Life's Pleasures Quote by Richard M. Daley

Daley’s sentence reads like a mayoral shrug turned into a mandate: if you want fewer people in crisis on the street, you have to build the machinery that gets them back into daily life. The repeated “need” and the blunt “That’s what you have to do” aren’t lyrical; they’re managerial. This is city governance as triage, with the speaker positioning himself as the adult in the room, impatient with symbolic fixes.

The choice of actors is the real tell. By naming social workers and drug treatment programs alongside “volunteers” and the explicitly faith-based Christian Industrial League, Daley stitches together a pragmatic coalition that cities often rely on but rarely celebrate: public services plus nonprofit labor plus religious institutions that can move faster than government. It’s an implicit admission that the state alone won’t do it, whether because of budget limits, bureaucracy, or political appetite. The subtext: Chicago’s problems are too entrenched for a single department and too visible to ignore.

“Make sure you are getting them a job” frames employment as the hinge point, a classic urban-policy premise: stability follows work. It also quietly narrows the moral lens. Structural issues (housing markets, wages, mental health infrastructure) disappear behind an individualized pipeline from treatment to employment. The closing image - “stepping around these things” - captures the street-level embarrassment of civic failure: a city that learns to navigate human suffering like an obstacle course. Daley’s intent is to shame complacency while steering the conversation toward programs that convert compassion into measurable outcomes.