This weekend

Friday night after watching a movie, I was ready to go to bed, but I thought I'd tune into CNN to see what was going on in the world and there were riots in Minneapolis and Georgia so I stepped out onto the balcony to see what was going on here and holy shit.

The cops were being driven back south on State Street from Kinzie by the demonstrators.  They weren't doing much damage at this point but they were all in the cops' faces.  Very ugly.

Then some more came from the south crossing the State Street bridge.  The cops eventually shoved them back on both fronts.  I watched for about an hour and then I went to bed.


Saturday morning there was a little debris, but things were peaceful.  I went out to get a sandwich and tuned into CNN where they were launching that stoopid rocket, and settled into my lazy boy for a nap, drifting off just after it had broken the surly bonds of Earth.

When I woke up they were talking about what was going on in Chicago, and I stepped out onto my balcony and holy shit again.  What a mob.  There was a group of them on Kinzie, in that plaza in front of the IBM building, and coming down Wacker and turning north on State Street.  It was a huge confrontation on several shifting fronts.  The rioters were uglier, more in the cops' face and throwing what mostly looked like water bottles.


Eventually they were driven back and I went back in and watched a movie.  An hour and a half later I stepped back out and there were a couple cars on fire just south of State and Lake.  The confrontation was even uglier.  Eventually they were driven back and they raised the bridges to keep them away from their target which was Trump Tower and after that there wasn't much going on that I could see from the balcony, but I watched it on CNN, WGN and the local Fox affiliate until ten at which time it appeared to be mostly opportunistic looting. The bridges are still up Sunday afternoon and likely they won't go back down again until Monday morning.

From what I could see the protesters are about 80 percent between 20 and 30 and roughly half white and half black.  I tried to look for antifa guys, people dressed in black (actually most all of them are dressed in black, being between 20 and 30 years old) and kind of organized but I didn't see many like that.  Some of them seemed to be like peacemakers, sometimes forming a line between the more rabid demonstrators and the cops, and some of them were, well, rabid.

I didn't like these guys, but I felt uneasy about that, it seemed a little right wing.  Didn't we demonstrate, or at any rate support the demonstrators, back in the days of the unpopular war and didn't that end it?  I used to think that, but anymore I am not so sure .  It helped elect Nixon and that guaranteed at leas four more years of the war.

Then my sister send me an email of her cat tearing up her rug and made a little joke about how the cat was doing it in sympathy with the demonstrators, and that struck me.  Of course her cat was not doing anything to stop police brutality, but how did these demonstrators think that setting cop cars on fire and looting was doing anything to stop it?