Within 48 hours of the nail’s arrival in the Orland Park’s man cerebellum, the news of the Illinois event had been repeated 22 million times by internet “news” providers.” Just search Google under “nail in the head” to see for yourself.

From America to Buenos Aires to Minsk, they were marveling at the bizarre non-achievement of Autello’s life. He provoked prattling in Prague, ignited inquiries in Inchon and triggered talk in Tel Aviv.

We won’t contribute to the cliche of noting how blazingly fast the World Wide Web connects every facet of our lives to everyone else in the world. Pedestrians standing on the shoulder of the information highway run the risk of being run over by large, fast trucks.

We know all that.

But what you should most take from this event is how sure the world is that what happened to Autello actually happened. As on, it was a true fact, not just a sort of fact.

We know it’s true because local reporters and photographers in Orland Park were there to bear witness, assess the physical evidence, interview the participants, weight the facts.

To whatever degree you trust the observations of trained, dispassionate fact gatherers, you can trust that the case of Autello was true and accurately reported.

But you also should be skeptical that several billion more people on the planet are sure it’s true without an ounce of independent evidence it is. As the world spins on its axis, millions believe perceptions, hunches, and outright falsehood as if they were as true as reports of the Autello episode.

Why are we gullible?

The world trusts the Ghost in The Machine will not lie to them. We trust machines to work because we are told they are trustworthy. In the case of the Internet, we tend to believe the theory that elaborate lies are harder to pull off than simple truths.

But the truth about the Internet is that almost no one knows if facts displayed there as if it were unassailably true can be independently proven by the customer of that information.

Therein lies the conundrum of the world we inhabit. We know far more facts at any second in our history as human beings than we ever have. But we have less empirical evidence that any of those facts are true than ever before, too.

In the grander scheme of the universe, the events of Auello’s puncture wound don’t mean much except as a passing oddity. But there are facts that must be true for the world to work.

If you are tempted to dismiss your hometown news operation as irrelevant to your life, think of that lesson in Dante Auello’s quirky adventure. Ask yourself whether knowing the truth matters at all.

All of you within the sound of this keyboard should care because that definition could have fundamental effects on the flow of information. And how you conduct this part of your techno lives.

A Cook County judge has landed in the middle of that unanswered question by ruling a California technology blogger is not a real journalist and cannot claim the protection of the California and Illinois shield laws about his sources.

The judged seems to cast this as a tough judgment call because there are valid arguments on both sides. But the truth is this is the easiest case of its kind. If the blog in question is not journalism, then there are virtually no definitions that will cover what we all do.

TechnoBuffalo, a three-year-old gadget blog, claims a million readers a month. It has employees, editors, employees and all the infrastructure trappings that media companies usually possess.

It published images in August taken from the user’s guide for the Droid Bionic before the phone went on sale. A presumed insider spilled the beans, and Motorola’s printer in Niles, Ill., was not happy.

So they sued, demanding to know the source of the leak. But the blog has so far kept the tipster secret, arguing that it was publishing news and so is protected under the journalist shield laws.

Is it protected?

We’d like to know that ourselves. But the issue remains unsettled as both a cultural and legal matter. At some point, state legislatures or a high appeals court will have to define the rules.

But until then, we denizens of the murky Internet realms will continue crashing into old rules that seem obsolete.

Here’s how most shield laws work and why. To guarantee traditional press outlets – perhaps even Internet websites – can function, the shield law says they don’t have reveal a source of sensitive information.

Without the protection, most tipsters and sources would never reveal embarrassing secrets that history now suggests should have been public knowledge.

Think of the Pentagon Papers or Watergate, for example.

No law stops any blogger from blogging with facts, opinions or totally made-up nonsense.

No one is protected from being sued for libel.
But the law does protect the “newsman” (what an old-timey word) from being told to divulge who passed the secret.

It’s the first constituent element of press freedom guaranteed in the Constitution that has real effect on the business of information.

The hidden argument surrounds credibility. The Internet still is populated by a seething goulash of truth seekers, amateurs and some outright slugs devoid of much credibility. Just like “real” journalism. Do ruthless, tasteless, despicable people deserve the same rights as the rest of us noble people?

I guess so. Darn it. Otherwise it’s not an enunciated right. It’s just a good deal we’ve all lucked into.

The Constitution generally sides with the flow of information over keeping secrets. Without protection, whistleblowers always get fired, and worse. Too many secrets make for a closed society.

Judge Michael Panter insists that TechnoBuffalo isn’t a real news operation. Is it? Seems to fit the “quacks like a duck” theory of existential realism. But the judge seems baffled by what the rest of the world might see as obvious.

The real problem, of course, is that the “old society” doesn’t know how to frame the virtual world in other than brick-and-mortar definitions. It’s always the rumble seat paradigms that tend to thwart the future, not out of malice. Just ignorance.

It’s what stopped the Swiss from realizing that a digital watch was a real watch, just as much real as the gear and lever clocks they built.

The Swiss owned the invention of digital timekeeping and gave it away for virtually nothing to the Japanese because they could not fathom how a silent, electronic, numerical shape-shifter could be seen as a real watch.

What’s a bad paradigm worth? About four nickels, baby.

The world we leave behind an inch of reality at a time is the world that thrives on solid definitions far less than it does reality of the moment.

We are controlled by the old world. Still.

As for legal specifics, until the issue of defining bloggers can be resolved, the First Amendment has hit a speed bump in Illinois.

Sure, issuing a final “check, please” to Osama Bin Laden was a nice moment, and federal prison for a disgraced governor with big hair is good news, if you cast the definition wide enough.

As for the state of our check books, we’re told we’re not fully in a recession or depression, but it sure feel like it. Maybe it’s a recessive depression or depressive recession. By some calculations, 40 percent of the nation stands at the threshold of poverty.

Illinois government remains broke and broken. Congress? Ditto.

We were forced to pay attention to the Kardashians this year. There were four worse than usual Adam Sandler movies. Several hundred really rich guys in the NBA argued over how to divide their millions before deciding we couldn’t do without professional basketball.

When such banalities seem to overwhelm us, we are sustained by the grand richness of real life. Young couples fell in love; beautiful children were born; careers advanced; homes were filled with joy. Students discovered Twain, Mozart and Renoir.

The nation remains resilient.

So, if we were ever due for a break from rotten luck, 2012 could be the year we break out of our foul mood.

As a matter of mathematical fact, every major indicator of economic health showed improvement in the last months of the year: manufacturing, consumer confidence, holiday sales, inflation, and employment. Even government is shrinking. There are nearly 400,000 fewer government workers now than last December, and more people are employed overall.

If you are looking for portents, this might be the year things look up.

On the other hand, the ancient Mayans said 2012 is the year it all goes poof in a large cloud of flame. But after the general crumminess of 2011, how bad could that be?

Even if predictions of that final fireball turn out to be true, we’ll offer a hearty farewell to 2011.

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

So, when we say “Merry Christmas’ today, it likely will be the 1,000^th time in the last month someone has said that to you. It’s a password that shows we share the cultural and religious underpinnings of the event, but just as fundamentally, we’re saying that we hope you are well. Truly well and happy.

For some of us, hearing the words “Merry Christmas” from a loved one – a child you have not seen for years, for example – will mean more than just the words.

The Iraq War – at least our nation’s part in the miserable 10-year excursion – is over.

That means the million Americas who fought in that war can come home this Christmas to the warmth and peace they deserve. The world political maelstrom being what it is, the rest may be momentary. There is always the Afghanistan War which is in its 10^th year with no sign of ending. And after that war, who can tell? We seem to run out of reasons for peace much more easily than reasons for war.

But for the moment, this is a morning that thousands of your young neighbors can awake to a good cup of coffee and hugs from children and spouses.

They won’t have to worry about “improvised explosive devices” ending their lives this morning.  No need for body armor to fend off stray sniper bullets.

When they step outside their homes this morning to check the sky for signs of snow, they will encounter the same life as the rest of us do every day, the same perils, and the same aggravations.

They have returned to life as ordinary Americans, although their achievements in Iraq are not ordinary. Whether the price was worth it ultimately, they gave an entire nation a chance at freedom. They could not have done more.

So if no one else says it, we wish all you young soldiers a very “Merry Christmas” this morning.

And many more.

But, of course, it hasn’t really ended.

A war continues as long as the wounds suffered in that war linger. That war will hurt the nation and the soldiers we sent to fight in hidden ways we are only now starting to understand.

For reasons the Pentagon cannot explain, the prodigious improvements in battlefield medicine that helped thousands survive trauma has not worked on soldiers who want to kill themselves.

The new layer of tragic casualties for both active military and veterans is as mysterious as it is staggering. The cost of Iraq seems to have no clear limit.

You will read about them every day in newspaper pages. Others die with little reaction or notice, escept for those who loved them.  Some kill themselves by leaping from bridges or stepping in front of trains; others choose life-destroying conduct as Crest Hill, Ill., veteran Josh Price did. He was convicted of possessing child porn. He said it diverted his mind from the competing urge to kill his wife and two children.

They suffer post-traumatic stress disorders, joblessness and spiritual damage we can only guess.

One U.S. veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan attempts suicide every 80 minutes, according to new study. The Department of Veterans Affairs acknowledges that veterans account for one of every five of the nation’s 30,000 suicides.

“The suicide rate is out of control – it’s epidemic proportions right now,” says Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “There are very few programs that are effective, and there’s a serious lack of national awareness.”

Experts say that the problem will only grow as more veterans return home. From 2005 to 2010, one active military member attempted suicide every 36 hours.

If nothing else, the VA is under severe legal pressure to improve its programs. The problem got out of control from bureaucratic indifference and lack of planning for how damaged the returning soldiers would be.

We have paid for what we got in Iraq. If you did not know before how large and heartbreaking the price for Iraq was, now you do.

She was deciding whether the joy in her life — and there was joy — was enough to balance the pain. And there was pain. She had thought of it often. She had thought of suicide often.

The edge of this psychic Grand Canyon is the loneliest place in the world. There is no light. No warmth. No hope.

And then she could see no way out of the darkness. The hidden pain of her life was too much. The cyber bullying by schoolmates. The torments. The malicious gossip. The malevolent juvenile plots. The clinical depression that stalked her since she was a young child. The depression that even medicine couldn’t stop. Life had become a predator to her soul.

It only seemed as though she had defenses against the predator. She did not.

And then she gave up.

She killed herself in her family’s Northfield, Ill., home.

It was Feb. 11, 2004.

The ripples that spread after a child’s death extend eternally in all directions, as waves from a rock tossed into a quiet pool. The loss never goes away, and the grief seems permanent. Such losses are too profound to be clearly understood. The parent who loses a young child to suicide suffers the ultimate violation of human rightness. It changes everything that life was supposed to be.

Joanne Meyers wasn’t sure she could endure the loss and the heartbreak of her daughter’s death. The anger. Or even the guilt.

But if the wound of that day would be eternal, Joanne Meyers promised herself that the lessons of that day must be equally abiding and immutable. She could save herself only by saving others if she could. It was the least she owed to Elyssa. And to herself. There could be no compensation for the loss; but there might be redemption.

So she set about healing herself by healing others. There is virtual certainty that some teenagers are alive on Chicago’s North Shore now because of that healing.

That’s how Elyssa’s Mission got started.

The Perfect Child

Elyssa was the first of Joanne and Alan’s three daughters. Even after the years since Elyssa’s death, Joanne finds comfort in remembering how special her daughter was. She clings to it. She would have been been 23 this spring, likely a college graduate, deeply involved in her own charity work and ready to bloom as a young professional. Elyssa was a buoyant beacon at New Trier Township High.

Indeed, remembering Elyssa is one of the positive side effects of Elyssa’s Mission, an interventionist teaching foundation that places the perils of suicide squarely in front of teens and allows them to see themselves in the reflection. The Mission has counseled more than 10,000 students in 30 school districts along Lake Michigan. This is Joanne’s work. This is her triumph.

But as the years slide past, Elyssa will seem less real to more people. Joanne Meyers doesn’t want her daughter to be just a historical symbol, even in a good cause.

Elyssa Meyers was too special for that.

“She was such a beautiful girl,” her mom says.

“She was incredibly bright and ahead of her time. She was funny, and she made you laugh. She was a thinker. Her writing and poetry were beautiful. It was deep, but very sad. She had this big personality and when she came into a room, she’d want all the attention the room could give. She lit up the room. Her favorite thing in life was for me to fill up the house with her friends and family. She loved being around them. She longed for acceptance.”

“When I grow up, I want to help other people. That is my gift to the world. The way I see it, if I start understanding myself now, I will be able to understand others later. I don’t just want to listen to what people say to me, but feel what they mean. I have the power to make people smile, and I want to use that as much as I can. I know I am only one person, but when I grow up if I only make one person happy, it will make a difference. That is the world’s gift to me. That is real.”

— Elyssa Meyers
from her journal entry “Real”

Sadly, Elyssa’s desire for acceptance made her susceptible to some who were not her friends. “I think that was hard for her,” Joanne says. “I don’t think she knew how to pick kids as friends. It was important to her to be popular. And I think she made bad choices. Over time a lot of bad things happened. She left herself vulnerable. She acted out. There was pain from things that happened early in her life that I don’t think she ever overcame that. She endured a lot.”

Joanne Meyers can flip through her mental rolodex of old experiences with Elyssa, and see plenty of hints. Rearview mirrors see reality so perfectly. Everyone knew she was in trouble, just not how much trouble.

“She walked around with dark clouds above her head,” Joanne said. “There was the cyber bullying, terrible things written on the bathroom wall at school. A boy had stolen her computer password” and used the Internet to torment her.

One student later said he had been paid $10 to tell her that everyone in school hated her. The boy was crying as he admitted what he’d done.

“She struggled with self esteem and got down easily when people were not nice,” said classmate Melissa Malnoti. “As time went on, she just couldn’t take it. She once asked me when we were much younger to attend her funeral. But when people are so young, it’s hard to know what to do or say.”

“Kids can be terrible people,” said Zack Novak, another classmate. “It just started to snowball. Maybe I didn’t take it seriously enough. Obviously, now that she’s gone.”

Against that backdrop, a fragile soul stumbled, fell and could not rise again.

“She would say she didn’t understand the sadness,” mom said. “And it just very hard to understand that going through adolescence there is this fine line when a child has to develop coping mechanisms and find help. I thought she was getting better. She was taking medication. But she had this hopelessness, and the drugs weren’t helping.”

It was not until later that Joanne Meyers learned of the complex peer assaults on her daughter. “She didn’t think there was help. I didn’t know the depth of her pain. She did tell some of her peers. I only found out later.”

Yes, there was no help.

It was the greatest sadness a mother can feel. “In those last few months we were closer than we had ever been,” mom said. “We were friends, but …”

That realization of what she had not known left Joanne Meyers thunderstruck. Even if you sense a child’s terrible dread of alienation, how do you break through to help? Where do you turn? Who listens? Who is prepared to act?

“In those days you just didn’t talk much about mental health,” she said. “Especially here on the North Shore. I think this has been a place where everybody wants to stick to their own business. Elyssa was not so much ‘troubled’ as she was predisposed to depression. Her mind just didn’t work in a healthy way. But you didn’t know what to do. I knew something was wrong. Back then talking about mental illness was very hard. Living in this environment, there are secrets. People are so wrapped up in their own lives that they don’t want to get involved in other people’s lives. But we have to reach out to others. Have to.”

Joanne Meyers and brother-in-law Ken felt the same pull at the same time. To do something.

And they volunteered with Links-North Shore Youth Health Center to … to what?

Yes, that was the problem. To help another child? Another mother. Yes, of course. Anything to stop another painful trip like Elyssa had traveled with no one to grab her hand and pull her back. “I knew I had to do something,” mom said.

But the Links offered so many programs to address so many issues that suicide prevention was not a particular focus. In comparison, suicide prevention was the only thing that compelled Joanne and Ken.

And so they asked family, friends and Elyssa’s true high school friends for help. The community foundation that sprang forth from their common loss now raises money to administer the SOS (Signs of Suicide) program, the acknowledged gold standard in suicide prevention programs for teens.

The SOS program was created by Screening for Mental Health, Inc., and includes a video presentation, followed by an anonymous checklist survey that students take to determine whether they should talk about their feelings with an adult or health care professional. The personal story of Elyssa is central to the message.

Teens see themselves and their lives in this presentation. The signals of approaching suicide attempts are eerily similar, and SOS presenters are often shocked how many teens volunteer that they are feeling many of the same heartaches and depression that gripped Elyssa. “You can hear a pin drop in the room when teens are watching this,” Joanne says.

SOS works because there always are signs. It’s just that there hasn’t always been anyone to react to those signs.

“I believe we create our own path. Faith in God will help guide us, but it is I who lifts my foot and takes another step. We take what we want from life and make it what we choose. Our choices determine our life. One of the hardest concepts is that once we do something, we can’t take it back. No matter what we say or do afterward, what’s done is done. Everything is so permanent. With that knowledge my outlook on life changes. It all comes down to one simple thing: I don’t want to mess up.”

— Elyssa Meyers
from her journal entry “Real”

The program is intense and is meant to be. Ken Meyers found early that teens didn’t want a safe explanation of the truth. They wanted to know everything. They wanted to know exactly how Elyssa died. He hesitated at first. But now he tells them. She hanged herself, he says directly. There is always a deep, sad silence in the room at that news.

The program teaches — insists, really — that intervention is not a risk for a friend. It’s absolutely necessary for friends to accept that reaching out to help is the only true measure of that friendship and care. To this point, the program has allowed thousands of teens to identify themselves as at-risk and get adult help.

You belong to everyone who cares about you. And they belong to you. You cannot withhold that care. You must always act. That is the only safety net that catches a child ready to plunge. The SOS message is emphatic and consistent.

Joanne wishes with all her heart that Elyssa could have heard that message seven springs ago as she stood on the edge of her emotional Grand Canyon and saw nothing but darkness in the pit.

Wishes it with all her heart.

-          “The Death of Emmett Till” by Bob Dylan

We haven’t forgotten Emmett Till entirely. He still haunts our conscience when we are of a mind to remember that should never be forgotten.

But he is drifting away from us every day, which might not be the worst indignity he ever suffered, for at least he has peace wherever his soul is. Still, he is a wan ghost for us now, consumed by time and the forgetfulness that time imposes.

And reneging on her promise to find away to honor Till’s legacy and life was not the greatest crime Carolyn Towns committed in desecrating the remains in her care at Burr Oaks Cemetery in suburban Chicago. For those crimes, she has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.

She not only was guilty of greedy, criminal indifference, she gouged a hole in the heart of the region’s African-American community whose forebears were interred there.

But her crime against the child who became the nearly literal face of racial intolerance in America and roused us to shame was just as real. We could not turn away from his lynching murder on Aug. 25, 1955, in Mississippi because his mother showed us that face and what had been done to him.

And so, at long last, we came to our senses as a nation and began the path to civil rights and away from murderous intolerance. We remain on that path and likely will as long as the instinct to do right remains with us.

There had been plans to build a museum and memorial mausoleum in his honor at Burr Oaks. But the memorial, as with the memory of him, was whisked away in time.

Now his grave remains untouched in the middle of the Burr Oak cemetery, covered by a flat copper plate. His casket was sent to the Smithsonian.

But Emmett Till belongs to Illinois more than Mississippi where, oddly enough, his memory is more recognized in official remembrances.

If there is money to be raised for good causes and the will to remember, we must find a way to build that museum.

It need not be a sumptuous palace. Only a place of repose and dignity for a lost child who received neither in his death.

We owe it to him.

We owe it to ourselves.

Ask any Marine.

They left lots of blood on that miserable excuse for an island.

But that was 66 years ago, too long to hold a grudge against a nation or a small slice of it as Okinawa was. But it is not too long ago to forget.

Fardy was a man worth remembering. His death on May 7, 1945, was heroic even by the standards that separate Marines from most mortals.

He was a kid. He was 22 when he traded his life for the lives of all his friends in Company C, 1^st Battalion, 1^st Marines. In a flick of a second, he chose. The Japanese hand grenade came sailing at the feet of his eight-man squad. He was their leader. He chose. He dived on it. He knew it would kill him. It did.

So Fardy came home figuratively this week. His body did not come home to Illinois from that miserable island until four years after his death, and then his grave at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Worth Township showed no sign of who he was. No sign that he was a Medal of Honor winner.

That oversight was corrected this week with a rededicated headstone that told local citizens that Marine Cpl. John Peter Fardy had once been one of them.  His Leo High fellow alumni did the honors. Bagpipers played the Irish Anthem for him. Veterans of World War II rose to salute.

You might think that this was merely sentimental old business of a kind too removed from life now to mean much. You could not be more wrong about that.

Fardy should remind us how war is often as unexpected in its heroisms as it is deliberate in its indifference. Fardy’s death was not only testimony to courage; it also symbolizes the sad burden of fate. We must care. War does not.

His choice on the day of his death was almost forgotten by history and, sadly, had no effect on World War II. In a better world, gallantry should produce profound good. It did, in one way. Consider the hundreds of Company C grandchildren and their grandchildren to come who never would have existed without Fardy’s final act as a human. .

But two weeks later, the battle that took 200,000 Japanese lives on that miserable rock and 12,000 Marine lives, too, was rendered moot.

Two mushroom clouds, not Okinawa’s staggering human price, ended the war.

That’s why we must remember John Peter. We remember not only who he was but who he might have been had he lived.

If we forget him, we might forget all the others, too. We might forget the awful waste that all war imposes.

But we won’t.

When Cyril Strezo died from cancer, he actually died of a bureaucratic runaround that denied him chemotherapy that might have saved his life. Jody Polka will never know the answer to that question but she promised him, and herself,  to never let that happen in Illinois again.

Jody Polka is a person of true grit. She’s no movie script.

If she told insurance companies they could never do this again, she meant it. So for four years, she lobbied and testified and twisted arms as forcefully as she could. With state Rep. Mary Flowers (D-Chicago) at her side to fight for the legislation, the people of Illinois now have the right to quick, impartial review of medical treatment denial. Gov. Pat Quinn signed the legislation last month.

Why did this have to happen this way?

Perhaps you didn’t know it, but before Jody Polka’s crusade, there was no law that required insurance companies to show anyone why they refused to pay for medicine that a doctor prescribed. Even if the patient would die without the medicine. The insurer always decided if its denial was fair, and you can guess how often the insurer ruled itself guilty of a fatal medical error.

As they say in the “Godfather” movies, “it’s just business.”

By the time the insurer reconsidered its denial, Strezo’s esophageal cancer had spread, and he was doomed. The insurer changed its mind about the chemotherapy after the SouthtownStar wrote about the case. We’re sure the newfound conscience was coincidental. At any rate, the insurer saved itself money by deciding not to invest in saving Strezo.

If that does not make you nearly as furious as it did Polka, then you need to check your heart for a beat.

So now there is a “process”, a 48-hour review for urgent cases that affords an external, unbiased review.

As for the human cost of her battle, Polka has no reservations. “There was this huge feeling of calm and comfort. I think it came from knowing that no one will ever have to go through the feeling of being terrified and waiting and knowing that it’s the difference between the person you love living or being left to die.”

We’re glad there are people like Jody Polka and equally as glad there are people like Mary Flowers to give Jody’s voice the power it deserved.

You and we are better off for them today. Unlike some insurace companies, they keep their promises.

We made up the “Total Indifference” part of that. It’s sardonic irony. The mood just struck us.

Anyway, we noticed the national sea swell of change right away. We are very observant of these sorts of fundamental shifts.

The dietary designation change occurred because, well, we’re not quite sure, but we’re positive it’s going to be very good for us because it will lead us all to eat more balanced, more healthful meals just like its predecessor did.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “MyPlate” visual shows an aerial view of a color-coded plate (natch) with cubby holes for protein, vegetables, grains, fruits and a sidebar hole for dairy. We found last week that they usually mean “pork chops” when they say protein.

The old Pyramid system confused us. It must have, because after 30 years of following its precepts, we are a nation of very big-boned people. Most of our big bones are surrounded by big slabs of fat.

We think the Pyramid didn’t work (why didn’t they try Tetrahedrons or Parallelograms?) because we cannot withstand advertising’s call to supersize everything that winds up in our colons.

How can the federal government’s advice possibly stand up to two pounds of transfat-soaked French fries with a triple-pattied half-pounder and a soft drink with enough liquid volume to make a horse choke?

We aren’t an accidentally fat country. We do it out of habit. We’re trained to do it. We’re fat.

But that’s OK. We’ve just got big bones.