Newspaper must not forget ideals in pressing issues

There is still room for ideals in society. Even in Illinois government.

Managing Editor Madeleine Doubek reminded me of this recently as we were discussing various elements of our "Cleaning up Corruption" series of editorials and reports.

As we approached a certain point of debate, I was pressing for us to acknowledge that lawmakers had only about two weeks in which to act, so expecting well-crafted, thoroughly reasoned legislation from them on every point we considered important might not be realistic.

"Sometimes," Doubek replied, "it's the mission of an editorial page to not be pragmatic, but to be idealistic and to push for what's right no matter how impractical."

It is so easy in this business, maybe in any business, to overlook the importance of idealism. Sometimes, we can forget it even exists at all. We constantly find ourselves in the middle of warring forces pressing self-serving aims. Compromise and accommodation often seem to be the best we can hope for.

But it is there at the root of everything meaningful. It's important not to lose sight of that fact.

Yes, it is frustrating to watch the legislature operate for month after month every year without appearing to accomplish much more than to host a few hearings, only to leap to action in a flurry of deals and bills in the waning hours of the session that often become laws that most of the people supporting them never read. It's easy to think that people who operate like this care no more about their work than the college students who stay up all night cramming for that algebra final cared about algebra all the previous term.

But somewhere at the core of all that activity, somewhere within the fine print of a law no one may ever read, somewhere in the heart of, if no one else, the legislator trying to press a specific bill through the sausage-making process that is law making, there is a hope for something better than exists at present. An ideal.

Of course, by the time the ideal reaches the end of the legislative rendering plant, it may be a mere hint of its original self, as comparable to the original as a slice of bacon is to a hog. But it's there, and it's valuable, and it makes the society something different from it was before.

This is not to say that every law is a good law. But it is certainly true that every good law, however imperfect, builds from an ideal that, if practicality and pragmatism were the only considerations, might never have become more than hopeful words or a passing thought.

So, we have aggressively supported ideals for ethics reform on our editorial page, even knowing that lawmakers must act within a very short time frame, and we've given prominent attention to a series of stories, including a survey of local lawmakers getting on record their positions on key provisions of likely ethics legislation, by senior state government editor John Patterson and our Springfield bureau.

Our goal is to see meaningful legislation within the next 10 days that will lead to a better, more-open political system in a state that desperately needs it. We know that government leaders are also dealing with a debilitating economy and a desperate budget crisis of their own. We know that in terms of what is pragmatic, it could be tough for them to produce all we hope or all that could be.

But to press for less than all we hope or less than all that could be is to suggest we can be satisfied with something less than what's right. And that is something our ideals and our mission should never allow.