University and Spelman, said Jeffrey Johnson, the program's chief operating officer. 'A strong foundation in mathematics builds confidence in young people,' Johnson said. 'This sets up young people to be competitive, to get into the top colleges and universities, and in the top fields.' The nonprofit relies on philanthropic support and has financial and programmatic partnerships with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Argonne National Laboratory. Saturday morning, Walton smiled at the students as they explained the findings of their experiments to Pommells, who she watched grow into an engineer. Walton expressed some concern about the program's mission in the face of President Donald Trump's attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion. 'Even though we have been getting funding from foundations, everybody is being affected by the changes,' she said. She was a mechanical engineer for the city under former mayor Harold Washington before starting her own engineering company. But she said she had to climb to be where she is now. 'Growing up, if I had had a program like ChiS&E … I would have been on my way a lot sooner,' she said. 'Right now, (the program is) little known. We hope more people find out about it.'
Chicago Tribune
18-03-2025
- General
- Chicago Tribune
Column: Thoughts and memories for another St. Patrick's Day in Chicago
OK, that's over. Another St. Patrick's Day in the books. Your green clothes off to the laundry or dry cleaner, ready to be then put back in your closet, those 'Kiss me, I'm Irish' buttons tossed in a drawer, your memories of this edition of this most celebratory of local holidays stored someplace. If you participated in the weekend's hoopla, good for you. Perhaps some of you have a hangover this morning, failing to follow the advice of George Shinnick Sr., who opened the venerable Shinnick's Pub in Bridgeport in 1938 and had this bit of timeless tavern wisdom: 'He who drinks and drinks with grace / is always welcome in this place / He who drinks more than his share / is never welcome anywhere.' I've got nothing against drinking and can still recall, a bit foggy as they might be, youthful memories of starting St. Pat's parade days at the bygone Elfman's delicatessen on State Street and then, proceeding north, stopping for a drink at any bar we encountered and that would have us, until only one of us was left standing. Such excessive drinking behavior remains one of the reasons that people rail against the excesses of this holiday, arguing that booze and its attendant misbehavior gives fuel to the unjust drunken Irish stereotype. My mother was Irish to her core, a Cavanagh, and it was she who took me by the hand to my very first St. Patrick's Day Parade, which also happened to be the first to be held on State Street in 1956. There has never been a person I have known who despised St. Patrick's Day celebrations more than she did. I don't remember, though I can logically assume, that then Mayor Richard J. Daley led that first parade. But I have always remembered something my mother told me that day. As we watched the parade, all around us were hundreds of smiling faces and I asked my mom, who was not smiling, 'Why aren't you happy?' 'The Irish have not always had a happy time of it,' she said. True enough I would learn from stories from her and her mother. I would learn that March 17 is believed to be the day St. Patrick died in 461, and he is credited with bringing Christianity to Ireland and efficiently, if apocryphally, ridding the island of snakes. I did not have a drink on Monday, but was tempted. I live in a neighborhood thick with taverns — one called Dublin's, for the capital of Ireland — many of them fine and lively places. And so it was that I found myself thinking about going inside one of them when I was approached by a young man toting a plastic one-gallon water jug and asking, 'This is my borg. Care for a sip?' It was 10 a.m. I will not give you the details of our entire conversation, which took place in the one-block stretch of Division Street between State and Dearborn Streets, a section that for the first year was wisely closed to traffic. 'OK, what's a borg?' I asked. He explained that a borg stands for Blackout Rage Gallon and is a relatively new 'invention,' a concoction that consists of a fifth of vodka, water and some sort of flavoring (his was orange Kool-Aid). It has nothing to do with St. Patrick. It has nothing to do with Ireland. As politely as possible I thanked him and went home to listen to a song. It's a fine song titled 'In the City of Chicago.' Sung by Christy Moore, it embodies what it means to be Irish in this city. In the City of Chicago As the evening shadows fall There are people dreaming Of the hills of Donegal. 1847 was the year it all began Deadly pains of hunger drove a million from the land They journeyed not for glory Their motive wasn't greed A voyage of survival across the stormy sea. To the City of Chicago As the evening shadows fall There are people dreaming Of the hills of Donegal. Some of them knew fortune Some of them knew fame More of them knew hardship And died upon the plain They spread throughout the nation They rode the railroad cars Brought their songs and music to ease their lonely hearts. To the City of Chicago As the evening shadows fall There are people dreaming Of the hills of Donegal. And that was that, another St. Patrick's Day over and done.
