"600 words by Esther J. Cepeda"

Pay to play

by Esther J. Cepeda

"Pregunta del Dia" translates to Question of the Day and today’s comes from R.T., a Cary, IL reader who asks

Q. "Do YOU think DePaul [University, in Chicago] should keep the Minutemen from having their speaker there Monday?"

A. He’s referring to a speech to be delivered Monday May 19 on the campus of DePaul University – the largest private University in Illinois, one of the largest private universities in this country and the largest Catholic university in the U.S., according to Wikipedia.

Let me quote from the Father Jose Landaverde and the "Comite de Marzo," a pro-illegal immigrant rights group, from their press release asking for people to join them in a 24-hour "Prayer Vigil to Stop the Hate & Racism."

"Cris Simcox who is the Minuteman Militia Corps. Leader has been invited to speak by a conservative group at DePaul University on May 19th, 2008.  Simcox is well known for his anti immigrant sentiment against Mexicans.   Simcox travels the country recruiting members and has had growing involvement in his group of racist border vigilantes.  White supremacist groups have openly recruited members for the Minuteman patrols groups like neo-Nazis from the National Alliance & Aryan Nations.  Simcox as of today refuses to acknowledge that vigilante border patrols are a haven for violent racist.  Many groups have asked the university to cancel Simcox's invitation but DePaul University refuses & say that they must allow all groups on campus exercise the right to freedom of speech."

DePaul is…absolutely 100% correct. They have allowed their students to freely exercise their right to freedom of speech in protesting Simcox, been open with the media, and offered these same freedoms to campus speakers – and campus protesters – who were similarly controversial.

But today the DePaul Conservative Alliance, which invited Simcox, is upset. DePaul is making that group pay $2,500 for security officers to make sure things don’t get out of hand between Minutemen supporters and praying protesters.

And again DePaul is…absolutely 100% correct. The Conservative Alliance knew their choice in speaker would draw opposition and went ahead with plans for a hoppin’ event. Fair enough. They should have known that the University routinely asks student groups to pay for the cost of ensuring the safety of large crowds at any on-campus event, instead they’re hurtin’ for money and blaming the protestors for their presence at the speech.

"Basically, I am paying to ensure a protest happens at my event," Nicholas Hahn, the president of the university’s Conservative Alliance told a Chicago Tribune reporter.

No, that would be your speaker fee. Nevertheless, it’s an easy fix. Just pass the hat around at the event, Conservative Alliance, your peeps will be glad to help out. It’s your right to be there and have your speaker say whatever he wants, but as with most things in life: you play, you pay.

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com

No vote, no voice if you're poor, scatterbrained

"600 Words" by Esther J. Cepeda

If you’re happy to break one law, then you’ll surely break another, right? You’ve jaywalked so you’re a good candidate for committing an armed robbery.

That’s the exact logic being used to defend the ridiculous scheme to limit voters in Missouri and approximately 20 other states across the country by requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration.

That state’s proposed constitutional amendment, which if passed could go into effect as early as August, could keep approximately 240,000 unregistered Missouri-dwelling U.S. citizens from voting in the most interesting Presidential election of the last several decades.

Why? Fear the estimated "12 million" illegal immigrants residing in the U.S. who were bold enough to break federal immigration laws but are too terrified of getting deported to seek medical care or report crime might get it in their minds to commit voter fraud by giving a municipal system all their contact information for a shot at electing a president from a pool of candidates too terrified to broach the subject of immigration.

Already the elderly, the disabled, those who can’t afford – or choose to not to – drive and haven’t gotten around to sitting at their secretary of state facility for most of a day to get an official photo identification card, have been denied their right to vote in seven states. By decree of the U.S. Supreme Court, no less, who upheld Indiana’s photo-ID requirement law on April 28th.

The argument: according to the Justice Department, of forty voters indicted for registration fraud or illegal voting between 2002 and 2005, twenty-one were non-citizens. Also, anyone could easily forge an electric or phone utility bill or paychecks, which are just some of the many forms of ID currently used to register voters.

If you buy into that, then why not note the reported tens of thousands of native-born Missourians who were kicked off Medicaid in 2006 because they couldn’t find their birth certificates to argue that more U.S.-born people will be screwed out of their voting rights than impostors? It’s better to deny suffrage to people who live on the margins of society – or are simply prone to misplacing things – than take a chance on "illegal Irma" blackening the ovals?

On the other side of the conspiracy theory coin are rumors that the Republicans are masterminding a scheme to keep the ethnic minorities – assumed to lean Democratic – from voting them out of office in droves as they vote the country’s first African American into the "White" House.

How about the theory that photo ID voting restrictions are designed to counteract the backlog of 930,000 citizenship applications that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recently promised to process by September 30th because about nine thousand almost-new Americans sued USCIS in order to get them to do things "the right way." The letter of the law demands the decision to grant citizenship be made within 120 days of interviewing the applicant, after all.

I’ll give the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume the people who make these laws up aren’t malevolent but instead simply ignorant.

Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that the well-to-do bureaucrats who propose laws simply can’t imagine a world in which you don’t have mommy or daddy drive you to the DMV on your sixteenth birthday for a driver’s license? Is it really too hard to imagine people of certain means not having a clue how hard it is to navigate replacing a lost birth certificate when you don’t read well or have a disability?

No harder, I guess, than imagining legislators so stupid they actually believe droves of illegal aliens are going to throw the next election.

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com

Colorblind killings

by Esther J. Cepeda

"Pregunta del Dia" translates to Question of the Day and today’s comes from Larry, a faithful reader who asks:

Q. "I was just wondering what your opinion is on the two young Hispanic gentlemen that were killed in a car accident that was caused by a white Chicago Police Officer.  I believe that he is about to get off scott free."

A. Larry is referring to Chicago Police Officer John Ardelean, who the Illinois State’s Attorney’s office just determined cannot be tried criminally for the deaths of Miguel Flores and Erick Lagunas in a car crash Thanksgiving 2007. The officer had been off-duty at the time.

Officer Ardelean had been up on two counts of aggravated DUI, but because he refused a Breathalyzer test for 7 hours after the crash and didn’t do so until his supervisor insisted, there is no evidence to prove in court he actually was drunk at the time he killed.

That’s not to say he wasn’t. Nevermind that he knew better than to drink and drive. He clearly used his knowledge of the law to avoid a conclusive test until his boss made him take it. This is the part when the conspiracy theorists make it all about Latinos being disposable in this society, their lives and deaths less important than others’, etc.

Nope, had the two victims been white or Asian or Martian, for that matter, Officer Ardelean would have still been in cover-your-ass mode. Human nature. It’s not as though in a purportedly drunken binge he was looking for two minorities to mow down.

That, of course, is no excuse for his actions.

On the bright side there’s a new sheriff in town, Jody Weis, and this is exactly the sort of community-relationship mess he’s pledged to root out and boot out. He verified for local media that Ardelean is still under investigation and has been relieved of his duties.

Perhaps out of the glare of the TV cameras he went ballistic and made crystal clear to other cops that they aren’t going to slip quietly away if they’re caught driving drunk – or giving a checkered brother a free pass for seven hours until the buzz wears off before insisting on a test.

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com

Prostitution's Hidden victims: boys

"600 Words" by Esther J. Cepeda

That "dirty old man" who pays cash to use women as disposable sex toys may have started out as a bewildered, ten-year-old boy.

Of the many shocking revelations meticulously documented in the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation’s report "Deconstructing the Demand for Prostitution" released late last week, the most heartbreaking and disturbing was that among men who frequently pay prostitutes for sex, many had their first sexual experience paid for by a close relative – at as tender an age as ten.

In 2006 and 2007, a team of twelve male and female project interviewers from CAASE and a group called Prostitution Research Education set out to look into the minds of Chicago men who pay for sex from the estimated 16,000 to 25,000 women in the city who sell their services. They advertised their study on Craigslist, Chicago After Dark, and the Chicago Reader, and eventually spoke for two hours each with 113 men ages 20-71.

Their "average" john was 39 years old, only slightly more likely African American than Caucasian, overwhelmingly college-educated and making over $40,000 a year, with a girlfriend or wife at home. A little over half of them bought sex from once a month to several times in one week, soliciting women on the internet, in person, and through escort services alike.

The average age of their first purchase was 21 with the jaw-dropping age of ten pulling down the average. These stark numbers – 29% of these guys’ first time ever was paid and 17% had that first experience on a dad’s dime – round out the tragedy.

"We have to do a lot better job of talking about exploitation and violence toward women just to counteract the overwhelming glamorization of prostitution in this country," study author Rachel Durchslag told me last week. "One thing we need to do is talk to young men about this issue. Moms and dads don’t want to talk to their sons about this but with one quarter of our participants reporting they had their first paid experience before the age of seventeen, it tells me we have to talk to dads about how to bond with their sons with some healthy masculinity instead of based on exploitation and domination."

Up until now, the conversation about the fallout of pay-to-play has been focused on the female part of the prostitution equation. The facts in this report, found on http://www.caase.org, point to the serious need to intervene in the lives of very young men today in order to make a difference in the lives of women and men – both those involved in prostitution transactions and those hurt by after-effects like sexually transmitted diseases, the pain of betrayal, and the inability to have healthy relationships – for generations to come.

That’s a tall order in a society where young boys and girls are constantly bombarded by images of ultra-sexual women, and pimp culture has become so mainstream you can buy pre-packaged costumes at your local Halloween supply store. The same society where parents scoff at the idea of their 8^{th-graders learning about condoms in health ed. classes.}

"Absolutely young women are growing up with unbelievable amounts of pressure to be sexual but that’s only half of the equation. Prostitution not only harms women in communities but harms men as well," Rachel said, citing the guilt, shame, and real remorse the men in the study expressed to their interviewers after having the opportunity – in many cases for the first time in their lives – to talk openly about their behavior and feelings out.

Calling all moms and dads: get over your embarrassment about the "sex talk." Your sons and daughters need you to have frank and open heart-to-heart conversations about sexual health and responsibility, today. Sexual victimization for either gender can happen early but it’s never too late to do everything possible to avoid it.

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com

We do all get along, mostly

by Esther J. Cepeda

"Pregunta del Dia" translates to Question of the Day and today’s comes from R.M., a Chicago reader who emailed to "ha-ha."

Q. Did you hear about the brawl between the blacks and the Hispanics in L.A.? Aren’t you the one always talking about how there’s no problems between the two?

A. Yes. R.M. was referring to the Associated Press story from last Friday – at around noon 600 students at a high school in Los Angeles got into a huge fight, leaving several injured and three arrested. The fight had been planned between members of rival Hispanic and Black graffiti gangs.

The media loves to report on these things. I’m sure there is some poor Californian soul whose entire reporting job is to find blacks and Hispanics who hate each other. Why not keep a person in Boston to report on the tensions between the Irish and everyone else who lives there? Because it’s not really a story, that’s why.

First off, rival gangs hate each other regardless of skin color – that’s why they come up with convoluted dress and communication codes to transcend race and gender. Second, give it a rest – no monolithic group of any persuasion gets along in complete harmony with any other, that’s just human nature.

If the energy put into pointing out tensions between ethnic groups – a dialogue on Japanese-Chinese relations, anyone? – went into observing the millions of ways in which all of us get along and work together everyday, the world would be a better place.

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com