The city crackled with an unruly energy. Or maybe it was just me.
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No civil disobedience was planned for the march against the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue conference Thursday, according to the protesters’ advance materials. Good.
But given the extensive Chicago police training, I was uneasy as I walked downtown to accompany the demonstrators.
Actually I was exhilarated, too, but in an I’m-about-to-make-a-potentially-stupid-and-inexorable-mistake kind of way. The cops spent months and millions preparing for the protesters. And who knows how this loose coalition will behave?
The world looks entirely different through this lens. Everything becomes an omen to either turn back or soldier on. I hadn’t felt this way since I traveled to Israel last year and looked in other people’s faces at the airport to decide if I should get on the plane or not.
Still, as my first protest, the experience was too intriguing to pass up.
I continued my stroll down Michigan Avenue on one of the nicest afternoons in weeks. Great day for a protest. (OK, keep walking.)
But I looked at people differently–a prep cook in black-and-white kitchen pants, a teary-eyed clerk smoking a cigarette, a homeless guy selling newspapers. Were we marching for them today? To make their working lives better? Would people be marching for themselves?
Police officers clustered on the corners. Block 37, at State and Randolph Streets, was converted into a police staging area. I watched suspiciously as men in long coats scanned the crowd and spoke furtively into cell phones. (OK, turn back.)
As I reached the demonstration’s starting point, I grinned. The cops–with bullet-proof vests, clubs, shields and these adorable powder blue helmets–outnumbered the protesters. They lined the street, two-deep.
“I’m scared,” said a 20-something man with a goatee.
Still, the pre-march atmosphere was more like a festival than a riot. The crowd swelled with people playing instruments, waving to friends and carrying banners.
A young woman with a pixie haircut and a stud in her lower lip video-taped the police line. She said she attended the march for a friend.
“He got beat up in Seattle and was too scared to come out here,” she said.
A graduate student from the University of Chicago said, “I was really upset by the elections. I needed to get outside and clear my head.”
It dawned on me that this protest was like a group catharsis. Anti-globalism may have been the headlining complaint, but the grievances varied. Protesters claimed this march was about anything they wanted, but that was OK. It was enough that people cared about something so much to be here, offering a moment of community and intimacy in a world that has so little.
A woman walked through the crowd shouting: “Call this emergency number in case you get arrested!”
Suddenly we started moving.
Protesters wearing yellow armbands kept marchers off the sidewalks. People filmed and snapped pictures.
They chanted. “No blood for oil!” “Human need, not corporate greed!” “The world is not for sale!”
We arrived in a plaza for more chants, more milling around. People began to leave. A fleeting moment of community faded into the night, except for the excellent new addition to my vocabulary: Right on, man.
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