The ghost of life: A land that's known as freedom

The first time I saw a police riot was on my parents’ black and white TV, during the 1968 Democratic convention where Mayor Richard J. Daley jammed his thumb on the scales of the democratic process to get Hubert H. Humphrey nominated. The cops clubbed and gassed anti-Vietnam War protestors outside the convention center while inside party hacks turned the cogs of machine politics. The nasty taste of everything to do with those events has stayed with me throughout the decades.

No cops were arrested, but the protest leaders who came to be known as the Chicago 7 (originally 8, until Black Panther Bobby Seale was first chained and gagged in the courtroom, then severed from the case and imprisoned for four years for contempt of court) were put on trial the following year. They were charged with—and in 1970 five of them were convicted of—crossing state lines to incite riot. Two years later a federal appeals court reversed the convictions because of the outrageous bias on the part of the trial judge, Julius Hoffman.

As I recount that history I think of the state of our Department of Justice, and the blatant racism that permeates most police forces throughout the country, and I wonder just exactly how far the fuck we’ve progressed in 50 years. Not far at all, it seems.

(Look—if you for one second believe that if scores of black men armed to the gills showed up at any civic center, much less a state capitol, and the cops wouldn’t mow them down with impunity, you are bloody delusional.)

Anyhow—today’s Friday, so for our National Poetry Month post today, I’m giving you Graham Nash’s “Chicago”. The first line describes Seale, and he goes on from there. The song is awash in irony and bitterness. 

And yet, and yet—there are two lines of hope: "We can change the world. Rearrange the world." Let's do it.

This version is by Crosby, Stills and Nash.