A city hall reporter I used to work with, in a city not unlike Chicago, had a useful description for most of what he covered: the statements, the speeches, the hearings, the reports, the carefully leaked rumors.
“Balloon juice,” he would say, rolling his eyes.
Since then, whenever I am stuck listening to an empty speech or meandering meeting, or any talk that seems unconnected to reality, I try to picture how many balloons might be inflated with that flow of hot air. When 150,000 balloons floated down from the United Center ceiling at last year’s Democratic National Convention, for instance, I figured that was just about right.
And I will admit, when I saw plans for the first-ever Interfaith Leadership Conference on Family and Juvenile Violence, the words that popped into my mind were “balloon juice.”
The conference, held Tuesday in Hillside, gathered law enforcement officials led by Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan and Cook County State’s Atty. Dick Devine, and more than 100 local religious leaders, including Roman Catholic Archbishop Francis George.
It was an impressive lineup. But stick them in a hotel conference room, tell them to discuss a topic as broad and pervasive–but not quite as well understood–as the weather, and what possible result could there be?
The answer, of course, is not a 12-step solution. But there are times when talk for talk’s sake rises above balloon juice. This was one of them.
What made it interesting was that early on, the language of the violence professionals gave way to a more provocative way of seeing the problem.
“Our discussion . . . has often been based on the assumption that violence is based on poverty,” said the archbishop in his opening remarks. “But violence is more profound.”
To predict whether a child will grow up to become violent, George added, society cannot limit itself to asking whether the child is poor, whether the child has a father, whether the child has a government-provided safety net. Plenty of poor, fatherless, through-the-cracks kids have gone on to lives that are not particularly violent.
“Far more important is the question, `How spiritually and morally isolated is this child?’ ” George said.
There is something incongruous about the idea of spiritual isolation in a city like Chicago. Every brand of belief is here, every style of outreach. Even the bleakest, most dangerous streets are dotted with storefront hothouses of salvation.
How can a person be so thoroughly surrounded by religion, yet spiritually and morally isolated in a way that wasn’t true a century ago?
The answers suggested Tuesday had a few themes in common.
Culturally, we are a nation that doesn’t like busybodies. We prize individualism and privacy, and recoil from in-your-face preaching, religious or otherwise.
Professionally, society likes to slice up its problems, violence among them, and hand them off to different experts. Police get one piece, psychologists get another, social workers get another, clergy yet another. Somebody else is always responsible.
Finally, oddly, there is television.
It’s not that the medium is intrinsically sinful or dangerous. But it warps the way people spend their time, and that changes their approach to the rest of life. Their growing, self-imposed detachment from the world was cited Tuesday by ministers from across neighborhood and religious spectrums.
Rev. Susan Johnson of the Hyde Park Union Church, for instance, has held an outdoor vigil, once a month, for five years. At that vigil, the name of each person killed violently on the South Side that year is read aloud. The list grows to about 500 by December.
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The intent, Johnson said, is to bring people together, in some sort of makeshift community, at least for an evening. But many, she finds, would rather stay by the tube, where the vigil sometimes makes newscasts.
“I meet people who say, `The vigil is great. I always watch the vigil when it’s on TV,’ ” Johnson said.
George said that four months after he arrived in Chicago, he is still amazed by how many people think they know him through TV.
“Television connects,” he said. “But it also isolates. When you watch, you don’t talk.”
If indeed people are losing their moral bearings, floating around in their own enclosed, semi-artificial worlds, government programs won’t solve the problem. Neither will deputizing every minister as a social worker.
The challenge, for religious and community leaders, for everybody who cares, then becomes: How do you reach people who are across the street, but increasingly distant from everyone around them?
How do you make yourself heard over all of society’s balloon juice?