Welcome to Opening Doors

A little bit about me is in order. I’m senior reporter Kevin Craver, and I have lived in McHenry County since 2000, when I accepted a job covering Woodstock for the newspaper. That doesn’t count two deployments totaling about two years with the U.S. Army, where I served as an infantryman.

I’ve been senior reporter since 2005, and have won more than 60 journalism awards during a newspaper career spanning about 15 years. I married a nice local girl in 2006, bought two troublesome Siamese cats and settled down in Lakewood. When I’m not busy poking into everyone else’s business, I can be found watching birds, reading, cooking or shooting, never at the same time.

Now for a little bit about my news judgment, and why I’m starting this blog.

I’m one of those shameless idealists who takes the phrase “public servant” literally. A public servant should serve the public, hence the clever name. In Illinois, this dynamic has the annoying tendency to get reversed. I’m also one of those shameless idealists who believes that elected officials and government employees should be held to the same standards, and follow the same rules, as the rest of us.

And I’m getting the nagging feeling here in the Land of Lincoln that the leaders elected and appointed to our 7,000 units of state government see the rest of us not as human beings, but as ATMs that can walk and talk.

The purpose of this “Opening Doors” blog is the same as the purpose of my news stories - to open the door for you to see what government does, and what it doesn’t. When it works for you, when it works against you, and what it does when our leaders think that no one is watching.

Sometimes I’ll share parts of stories that didn’t make it to print because of space constraints. Other times, I’ll share observations, or things to think about. And once in a while, I may write about something off the wall and apolitical, like the dread I have of what changes George Lucas made to Star Wars in the new Blu-ray collection.