From Lawn Chairs to the Nanny Village

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I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree

Two lines. They were written by poet Joyce Kilmer in 1913 and I memorized the poem as a class assignment by my third grade teacher, Mrs. Penzkover. Fortunately most of the class was ahead of me by the time it was my turn to recite. But who knows if I would have remembered more than that first line over 40 years later if I hadn't had to memorize it, just have read it.

In 1913 Wilmette had grown from prairie, farmland, or swamp. There were a few trees to go with the few homes.

This week the village passed an ordinance mandating a tree canopy of 35%. It runs 8 pages. What's Wilmette's current tree canopy, painstakingly quantified by UIC students? Almost 50%, the laissez faire level, up from zero when Wilmette was founded.

The truth is, homeowners like trees.

What's the greatest threat to Wilmette trees? Dutch Elm and now Emerald Ash Borer disease. And the Village of Wilmette.

So this ordinance is purely symbolic. But if the village insists on passing symbolic ordinances, please, brevity is preferred. Especially if this ordinance is to serve as a model for other communities.

Rather than 8 pages of bureaucratese, (if memory serves), Trustee Swanson said it nicely at the board meeting on Tuesday...

Plant a tree in the front yard.

Plant a tree in the back yard.

Two sentences. That's poetry for you.

I learned my first lesson in suburban politics the first winter we lived here. A major snowstorm paralyzed the city of Chicago and my suburb as well. At the time I lived one suburb south, in Evanston, right next to the City.

People started digging their cars out. The snow had covered most of them. As I dumped snow on the sidewalk (where else?), I noted neighbors who had finished digging bringing out big plastic garbage cans, bar stools, lawn chairs… Then they would string something around them to mark off their newly liberated parking space. The bar stools had a certain cachet, but over the next few days I observed they were most likely to be stolen. The lawn chairs emerged as the superior choice. After all, you could comfortably lounge on sentry duty, or chat with similarly occupied people, kind of a mobile front porch. Or you could twist the lawn chairs until they made a kind of fence---you could even call it street art, and who could disagree? The most secure arrangement was to loop bike locks through them, perhaps casually looped around a nearby streetlight or post. In Chicago a little bit of effort entitled one to convert public property to personal use. Our politicians of all stripes have taken this to heart. Thus we see corruption both grand and petty, and public offices bequeathed to children.

But I was shocked to hear air-raid sirens go off one night. What now!? My new husband, having been in town a few months longer, reassured me that since our suburb had declared itself a “nuclear free zone” this was the suburb’s way of reminding people to move their cars so the plows could come through. This struck me as both alarmist and trivial, but I suppose it is one way to alert people who otherwise have no expectation that the local government will actually plow the streets in a timely manner. But as my spouse also pointed out, if the nukes come, people in Evanston will be out moving their cars. The second lesson I learned that there is absolutely no limit to the amount of symbolic gestures my fellow citizens will make.

We moved one suburb north. Wilmette had cobbled streets, old houses, and lots of trees. It had an image of “little old lady in tennis shoes” conservatism. That reputation is way out of date. Oh, there are the left-over libertarians, the social conservatives here and there. But they have been taught to mind their own business and keep out of local affairs. While the taxes are too high, the level of services is high--- decent schools, the village plows the sidewalks and picks up leaves from the curb—no need to bag them. These folks send their checks to Club for Growth but are a non-factor except for the occasional property tax rebellion.

The most common kind of conservative is the “good government” conservative. This successful business executive will run for office promising to bring business methods to the local government bodies and make them more efficient. The trouble is they do treat government like a business---a growth industry. The school superintendents, the village managers and the park district directors soon capture them. These business folk raise taxes because they are fiscal conservatives. They defend buying houses for the village manager or arranging a $200k pension (paid by the state, not the local taxpayers) for a beloved school superintendent. They are the political living dead. Watching a meeting you may think it’s that deer-in-the-headlights look, but it comes back at you---their dead conservative souls stream out of their lifeless eyes as they go along with raising taxes to extend school children’s P.E. by two minutes, or giving a $25 subsidy to village residents who buy a Prius. They play along because they have succeeded in business by being team players. So they block and tackle for the wrong team.

The team is being quarterbacked by another set of good government types. These folks, having labored on the Appearance Review Commission or the Fine Arts Commission, believe they have earned lawn chairs. These lawn chairs are used to mark other people’s private property and convert it to “public use.” This public use turns out to be a currently favored cause- but mostly a symbolic one.

An old convent came up for sale in an old part of town, residential on one side, commercial on the other. The retired nuns sold the land to a developer of single family homes. But everyone had an opinion on the sale of church land. No separation of church and state here. One faction wanted open space for a park. There were some wonderful old trees on the property and for sure they needed to be saved. Another group wanted part of the land for soccer fields, yet another for senior housing. And there was a group who wanted to preserve the historic building, presumably not preserving the nuns within as well. They all signed a petition to put the purchase of the land on the ballot for a negligible $25 million. The referendum passed. Candidates for village trustee who supported the referendum triumphed at the polls. Alas, the construction of affordable housing necessitated cutting down many of the trees that had just been saved from private developers. One newly-elected village trustee said they weren’t supposed to cut all the trees down at once. Perhaps in penance, the newly elected trustees passed an ordinance requiring homeowners to get a license to cut down any tree and pay a fine if the tree exceeds a certain circumference. The dozen senior “affordable” units will sell for $199,000 (the other 69 units are priced from $400,000 to $2 million.)---not really affordable outside of Manhattan or South Beach, but a symbol of triumph for our caring liberal friends.

The causes multiply. Handguns are banned. Smoking is banned. Hybrid cars are subsidized. The village is now considering how to enforce the Kyoto treaty.

I started blogging a year ago, having outworn my welcome among some in the village. Andrew Klavan, City Journal, chronicles his experience in "The Big White Lie":

The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don’t have to say that everyone’s special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don’t have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don’t have to pretend that Islam means peace.

Of course, like everything, this candor has its price. A politics that depends on honesty will be, by nature, often impolite.

By blogging I only alienate people indirectly or by accident as they browse, so liberals around here can maintain their polite fictions, at least among themselves.

When the snows melted, my neighbors took their lawn chairs and restored the public street. The lawn chairs of our village government will long outlast the melting snow.

We have a couple of newly elected board members, two incumbents off in a few weeks. And I keep blogging.