When do the last really get to go first? When do those most vulnerable get to feel safe? What time does that happen? Here in Chicago, will it be marked in central standard time?

There is a moment, driving a cab all night, around 4:15- 4:30 in the morning, when the night is not quite gone and the new day hasn’t started yet. Circuit breakers switch off neon lights, doors shuttered tight on the 4:00 am bars in the neighborhoods, and even the din of the manufactured party on Rush Street takes a breath.

 The Lake is calm, a thin orange line painted in across the eastern sky like a promise. Kids now safe in beds in every corner of the soon to be teeming metropolis, stir for just a moment, scrunch their faces with terror dream sweats of being scared to walk to school.  

All night taxi drivers head for their parking spots, a cell phone arrangement to be picked up by another driver so you won’t have to walk the 4 blocks home with your cash because there is a damn good chance that you’ll get robbed. And if you’re lucky, they will just take the money. 

 The kid drifts back to sleep. The cab driver shuts the front door of his apartment. Turns the lock. 

Is that the moment when the last get to go first? 

Travel back a few years. Maybe you’ll find the moment then.   

Back before Chicago’s grand boulevards were lined with rainbow colors of flowers spilling out like overfilled dishes of candy. Back before gleaming silver sculptures danced and tossed light beams on the gardens of Millennium Park. Chicago’s Parisian gardens of splendor encompassing land where factories once belched out sooty, gritty grime. Land where railroads lumbered in slowly depositing tired travelers from every part of the globe.  

In Chicago, there is always a city stretched out and still breathing right below the surface 

Back when a certain time was drawing to a close. Mayor Daley the Elder had just passed. The expressways and housing projects all in place but just starting to crumble, setting off infrastructure alarms among the few who were watching.  

And when those concrete expressway dividing lines that also divided neighborhoods and simmering tensions, started to crumble; was that the time when tiny souls could feel safe? 

Back when the brutal, cold order maintained by stacking people on top of each other in buildings called Cabrini, Robert Taylor or Stateway; is that when we stopped picking on the little ones? 

Back before the flowers and the trees and the miles of designer black iron fences which now serve as much more subtle reminders of the still existing barriers between the vulnerable and the strong, the rich and the poor; back then I drove a taxi for awhile and I knew that 4:00 am moment when the city gulps and sighs and takes a breath. 

But it wasn’t scary then.

I didn’t drive around with questions like “when will the last be first?” sitting up straight in the back seat of my taxi. I didn’t know there were questions like that then. 

Back then there was even a touch of romance in the job. I kept waiting for her, for Sue, to open the back of my cab and say “How are you Harry?” To which I’d reply “How are you. Sue? Through the too many miles and the two little smiles, I still remember you” 

But Sue never hopped in the cab. Or stuffed the bill in my shirt. And every now and then I’d remember those were just song lyrics. And my name wasn’t Harry.”

Toughest thing about the job back then was having to wipe down the back seat after frat boy puke time---because if I didn’t---the smell would drive away money the moment it opened that back door. 

Today, one in five taxi drivers has been attacked or robbed. That’s a real number. 20%. 

Today, just as he finishes his shift, the driver feels the icy cold of the gun barrel on the back of his neck. The ride tells him, “Give me your money.” He does. And then she says to him, (I am not making this up) “You’re lucky. The only reason I didn’t kill you is that today is my birthday.” 

It’s different today. The simmering of an ugly terror just below the surface. You want we stop picking on the little ones? You want the last to be first? That’s nice. Go find yourself a church. 

Back then, the gritty black soot swept down Elston Avenue like a nightmare dusting of the season’s first snow. The lights of the cab would catch a wave from one of the stick legged, short skirt working girls darting through the shadows at North and Elston Avenue. If the night had brought her money, she’d want a ride back to where she stayed on the west side of town.  

Always believing that the ride would not cost her money.  Skimming still empty surface streets west towards Oak Park, but never that far, the sun coming up in the rear view mirror, her eyes closed in the weariness of pure survival, till she said, “Here. Stop here.”  

The taxi ride always cost her money. She always did her best, but it always cost her money. Handed over with a street smart protest of understanding. 

Lots of things learned driving the cab. I learned that wearing your Beloit College t-shirt was not a good way to get tips.  But I wasn’t scared. Not like today when the numbers look like this: the average taxi driver will gross $54,000 a year in Chicago and after expenses---that number goes down to $12,000. 

Today---that’s what they have to feed and shelter families. 

Back then, graduate students, kooky artists, would be writers who used to be special education teachers and were on their way to running job training, workforce development programs for kids across the city---lots of people drove cabs.

One man pretty much owned all the cabs.  There was a system. There was an order, however brutal, but there was an order. And when you maybe, just for a moment were out of work, you could drive a cab. Not like today.

Back then when you were just about to borrow your girlfriends’ blue Chevy and drive to Deerfield, a faraway suburb of Chicago, to step from the street into the corporation for the very first time and suddenly start having money that didn’t come in one dollar bills stuffed in the pocket of your jeans----it was no big deal to drive a cab.  

Now after lifetimes of carrying business cards that said things like: corporate, senior executive, management consultant,  setting up Call Centers that employed hundreds,  now a lifetime later I think back.  Such true  gifts I  received in the cab, such true gifts when I poured drinks behind the bar and came home with that same crumpled pile of one dollar bills. Such true gifts  in the truck throwing bundles of what used to be a Chicago institution “The Reader” newspaper into the corners of taverns and then answering, “Sure! A shot would go great tonight. Thanks!” 

I wasn’t scared.  But I sure had better odds. I wasn’t in the 20% who got hit---because back then, if there was a number that high---it was not being counted. Oh, and gas went for about 50 cents a gallon. 

And I never had to ask, “When do the last go first?” 

Back then, Jimmy Carter never sent the Secretary of Education and Attorney General to Chicago to help shine a light on why the defenseless were getting pummeled, beaten and killed.

Those children. All those children scared to walk to school. Now. Right now. The President could have sent the whole cabinet and come home himself.

Because now the question is no longer a simmering boil just below the surface. Now, “when will we stop picking on the little ones?” is shouted in a roar.

Echoing in all the streets, all the neighborhoods, even the ones that act like gated communities, enclaves of the tiny strand of wealthy people that dot the city map.

“When will we stop picking on the little ones!” The understandably skeptical press core, or what is left of it, and the citizens of the streets who do the real work of government, wisely hold back belief because they have seen so much. They feel like they have been here before. They know about broken promises. They wince at detail. “Did they really hold the meeting with all the big shots to talk about how to stop the violence at the Four Season Hotel??? Could that really be true??” 

And then comes an idea so radical that it literally blows to smithereens the tired old cliché of “let’s think out of the box,” and instead moves to: “let’s find a new box entirely.” 

Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman says: let’s first put a microscope on the question: “Who exactly are the little ones most likely to get stomped?”

Instead of spreading the salve of political appeasement across the simmering urban streets---lets do something so radical that the fundamental American principle so ingrained in everything from health insurance to financial markets is turned on its head. That principle that says: if you can just make rich people happy, then all that happy will trickle down like chocolate syrup on a sundae to all the rest of the world.

Let’s do something different. Let’s turn that principle on its head.  Let’s do this. Let’s summon the untapped power and gristle and courage and political will to drill down deep and find the little ones MOST at risk.

Gather up the power of analytics and really grasp the details.

The details.

Take 38 high schools where the cold true power of the numbers tell us: these are the little ones most likely to get smacked. Now exactly what time do they walk to school? Who sees them off? What’s the route? What gang controls that street? Who greets them when get to the school? When they go home?  How exactly do we make the last be first? 

The plan has been and will continue to be attacked. The attackers will have all sorts of valid points. Many of those points beginning with the unspoken assumption, “What about me?”  

Or, as was once said by the late, great Mike Royko, who chronicled this place like no other ever has and probably ever will, 5 days a week in a newspaper, the attackers will call on the un-official Chicago motto. “Where’s mine?” 

To be clear, it won’t just be greed that comes from those opposing the plan. Opposition will come from world class teachers and classrooms where windows haven’t opened since the 1950’s.Leaders who have seen flavors of the month come and go. Again, the people who do the hard, real work of government. 

The plan might not work.

It could be called idealistic. A word, like “liberal” that was once not shouted down and proclaimed to be bad. 

Me? I’ve taught in the classrooms. Not the ones where the bureaucracy checks your credential at the door and then you’re on your own if you fill out the right forms.

I taught in schools steps from the street, private schools where the parents can’t pay, where the teacher’s first job is to find where the kid lives, then go get them and bring them to school. I’ve run public and private workforce and training programs. Some national in scope. And I’d hop on this train in a heartbeat shouting, “Tell me what oar you need me to row!” 

This plan that answers, “Here is how the last can be first” is very different.

Huberman calls what he’s looking for in the 38 schools, “a culture of calm.”

And it COULD work.  That microscope aimed at the last, the lonely, little ones.

Then a ripple from a plan gliding gently into this new dawn rising over the inland sea standing next to the city.  

A city, like any, just trying just to do the best it can. 

As a cab driver who has worked all night, simply parks his car, walks home safe, smiles at the morning sun, walks up the stairs to his apartment and sleeps the rest of gentle golden angels. 

At this time.

This place.

Right now.

The last become first.