Not funny

A couple of days ago I was listening to the news on the car radio, and there was a report about a demonstration going on in downtown Chicago. In the background you could hear people chanting, and as I pictured the people walking in circles in the sidewalk with their picket signs, I tried to hear what they were saying, but I couldn't quite make it out. As I listened to the reporter, it became clear: they were protesting the fact the Marshall Field's is now Macy's.

Seriously.

Are they kidding? This is worth protesting? I can't think of a single more shallow, self-centered, insensitive, spoiled-rich-person issue in the world. Literally blocks away from the downtown Macy's store, where the protest was taking place, there are homeless people sleeping in cardboard boxes on Lower Wacker Drive. Walk around downtown at any time, day or night, winter or summer, and you can't avoid encountering people who are victims of real injustices: poverty, racism, no health insurance, all sorts of critical needs due to the fact that the Bush administration decided the rich people in America were paying too much in taxes so they cut programs that used to help people who were truly helpless.

This demonstration is more than an outrage and an example of extreme insensitivity and greed: it's also an insult to those of us who demonstrated, and in some cases risked our lives, in the 1960's and 1970's on behalf of the poor and underprivileged in this great country of ours.

From the time I was a little kid, my mother took us to all kinds of protest meetings and demonstrations. In the 1950's, she mobilized a group of local residents and took me along to a town government meeting to force our town in New Jersey to integrate the town swimming pool. In the 1960's, she and my father became active in the Fair Housing Council, which worked to eliminate racism in real-estate sales in the town. For the Fourth of July one year, when I was about 10, the Council had a float in the parade. The float's theme was, "Would you sell your house to a red-white, and blue family?" There were about 8 of us kids on the float, along with a few adults, and we all had our faces painted red, white, and blue.
Mostly there was silence from the crowd as the float passed by, but a few people booed us.

Later, when I was in high school, I attended anti-war demonstrations, and rallies in support of providing better education for the kids in Paterson, a nearby city with a large low-income black and Hispanic population. Kids in my WASP-y, upper-middle-class high school shunned me and my friends and made nasty remarks as we passed them in the halls.

I remember spending 18 hours on a Greyhound Bus going from Milwaukee, where I had just started college, to Washington, D.C. in November, 1969, to join 250,000 other citizens in the March on Washington to show support for our soldiers and end the Vietnam War. And at other demonstrations in Milwaukee, and in Madison, WI, people (including Norman, who I hadn't met yet) had rocks and bricks thrown at them.
But these were mild incidents, compared to the fate of the people who died in the last 50 years because they cared about their fellow human beings: Martin Luther King; Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, the three civil rights activists who were tortured and murdered by the KKK in Mississippi in 1964; and many others.

I now work for a non-profit agency that provides free food, shelter, and medical care to poor people. If I'd been downtown on the day of the protest in front of Macy's, I'd have gone up to the protesters and asked them if they'd like to come to work with me and see people who are facing real hardships--such as having to sleep in a cardboard box, or eating out of the Dumpster behind a restaurant, or not owning a coat in Chicago in January--as opposed to the unbearable experience these protesters might be complaining about--of having the label in their $300 cashmere cardigan say "Macy's" instead of "Marshall Field's."

If these people have the energy and the time to stand on the sidewalk and yell, I'd really relish the opportunity to show them something really worth yelling about.