It is time for the disruptions to stop

I had been trying to articulate my objection to the never ending slew of demonstrations on the nightly newscasts when I came across this graphic on Facebook. (No, I don't know why the extinction symbol is on it either.)

Whoever came up with this graphic was clearly trying to suggest that the today's seemingly endless protests can be likened to the struggle for women's suffrage: Look at how the tactics that some now deplore were employed by our great-great-grandmothers, and successfully, too!

But the cause espoused by the Suffragettes was clear and precise: They wanted votes for women. And the tactics they employed were in pursuit of that specific goal.

This week the nation has been mourning the passing of Rep. John Lewis (well, most of it, anyway). On March 7, 1965, Lewis, the Rev. Hosea Williams, and about 600 others planned to march the 50 or so miles from Selma, Alabama, to the State Capital at Montgomery. At the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge their path was blocked by 150 Alabama state troopers, sheriff's deputies, and possemen, and ordered to disperse. As the Eyewitness educational materials from the National Archive explain,

One minute and five seconds after a two-minute warning was announced, the troops advanced, wielding clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. John Lewis, who suffered a skull fracture, was one of fifty-eight people treated for injuries at the local hospital. The day is remembered in history as “Bloody Sunday.”

Lewis et al. were marching for a specific, clearly defined goal: The right of Blacks to vote, a right guaranteed since 1870 by the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution -- a right systematically denied, in Alabama and elsewhere in the former Confederate States, once federal troops were withdrawn at the end of Reconstruction. The murder of a local deacon, shot in the course of a February protest demanding voting rights, was the specific cause of the Bloody Sunday march -- but the overriding goal was clear: Black Americans were demanding the opportunity to exercise a right the Constitution already said they had.

Now, to the present.

What is the clear goal of today's endless protests in Chicago? What is so important that public health orders in the midst of a world-wide pandemic must be flouted?

In a Monday, July 27, Chicago Tribune column, "Today’s social justice movement was born out of anger, not hope. There’s nothing peaceful about it," Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton wrote,

Right now, the demands are all over the place, including defunding the police, stopping police brutality, taking down Confederate monuments and removing statues of Christopher Columbus.

Glanton's list is both lengthy and incomplete.

To Glanton's list of protester demands I would add "Decolonize Zhigaagoong," which is apparently a demand that Chicago be abandoned to the descendants of people living here before Europeans arrived.

I would add this to Glanton's list because this was one of the stated goals of the organizers of several protests, including last Friday's Homan Square protest (where the above photograph -- a still from a participant's video -- was obtained). Nor am I inventing or exaggerating the demand. Quoting now from The Triibe website, "Decolonize Zhigaagoong [is] a movement to restore native lands to the Indigenous people who lived in Chicago before they were forcibly removed by the U.S. military in 1833. The word 'Zhigaagoong' derives from the Native Anishnaabemowin language and refers to the unceded Niswi-mishokdewinan territory east of Michigan avenue (sic)."

Anishnaabemowin, also spelled Anishinaabemowin, can refer to the language group shared by the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa), and Potawatomi peoples. And Niswi-mishokdewinan refers to the peoples who together comprised the Council of Three Fires, the United Nation of the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi peoples, that entered into the 1833 Treaty of Chicago with the United States, the last of five treaties that gave the United States (and Chicago developers) clear title to what is now Chicago, including all the land west of Lake Michigan.

Finis Farr, in his "personal history" of Chicago (Chicago, 1973, Arlington House), was critical of the 1833 treaty and the negotiations attendant thereto. Farr refers to the eyewitness testimony of an English traveler, Charles J. Latrobe, in this regard.

Latrobe's observations are extensively excerpted in A.T. Andreas's monumental History of Cook County Illinois (1884) (see pp. 123-124). The 1833 Treaty, too, and its appendices, are largely set out in that work (pp. 124-128). Andreas concluded that the result of the Black Hawk War, and the treaty that concluded that conflict, showed the leaders of the indigenous peoples that (p. 123) "they had no alternative. They must sell their lands for such sum and on such terms as the Government agents might deem it politic or just or generous to grant. The result of the treaty was what might have been expected."

The 1833 Treaty of Chicago was a sharp real estate deal, an early example of many thousands that would take place in Chicago from that time forward. But there was no forcible removal of indigenous peoples from Chicago by the military.

Glanton's summary of protester demands also skims over the widely varying demands made regarding the police and justice system. "Defund the police" is a vague demand, subject to various interpretations, but "abolish the police" is pretty plain. Some protestors are demanding that. Others want to abolish prisons. Here's a screen grab of a July 22, 2020 tweet from GoodKids MadCity, one of the organizers of the July 23 Logan Square Lockdown, which moved, in the course of the evening, to the immediate vicinity of Mayor Lightfoot's home:

This photograph from last Friday's Homan Square protest shows one protester's concise summary of many of the aforestated demands -- abolish the entire "carceral system."

There may be many who would be receptive to meaningful police reform, including many police officers, depending on what the proposed reforms are, but (I hope) there can't be many who want to throw out police, prisons, and the courts.

And the combination of absolutism and certitude on these two signs can not be persuasive for most of the public, or useful in the recruitment of allies.

The Suffragettes and the Civil Rights marchers of the 1960s used the streets, not to obtain justice there, but to awaken the public at large to the justice of their respective causes.

The Suffragettes and the Civil Rights marchers of the 1960s counted on the public at large, once provoked and prompted, and then educated and enlightened, by their protests, to join them in demanding action through and from the institutions that serve us all. In the case of the Suffragettes, the demand was for a constitutional amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote. In the case of the Civil Rights marchers, the demand was for federal legislation to make viable the right to vote, a right already enshrined in the Constitution of the United States. Marching was not an end; it was a beginning. Too many protesters today seem to think marching alone can bring about the unspecified "change" they profess to desire. And at least some of today's protesters appear bent on the destruction of our common institutions.

I've been a lawyer now for 40 years. I will be the first to admit that one does not always find justice in the courts. And I've been a voter for longer than 40 years. I can not dispute that sometimes our elected officials fail us, that sometimes they are more interested in their own perpetuation in office and personal enrichment than they are in improving the lot of their fellow humans. There is no human institution without flaws. But one -- anyone -- is more likely to find justice in our flawed institutions than in the street. And that is far more true today than it was in 1920 or 1965 because the people who protested then also contributed to, and improved, our flawed institutions.

Slogans alone do not make policy. Ideas are not legislation. Inspiration may ultimately produce a beautiful painting, but not by itself alone, not without a lot of hard and thoughtful and careful brushwork. So it is also with demands for "reform."

As Dahleen Glanton's Monday Tribune column said,

The goals of the 1960s social-justice protests were concise. Voting rights, desegregation and jobs were the focus and it never changed. [Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s] most powerful contribution was keeping everyone’s eyes on the prize.

Today's protests are out of focus, all over the board. There is really no focus at all.

But Glanton follows up the above statement with this non-sequitur: "When the stakes are this high, the idea of peaceful protests simply isn’t real. People on both sides have too much to lose and no one wants to walk away empty-handed."

What stakes? What is the "prize" here? What do the protesters really have to lose, except perhaps their health, and ours, because of their congregating unsafely in this never-ending Year of Pandemic? And, for heaven's sake, why is the idea of peaceful protest not "real"?

I don't deny anyone's right to their opinions, or to freely express their opinions. That is part of our common, shared birthright as Americans. But it is time to stop marching. It is time to go home. COVID-19 positivity rates are going up in Chicago and Cook County, heading toward levels that will trigger new, and potentially even more ruinous, business shutdowns. Bars and restaurants may have contributed to these increases -- but the protests are contributing as well.

It seems appropriate to give Rep. Lewis the last word:

There are still forces in America that want to divide us along racial lines, religious lines, sex, class. But we've come too far; we've made too much progress to stop or to pull back. We must go forward. And I believe we will get there.