How Chicago can
lose its bid for the 2016 Olympics  April 27th, 2007 in the Chicago SunTimes' Daily Southtown By Andrew Greeley |
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Like most Chicagoans, I believe that this city
should win the big prize in 2009 when they choose an Olympic site. Only Rio
can beat Chicago for the beauty of its setting. The trouble with its beaches
is that large numbers of teens with automatic weapons are up in the favillas
waiting for opportunities to terrorize the city. None of the other
contestants has a plan like Chicago's to put all the venues within a fairly
compact area. Chicago is a fascinating and variegated city despite the
constant putdowns from New York, which blew its opportunity to have the
Olympics.
However, there are a number of conditions that have to be met before Chicago can be hopeful about victory. |
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With advent of new
leadership, one hopes that the few rogue cops in the Police Department will
be brought under proper control. Any more misbehavior, and the Olympics will
be in grave jeopardy. Moreover, the city must convince African Americans
that it does not intend to take away Washington Park from them. ''White folk
want to take back the South Side," representatives of the Washington Park
Forum argued on public radio the other night. The Olympic planners must
convince them that there is no such plot.
Chicago officials must deal with those problems. The more serious ones are beyond the city's control. Many people in other countries are convinced that Americans are "cowboys" who swagger around with guns, much like the Earps and the Clantons did in Tombstone in days of yore, or various Italian mobs did during Prohibition under the aegis of Chicagoan Al Capone. The "Outfit" (a k a "The Boys on the West Side") is still alive, but it is elderly, conservative, and generally deplores violence. Yet the United States is a heavily armed country in which crazies can buy guns almost at will and use them for mass murders like the horror at Virginia Tech last week. One more such incident of mayhem, with overweight cops rushing across campus cradling automatic weapons, searching for someone to shoot, and Chicago's Olympic bid, I fear, is sunk on arrival. |
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.Since
the National Rifle Association won't let us control the sale of guns, there
is always the possibility of another spree of killing. Some NRA enthusiasts
suggested -- seriously, I fear -- that the killing wouldn't have happened if
some of the endangered students in the classrooms had their own guns to pull
out and shoot back! Tombstone seems to be their idea of an appropriate
social order.
The most important condition for a successful Chicago bid, however, is that the new president, whoever he or she may be, will present an image of the United States not as the only superpower in the world (a pretty weak superpower just now!), but as the sensitive and intelligent leader of the free world that it was in the time of the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Clinton administrations. The president of the United States must show that he realizes he's the leader of the Free World and not the cowboy-in-chief of the only superpower. While we were grieving for the dead in Blacksburg, in a single day almost 200 people died in one car-bomb explosion. A distraught man shouted at the camera, "The Americans did this!" America bungled into an unjust war and was incompetent in its attempts to recreate order. Still is, in fact. If the new president seems to the rest of the world to be one more cowboy-in-chief, Chicago can forget about the Olympics, and the United States about much more than that. .
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