Since the 2022 election, far too many Illinoisans have been far
too eager to pine for a repeat of the past.
It started with non-stop rumors about Gov. JB Pritzker running for
president. Every word he spoke, every position he took, every out-of-state trip
he made was examined for signs of what everybody thought they knew. And they
played it up for all it was worth whenever they could. For many, the talk
brought back those heady years when Barack Obama captivated the nation and
eventually won the presidency, taking lots of local folks with him to DC. Turns
out, Pritzker wasn’t even the Democrats’ “Break glass in case of emergency”
guy.
Around the same time, we saw the Chicago Bears drag out its 30-year-old
playbook to demand a new stadium and use a town outside Chicago (Gary way back
when, Arlington Heights in late 2022) to put pressure on the city and state to
cave in to the team’s demands. Lots of folks just assumed it would work again.
Nope.
And then White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf decided to defend his
state stadium subsidy against the Bears by promising to build a new ballpark as
long as he kept receiving state welfare. Too few people failed to see that the
members of the current General Assembly simply weren’t going to literally stop
the clock again so that the governor and the House Speaker (or Senate
President, for that matter) could twist enough arms to seal a new deal before a
dramatic midnight deadline. Those days are over. These days, it’s a
half-billion dollars for quantum computing or an equal amount of state cash to
spark investments by the electric vehicle industry.
And, of course, for months we were constantly reminded of the
notorious 1968 Democratic National Convention violence as last week’s DNC
approached.
There were some valid concerns, of course. I mean, the Chicago
Police Department doesn’t have the greatest reputation.
There was also no doubt that some protesters would come to town
itching for a street fight with the cops, using the Gaza war as pretext and
trying to manifest the angry spirit of 1968 again this year.
And lots of young people throughout the nation have been angry
about this war as many were about Vietnam (without the added personal threat of
a compulsive military draft, of course). But while anti-Semitism has been
intensely ugly since last October, we hadn’t seen any truly violent protests,
even though Cook County has more Palestinian Americans than any county in the
nation.
A smallish block-long protest the Sunday before the convention was
intensely covered by the Chicago and national media, but the cops seemed to
outnumber the protesters. Still, references to 1968 dotted the coverage, both
on social media and in subsequent news stories, including that the protesters
came near the General John Logan Memorial statue, which was the scene of an
epic battle between protesters and law enforcement back in 1968. At one point,
protesters chanted the old line, “The whole world is watching!” during a
scuffle that didn’t actually involve the police. It was almost silly.
The comparisons to 1968 kicked up a big notch when the news media
reported rumors that 150 members of the National Guard had been deployed to the
city. The National Guard, of course, battled protesters in the streets in ’68.
Those fights are a big reason why Chicago mayors have been super reluctant to
call out the Guard in the decades since.
It turns out that far more than that were actually called up, but
most had nothing to do with protest violence. It was mainly about terrorism or
other disruptions. Hundreds of cybersecurity task force members, communications
experts, chemical and biological response troops and explosive device experts
were activated. Even some veterinarians were called up to care for
bomb-sniffing dogs.
“They’re not called up to beat up protestors in Grant Park,” said
one exasperated state official.
One protest outside the Israeli consulate turned violent when
street fighters attacked a police line. Just a couple of protesters claimed minor
injuries. Fewer than 60 were arrested, which is about a tenth the number
arrested on the single most violent day of the 1968 convention.
It just didn’t pan out as some people clearly hoped.
All I’m saying here is that we need to live more in the present
than in the past. Our aging president has dropped out of the race, and now our
aging news media narratives need to do the same.