In days gone by when we’d host Boy Scouts at the Journal for the nickel tour, I’d ask the kids if they’d ever made our pages. Almost always a hand or two would go up and we’d hear about some great moment in T-ball, their Gram’s obit or their sister’s pic in the Memorial Day Parade.
And then I’d ask what they thought it would take for President Bush – you pick which one – to turn up in the Journal? Well, I’d say, he’d have to eat breakfast at George’s to make our paper because everything we wrote about happened in Oak Park or River Forest.
It worked pretty well for 40 years. There was plenty to report on in these villages and no one bought the paper to hear our take on D.C. or even Springfield.
But now we have Donald Trump in the White House and every evil, divisive thing he does leaks or floods into our villages, and every other town in America. Cuts to Medicaid that will cripple our enfeebled health care. Diverting infrastructure or Block Grant funds because our state is too blue. Abusing worthy nonprofits for caring for those who suffer.
And, most directly, Trump’s obsession with punishing immigrants who are the lifeblood of this nation historically and in this very moment. The viciousness of it all. His glee in rounding up those who are Brown. And his determination to cause collateral pain to those who protest.
So from George Floyd forward, all the lanes are crisscrossed and the president of the United States, directly or indirectly, makes our pages with regularity.
Last week his preposterous impact on transforming the Department of Justice into a pitiful tool of his vapor dreams turned our local story about Oak Park Trustee Brian Straw and his Broadview 6 fight into a national story. Here the dismissal of the weak but remaining charges against Straw and his colleagues in court became clear evidence that the DOJ has abandoned any precept of justice in an effort to slam the resistance into submission.
Grit and courage by Straw, smarts by his attorney, Oak Parker Chris Parente, and a judge who was just on the level made plain in the national press that the story we and the Chicago metros have been covering for a year was sham and hooey. Prosecutors in the previously respected U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois were in on the fix and had perverted the grand jury process to do the bidding of Bondi and Blanche and Trump.
Until they weren’t. Until they were called out in court. Humbled if they can still be humbled. But still shut down by some version of law and order that remarkably manages to hold. Their plot put on full display as the resistance still gathers force in this town and across this nation.
Brian Straw has a loving One View in today’s Journal offering thanks to this village for its foundational support of him, of his family, of our shared American values. But it is Brian Straw we are thanking. He was the one on the line against an administration that masquerades as all powerful but which is increasingly revealed as overreaching, heartless and not what most Americans want to believe in.
