Some things just never change

Why do I suspect these '68 Democratic delegates were as oblivious to their protesters as NATO officials will be later this month to theirs.

In the course of my duties for a suburban daily newspaper, I happened on Friday to attend a Catholic mass performed by Chicago Police Chaplain Daniel J. Brandt and that bounced around my brain all weekend

While most of the service was a tribute to public safety workers (ie., cops and firefighters), Brandt also gave a mention to the upcoming activities that will take place when officials with NATO meet in Chicago during May.

FOR BRANDT ASKED those people in attendance to say extra prayers for those public safety people who wind up getting assigned to security details connected with NATO (meeting at McCormick Place) or any of the sites where demonstrations against NATO are expected to take place.

Now coming from Brandt, I realize he’s not an “objective” perspective. He has his view influenced by his job, and he has his right to his opinion. Yet I, and everybody else, have a right to our opinion too.

So here’s mine.

I couldn’t help but be a bit appalled at Brandt’s characterization of the people who will come to Chicago to protest (they will be here from around Planet Earth) as those who are here to cause, “trouble, havoc and mischief.”

AS THOUGH THE individuals who have their objections to the U.S. military might being used for what at times seems questionable purposes have no legitimacy to such a view.

As though on a certain level we ought to be hoping for a repeat of 1968 and the treatment given by Chicago police to the demonstrators who were in the city for the Democratic National Convention – the treatment later labeled by an official investigation as a “police riot.”

If we have officials maintaining this kind of a rigid, stubborn approach to viewing the issue, that is going to be what causes tensions that escalate into violence and vandalism.

We have history of siding w/ police in protests

 It certainly won’t be that “wannabe hippie freaks” came to Chicago just to cause trouble.

I DON'T GET as worked up about the sentiments that will be expressed by the activists who are determined to make their views known while NATO officials are in Chicago.

I am sympathetic to their viewpoint, but I’m not convinced that the “in your face” tactics being considered by some will do anything to sway anyone who attends NATO conferences being held here. As for those who are hostile to their viewpoint, they’re just looking for excuses to complain.

In fact, I won’t be surprised if those people are so isolated from the city’s daily life that they will be completely unaware of any protests being done against them. Just like the Democratic convention from 44 years ago – where many of the delegates didn’t learn of the violence in the streets until after they left town at the end of the event.

Yet that doesn’t take away from the legitimacy of their views, which ought to be heard. It is the failure to listen that will cause problems.

IT STRIKES ME as being ironic that I’m having these thoughts now, as we go into Tuesday – which for some people is May Day (a holiday that in part memorializes the deaths of labor activists in Chicago on May 4, 1886, although the city’s initial reaction was to build a memorial to the police officers who killed them).

Of course, there are those who prefer to think that Tuesday is Loyalty Day – the holiday made up in the 1950s to undermine anyone who might want to pay tribute to labor.

NATO protester instruction?

For all I know, they may be the same people who will follow Brandt’s request and add extra prayers for all the cops(who literally are being borrowed from suburban police departments across the metro area to supplement the Chicago police regular staffing) who have to work extra hours three weeks from now. As though the overtime pay they wind up receiving won’t be a sufficient reward in and of itself.

Personally, I take some joy in the fact that “real” people (most of us, that is) aren’t acknowledging Tuesday as any kind of holiday. It’s just another work day, and in a few weeks some of us will have our daily routines disrupted for a week or so (the time that NATO is in Chicago), before things revert back to the norm.

FOR WHILE I think those people are a little bit guilty of trivializing the greater issue by trying to claim that all these people will make it harder for them to go shopping or run other errands for a couple of days, I like the thought of those who aren’t eager to latch themselves onto a bandwagon that starts demonizing someone else.

Perhaps the legitimate way to view the upcoming events is to realize that come Memorial Day weekend, it will all be over and we’ll be able to look back on the experience as one of those moments that makes life in Chicago unique from elsewhere in the Midwestern U.S.

And it is why I personally prefer to do my celebrating on Monday, rather than Tuesday.

It is, after all, International Jazz Day. Listening to Billie Holiday or Herbie Hancock (the Chicago native who helped inspire UNESCO to create the holiday) sounds much more pleasurable to me than obsessing about a riot that may well never occur.

  -30-

Dueling holidays? It’s just Friday

Would you believe that today is a significant day when it comes to determining one’s political ideology?

It’s May 1, and just how you describe this day will give your enemies ammunition to use against you whenever they feel the need to dump on you for whatever strange reasons they concoct in their minds.

NOW AS SOME people of an international mindset will know, it is May Day. The day that officially marks the coming of the spring has been turned by many countries of a Communist orientation into a day of celebration of “the worker” (actually, the state that “owns” the worker).

But it’s a day for the workers of the world to think that someday they will unite.

That orientation is what caused groups such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars to make up their own holiday. It is Loyalty Day, and it is supposed to be the day upon which all Good Americans renounce the concept of Communism and spit on the very idea of May Day.

Not that anybody I know (or anybody who knows anyone I know) celebrates either holiday. For real people, the significance of May 1 this year is that it comes on Friday. So in a few hours, we will have the weekend upon us – one of the first of spring 2009.

IT SHOULDN’T BE a surprise that the concept of Loyalty Day dates back exactly 50 years. That makes this a significant anniversary for the holiday that does not seem to have caught on in the public’s imagination.

It is a remnant of the Cold War, and people who bother to acknowledge it are doing so most likely because they think someone will use their refusal to do or say anything about it as a sign that they’re one of the dreaded red hoard that thus far has failed to take over the world like the most paranoid among us in our society say it will.

I’ll have to plead my own ignorance. I had never heard of the concept of Loyalty Day until last week, when a municipal government that I sometimes cover for one of the suburban-based daily newspapers passed a resolution in support of the holiday.

So in many other municipalities, since the resolution had the feel of mass-produced rhetoric that could be passed by city councils across the country, residents are asked “to take full advantage” of having such a holiday to show how much they love their country.

IN ALL HONESTY, I must admit that the aldermen who voted in favor of a Loyalty Day resolution didn’t give it much thought. It was just another of the many routine resolutions with no binding authority that government officials support all the time.

I don’t think anyone is giving this so-called holiday much thought or concern.

If it sounds like I’m mocking the concept of Loyalty Day, you’d be right. And no, I don’t want to hear from the John Birch Society types that I’m expressing Communist sympathies. I’m just being realistic enough to say that this type of rhetoric is nothing more than a reminder of how absurd some aspects of our society were at the height of the Cold War.

Perhaps I’d see the need for an alternate holiday if the concept of May Day had ever caught on in this country. But it didn’t.

EVEN IN THE days when there was something of a Communist Party movement in this country (and most of those people were less enthralled by Moscow than they were opposed to the segregationist mentality that too many “real Americans” were willing to accept), the holiday itself wasn’t all that important.

In today’s day and age, there probably are many people to whom the thought of May Day is just as obscure as the VFW’s attempt to create a dueling holiday.

So I’m inclined to think we need to create a third option – one that I think is in line with the bulk of the population of the United States of America. May 1 is just May 1. We’ll see a few seconds of footage on the national newscasts (if we even bother to watch them) that tell us in some foreign countries that many of us most likely would not want to live in celebrated May Day.

We’ll snicker a bit at the thought of a pseudo-holiday, and perhaps at the thought of some clumsy oaf tripping over his own feet while dancing around the maypole.

THEN, WE’LL FORGET it until next year.

Because this year’s May 1 comes on a Friday, we’ll move on to making plans for our weekend. Perhaps we’ll spend some time with family members (or for some others, getting away from the family may be more enjoyable). The last thing I want to have to think about is an attempt by the VFW to continue to spread its 50-year-old rhetoric left over from a past age that is losing its relevance.

I don’t feel the need to crush “the Commies” at their holiday. I do feel sorry for anyone who in today’s day and age takes this kind of rhetoric seriously and feels the need to celebrate either of these holidays.

For me, it’s just a weekend.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Veterans of Foreign Wars issued their own statement about the need (http://www.vfw.org/resources/pdf/loyaltyday09.pdf) to continue the tradition of Loyalty Day, which appears to me to be even deader in this country than May Day.