Words of perspective amid the precipitation

When you have gone mano-a-mano with the Gambino crime family, slogged through the wreckage of an embassy bombing, pursued Osama bin Laden and Scooter Libby and strung up two Illinois governors, what's a little precip?

"Timing is everything," said Patrick Fitzgerald, the seemingly fearless federal prosecutor, as the rain began to fall Saturday on his commencement speech at Knox College in Galesburg, northwest of Peoria.

"I'm truly honored and humbled to be able to speak to you today and to receive a degree I didn't earn, but I will certainly treasure," Fitzgerald said, standing in the rain, after the graduates made the first good decision of their post-college lives: To get wet so they could hear what he had to say.

When a United States Attorney comes to speak at a college graduation, there usually aren't protests as there were a few weeks ago when a United States President showed up at Notre Dame.

Then again, Pat Fitzgerald was just there to talk about public service.

As he spoke under a darkened sky, the lanky lawman noted that another proceeding was underway about 300 miles away in Chicago: The funeral for a fallen Chicago policeman, shot down in the line of duty.

What Fitzgerald then had to say about the role of police and prosecutors in stopping all the shootings and murders, the corruption and organized crime, was surprising.

In a business where officials including Fitzgerald routinely stand up at news conferences to thank each other for doing what they are paid to do, Fitzgerald's speech took a different approach.

"We give public servants - and particularly law enforcement - too much credit. And there's a danger in that. If you give someone else credit, you give them responsibility. And in a subtle way, society can walk away from some of the things we need to address."

"In the areas of violence and drugs and gangs, we can put it in the box and say it's a law enforcement problem. We can look at corporate corruption, and say that's a law enforcement problem. And we can look at public corruption, and say it's a law enforcement problem. And that means we don't have to deal with it. It's covered. It's dealt with. If we need to hire more law enforcement, then do that. And that's a mistake, because it doesn't work that way."

"The reason we have violence, is we often have large areas of our cities in different parts of the country where we have lack of educational opportunities; we don't have good role models; we have more gang structures at times than family structures."

These are all things we have heard before. Hearing them from Fitzgerald gives them renewed credence.

"What we have to do is address the problems of poverty. You may think it odd that a prosecutor's talking about the reasons why people commit crime. I don't think growing up in a poor neighborhood excuses you from crime. You can't rob a bank, shoot someone, and excuse it by having a rough upbringing. Many people have rough upbringings and make very positive contributions."

"And carrying that over to public corruption, or corporate corruption, I think we have a willingness to hold people accountable when we see people who are crooks and steal money from companies, or cause losses to shareholders, and then we jump to law enforcement as the next solution, and we skip past the middle. The middle are the people who are out there working, who are honest, who see upfront that other people are corrupt and don't do anything about it sometimes."

Finally, with Fitzgerald and his audience soaked, he recommended a "cultural change" and offered them perhaps the most important lesson they would ever learn in college - more important than any classroom theory.

"There may be a day in the future, where some of you are approached by someone, when you want something from the government. They may ask you to pay them something."

Pay them something as in a bribe, or government gratuity, if you please.

"We need to make the people who would ask afraid to ask in the first place," he suggested, without invoking the names of 30 Chicago alderman who have gone down on corruption charges along with hundreds of other elected representatives, judges, attorneys and their appointed bagmen, minions and lackeys.

"If you each here today-would resolve that if anyone ever tried to corrupt business, society, or government in your presence, that you would scream loudly, that you would blow the whistle, that you would be as loud as one of those train horns. That would make a real difference in the world."

Then, before retreating for dry cover, Fitzgerald left them with two departing words:

"Good luck" he said.

It didn't sound as though he meant "good luck" in the fatalistic sense, as in "yeah, good luck with that."

I think Fitzgerald meant "good luck" in the public service sense we've come to expect from him.

As in "go get 'em. God knows they're out there."

• Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by e-mail at chuckgoudie@gmail.com and followed on Twitter at: twitter.com/ChuckGoudie