Pone Ten
THE MICHIGAN DAILY Thursday, April 10, 1969
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e Wi dyCity spreads dittlepeace
By JIM HECK
CHICAGO--I remember a city so worried it would be given up
onto the people that its mayor sent out its cops onto the streets to
club everybody bloody and thereby hope to discourage dissent and
expression and all those things we are encouraged to fastidiously
deny ourselves in the name of God, country and mother.
There was Grant Park and tear gas and Michigan Boulevard
and mace. There was West Madison St. and shotguns and Des
Plaines Ave. and billy clubs There were a lot more people hurt
and a lot more people killed than the police said there were.
Unfortunately, it made many people angry. And for the first
time it made many white people as angry as black people had been.
And for a short time that dear ole city burned again and it wasn't
started by any cow knocking over any oil lamp.
Now a lot of people think that such activity involves a tiny
minority of revolutionaries. Even after senators and congressmen
denounce the fascist activities of our nation's defenders of law and
order, somehow, mapy people still think the only wave in this
status quo is caused by the proliferation of hair growing rampantly
around unclean chins.
Last Saturday more than 20,000 people marched in protest of
the Vietnam War, the ABM, racism and a number of other related
oppressions. They marched in Chicago in utter but passive de-
fiance of any brutalism that city could muster.. They marched with
babies, in Sax Fifth Avenue fur coats, in military uniforms, in
vestments; they marched holding hands--and they all marched for
peace. 1
So simple. Peace. I often wonder why it is so difficult for people
to embrace peace. Do they fear it? Can the guilt and oppression of
aggressive war be any less tormenting than the mythical, but be-
lieved, fear of domination-yes, even by the communists?
I don't think so, for the most burdening torment is that of
guilt, not suppression. Suppression can always be resisted. Even if
only by the mind. Suppression is resilient, easily dispensed with
by a united and free spirit. Suppression, is always tenuous, always
usurped by hope and faith that it can be overcome.
Guilt lingers in the past as a regret and when it is not vindi-
cated it grows and grows until it becomes a monstrous torment in
the present ominously foretelling the future with even graver
images. We have killed too many people and even if we stop killing
today we will still always have killed too many people. There is
none of us that can shed this burden. We are murderers, collectively
united in war. And we murder the people who seek to lift themselves
from the suppression of a feudal, inhibiting civilization.
Thank you Mrs. Proctor and Army First Class Williams and
10-month-old Billy and Dr. Samuels and Reverend Thorn. You
know peace, and for once the Chicago television people looked at
you. The people on the sidewalks didn't jeer this time. The news-
casters and editorials didn't call you "outside agitators."
It was a wondgerful day, I think. Bittersweetly frosted on the
winter of war.
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Approxinately 50 counter-demonstrators walked along the parade route
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Photographs by
Peter IDreyf uss
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