Tag Archives: police riot

Chicago and the DNC

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The 2024 Democratic National Convention is about to begin in my hometown. I am worried.

In the summer of 1968, I was between my junior and senior years in high school. After a string of the usual summer jobs, delivering clothes for the local tailor, bagging groceries at the local supermarket, this summer I had a “real” job. I was writing computer programs for the City of Chicago. It was a big secret in those days that if you ignored a parking ticket in Chicago, you would never hear from the city. That was because the city’s traffic court, which had a crew of one hundred patronage workers dutifully typing the data from each ticket and each mailed in payment onto computer punched cards, no one had written the programs to match the two card decks and print out notices threatening arrest to the scofflaws who hadn’t paid.

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Who the hell are these people?

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What would you do if you saw these people advancing on you? What if they ordered you to stand still, or drop to your knees, or put your hands up in the air? One of these thugs, they do remind me of a motorcycle gang, is carrying a shield marked “police.” But you can buy one of those in any army-navy store. These guys have no badges, no insignia, no nametags, no proof they have the authority to order you or anyone else about. I don’t know about you but facing them I’d be scared stiff.

These ghost soldiers confronted residents of our nation’s capital city and it was a sight unseen in modern times. The residents these stormtroopers confronted were almost all peacefully protesting. That is a right guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Actually, calling these guys stormtroopers is unfair to stormtroopers, who in Star Wars wore white. They are more like Robocop, the cyborg created by corporations to enforce their interests in a dystopian comic book future.

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