Slusher: The necessarily relentless drive for better things

Change is frustratingly slow. Emphasis sometimes on frustratingly. I'm thinking now of two particular scourges that for years have been causes célèbre for the Daily Herald - heroin and distracted driving.

On the former, we published our first in-depth examination with a four-day series in December 2001 that extended into public forums, extensive reporting throughout 2002 and a yearlong series in 2003 in which we endeavored to report the personal stories of every person to die of drug-related causes in the suburbs.

In the intervening years, we've revisited the subject numerous times, including with our occasional series, "Heroin: Through Their Eyes" that began in 2014. Some of the impetus for that series grew from the DuPage County coroner's lament of heroin deaths the previous year in record numbers. Had we attempted to showcase the life and struggles of every person who died of a drug overdose in 2013, we could not have kept up. In DuPage County alone, we would have had to produce three profiles a month. Include all five counties in the Daily Herald coverage area and you get an idea of how far in the wrong direction habits have moved since those first four stories in 2001.

On distracted driving, transportation and projects writer Marni Pyke first produced a yearlong occasional series of reports in 2011. In December of that year, our editorial board produced an intensive four-day series of editorials attempting to focus attention on the problem and suggest solutions. In 2012, the legislature adopted tough new restrictions on cellphone use behind the wheel. Safety experts continued to sound alarms. Smartphone providers launched massive advertising campaigns. In October 2014, as you know from Pyke's latest series last Sunday and Monday, 40 of our staff members collected at various street corners around the suburbs to gauge compliance with those restrictions - and found more than 1,000 violations at just a handful of locations in a single hour.

Clearly, the epidemic we profiled in 2011 has not much abated in the intervening four years. It may even be worse.

Cynics would surely be discouraged. But we are not cynics. Today, our editorial board concludes another series on the topic. How we would love it if we could dust off our hands, breathe a satisfied sigh and declare our work finished. Problem solved. But we know the world is not that way.

In my first newsroom, cigarette smoke billowed so thick that the glass windows were glazed in brown goo. The seven or eight of us working together addressed each other through a constant gauze of gray fog. By the turn of the century, all smoking at most newsrooms and businesses, including the Daily Herald, had been forced outdoors, where small cadres of holdouts would gather to chat and puff just outside the entryways. Today, the entryways are almost entirely empty of smokers.

When I was a teenager, my friends and I (and most of our parents) said we would rue the day when the government would tell us we had to wear seat belts. Today, every parent I know refuses to touch the gas pedal until everyone in the vehicle is buckled up.

It's been a long time since I was a teenager, a long time since my first days as a reporter. But things certainly have changed, and much for the better. It happened not because of one news series or one newspaper editorial, but because of a consistent, unrelenting drive toward a better world.

Frustrating at times? You bet. But that hasn't stopped us yet. And it won't.

Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on Twitter at @JimSlusher.