The lesson of the ginkgo

    May, if you recall, was the coldest ever in Chicago, with a polar vortex that dropped down from Canada and scorched the area's budding plant life, including the ginkgo biloba tree in our front yard just as it was blooming. So instead of sprouting its distinctive fan-shaped leaves when it was supposed to, it grew stunted little brown nubbins.
     I took this personally.
     "I killed it," I wailed, disconsolate. "The tree survives 270 million years and I killed it."
     The ginkgo, in case you don't know, is a living fossil. When the Tyrannosaurus Rex showed up on Earth, the ginkgo was already almost 200 million years old. 
     Taxonomically, there is nothing remotely like it.  The ginkgo exists in its own division — Ginkgophyta — its own class, order and family and genus. To find a close living relative, another ginkgo-like tree, you have to go back to the Pliocene epoch, three million years ago.
    The perfect tree for a loner or eccentric. Frank Lloyd Wright loved them. Mine was planted about 10 years ago on the parkway through a program with the village that splits the costs of trees. So not just a wonder, but a bargain. Now dying before my eyes.
     To make matters worse, this was the tree brushed when that 50 foot evergreen fell over in an ice storm the day after Thanksgiving, 2018. The toppling tower missed me by 10 feet, snapped off one branch of the ginkgo. But the main tree was miraculously spared, still symmetrical and lovely. It escaped that fate, only to be slain by a few missing degrees of temperature in May, like a runner collapsing a few feet short of the finish line, dead.
     What to do?
     Northbrook, the leafy suburban paradise, has a forester of course, Terry Cichocki, and we know each other, my having phoned her enough times over the past two decades to consult, either for stories, or for some other tree that was giving me trouble.
    I phoned her again, not seeking help — what can be done for a scorched tree? — so much as to commiserate, to talk to someone who I knew would care, and to confirm that nothing could be done, that the frozen finger of fate had done its cruel business.
    What she said surprised me.
    A second sprouting, she explained, will occur and the tree will be fine. Do nothing. Maybe we'll toss some extra fertilizer on it to give that second set of leaves the extra oomph they need to push into their 270 millionth spring.
     Second set of leaves? Who knew? I was overjoyed.
     The village came by, the fertilizer was spread. This week the leaves appeared. Just before my 60th birthday, the perfect present.  Maybe that helped in my uncharacteristic reaction to the milestone. I was not introspective or sullen or irked. Not sad or depressed or melancholy. No conjuring up the life of celebrity and success, the pale blue Teslas, that might have been mine had I only been a different person doing everything differently. None of that bullshit. When my wife asked how it felt to be 60, I held up my hand and started ticking off the men I knew who died in their 50s—"Steve Neal, Jeff Zaslow, Andrew Patner" and others. Turning 60 was a gift I would gladly accept. It sure beat the alternative.
     Maybe it wasn't the tree, but the triple crisis going on in America — plague then recession then civic upheaval. The least a person who finds himself secure in all that is not to complain about the spinning clock. You'd have to be an idiot. Which is certainly within my repertoire. But not this time.
     I was also relieved. I had written a headline for my column Wednesday on race in America that rather than intrigue potential readers instead drove them away, in droves. Seven hundred comments in the first hour on Twitter, and, from the handful I looked at, most were of the "Fuck you, I'm not reading this," variety. Maybe the headline would have been fine last month, or next month, but now what I intended as a fish hook was acting as a spike. "Read the room," someone commented, sharply. Even as I was calling the paper to confer, the powers that be were pushing out a second headline that worked far better. Now instead of offending black Americans I was offending white bigots, like I'm supposed to.
     Timing and luck are important. It's best if the nearby evergreen never falls. And best to bloom when the weather is going to stay warm.
    But if it does fall, at least it should miss you. If you push out your verdant display at the wrong moment and get scorched, then you have to be  adaptive. You need a second set of leaves — or another headline — in reserve. A tree doesn't survive 270 million years without being resilient and having a few tricks up its ... ah, branches. I've written a column for the Sun-Times with my picture on it since 1996, and lived through this mini-vortex to bloom another day. That's the lesson of the ginkgo.

Can white America overcome its slaveholder mentality?

     It can be difficult to forgive those who wrong you. But it’s much harder to forgive those you’ve wronged.
     That, in a nutshell, is the challenge facing America today regarding race. That explains why, having lost the Civil War, the slaveholder mentality is still not only popular but, recent protests notwithstanding, ascendant: many white people still can’t find it in their hearts to forgive black Americans.
     The notion that white people are superior and besieged by the presence of lesser, darker races is on the upswing, having stupefied the United States sufficiently in 2016 that it elected an unfit fraud as president. Now...
     “Excuse me?” you might be thinking about now. Did you say “forgive?” Whites need to forgive blacks?
     Certainly. Flip open the dictionary:

     for·give /fərˈɡiv/ verb. stop feeling angry or resentful toward (someone) for an offense, flaw, or mistake.

     The “stop feeling angry or resentful” part doesn’t need explanation. Anger and resentment are the defining elements of white supremacy. The slavers professed to be burdened by their charges, saddled with their care and discipline.
     Trumpism is only that attitude’s latest manifestation. Setting down their whips to clutch at themselves and complain about being the true victims.
     OK ... you may be thinking ... point taken. But what about that second half? “...for an offense, flaw, or mistake.” What have black people done?

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The serendipity of maps

The Badlands

     Yesterday's column on the Rand McNally Road Atlas got a surprising amount of reader response. People really love maps, and I suppose also crave a break from the news of the day. Google Maps is a very useful tool. But it does fail at the whimsey, the serendipity, that physical maps excel at, in their ability to serve up unexpected destinations. 
     Or near serendipity, as in the case of the snippet below, from my unpublished travel memoir, "Quest for Pie." It is 2009; the boys are I are leaving Badlands National Park, pressing westward.

     Edie had suggested that I buy a Garmin — an electronic pad about two by three inches, a $200 piece of equipment that perches on the dashboard and gives directions using satellites. And God knows I sometimes need directions. We had stood in the big Best Buy electronics store while I turned the thing over dubiously in my hands. But it would be a new technological device to master, and I worried I’d drive off a cliff while consulting it. My gut told me: save the two hundred bucks.
     So I used maps—the paper kind that fold. A few weeks before we left, I picked up a stack at the American Automobile Association office at a strip mall in Northbrook, provided by a perky, helpful AAA gal who grew so enthusiastic about our trip as we talked about it, I fancied, for a moment, she wanted to come with us.
     The morning we left the Badlands, before the boys woke up in our cabin, I consulted the South Dakota map, figuring out our route. We had an easy, two-hour drive to Custer, where we’d see Mount Rushmore and, the next morning, tour Jewel Cave National Monument—another Edie call. She learned from guidebooks that they had a lantern-lit tour of the cave. Normally, I’d resist a cave, as a dark, damp place not worth the effort of descending into. Really, if you’ve seen one cave—and we had, a cave in Put-in-Bay, Ohio—you’ve seen them all. They’re dark. They’re subterranean. They’re caves.
     But lanterns? Flickering flame? That made it an adventure. Tom Sawyer, exploring a cave with a candle, courting death with Becky Thatcher. The route I worked out at home had us swing north along 90 through Rapid City, or…
     Badlands National Park is in the southwest corner of South Dakota, a thumb of green sitting atop a field of pink—the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Long ago the Sioux Nation. And there on the map, right by the border with Nebraska, I noticed the “Wounded Knee Massacre National Historic Site.”
     All I knew about Wounded Knee was a) a book was written about it with the evocative title, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and b) that’s it. I’d heard of the book, but not read it.
     Nevertheless the name resonated, vibrating with historical significance. Two inches below where we were now. I checked the map’s key. About 40 miles away. When I asked the clerk in the lodge—a round-faced, black-haired Native-American woman—what the drive to Wounded Knee is like, her eyes widened a tiny bit, as if impressed, and I felt perhaps a notch above the standard braying white bread tourist. I liked that, liked the idea of going there without having planned to go beforehand. Of the boys and I standing solemnly before whatever plaque or megalith or memorial is at Wounded Knee. The impulse surprised me—uncharacteristic—but I immediately realized where it came from.
     As you head into the West, the inventory of roadside gift shops attached to gas stations suddenly shifts toward rubber tomahawks and feathered dream catchers and plastic statuettes of Indian chiefs. I had never been particularly sympathetic to the Native-American plight—indigenous people always get the shaft by better-armed newcomers, it’s the same story the world over, no need to feel guilt-ridden that it was also true in the United States. Making a show of feeling bad, scraping together a little ball of faux remorse and rolling it around between your fingers doesn’t change the hard facts of the past. No suffering is alleviated. It’s just an unconsciously insincere, easy way of letting yourself off the hook for something that isn’t your fault to begin with.
     But this transformation of their vanished culture into souvenir garbage struck me as slightly obscene, romanticizing the people who had been ruthlessly slaughtered and displaced while yet again making a buck off them. A distinctly American phenomenon. I have never been to Poland, but I’ll bet there aren’t tubs of plastic rabbis and bad paintings of Jewish women lighting Sabbath candles in all the gas stations heading to Auschwitz. Visiting Wounded Knee struck me as an atonement, a kind of penance, a humble gesture to inject some good karma into our journey at its beginning. Plus it would be educational. I ran the plan by the boys—drop down 44 to 2, pass through Potato Creek and Porcupine, visit the site of the Wounded Knee massacre. We could even dip into Nebraska, to notch another state on our belts. It might add an hour to the drive. They were all for it.
     In the van, map spread out across the steering wheel, reviewing the route, I congratulated myself: the Garmin device would never have pointed me toward Wounded Knee. The Honda was loaded up, running, outside the cabin at Cedar Pass Lodge. We were checked out. The coffee was in the coffee holder, the boys in the back. Wallet, sunglasses, wedding ring. Everything set.
     Although … one qualm. As I put the car in gear, I thought I had better mention it to them, just in case. If we loop south to Wounded Knee, we’ll then proceed northwest to Custer, via a different route. That means we’ll miss Wall Drug.
     “Could we do both?” Ross asked. No, not really. If we did, we’d be backtracking and it would add 100 miles to the trip. The boys were adamantly in favor of Wall Drug. Mom had talked about it. We had to see Wall Drug.
     “Wall Drug is a must, right Ross?” said Kent, rallying support. Right.
     Edie had indeed been rhapsodizing the place as a highlight of her youth. They give free ice water. I considered overriding the boys, but then I’d be hijacking the itinerary and forcing us off onto a grim tangent. What if Wounded Knee turned out to be a bust; a windy, dreary nothing? It would be my fault.
     Okay, okay, I thought, No Wounded Knee. Wall Drug it is.
     “Goodbye Badlands,” Kent called, sweetly as we headed toward the park exit. “Hope to see you.…”
     “Eventually?” I said.
     “Yes.”

At the end of the tunnel, a light clicks on

     Look at a map of Illinois. Notice how Peoria, Bloomington and Champaign all line up, one, two, three, like the stars in Orion’s belt, hanging in a row southwest of Chicago. Beyond them ...
     What? You don’t have a map of Illinois? Well, go online and ... oh, I see the problem. On your phone, a map of Illinois is about 3 inches tall.
     Pity. The Illinois map I’m looking at is a mighty 19 inches tall, splayed across two big pages of the 2021 Rand McNally Road Atlas, a catalogue of delight, a joyful anachronism persisting in our Google Map age.
     “Huh?” you’re wondering about now. “Is this not about crisis? I’m confused.”
     Rest assured, this is also about crisis but indirectly. As the novel coronavirus shifted from terrifying new pandemic to wearying endless ordeal, I began to wonder what might be written about that wasn’t overburdened nurses frantically trying to save gasping patients in chaotic ERs. The machinery of former life must be grinding away somewhere. If only I knew how to find it ...
     “A new Road Atlas in the midst,” read the subject line of an April 21 email.
     “Good morning,” Kendra Ensor, marketing VP at Rand McNally, began. “I know it’s a strange time, and with the state COVID-19 guidelines in place, recreational travel is pretty much at a standstill.”
     Smart. A lot of companies wouldn’t even nod at the elephant in the room. “As is customary this time of year, and has been since 1924, the new edition Road Atlas has just released.”
     Admire the way that sentence is structured —“has just released.” There is no company releasing the Road Atlas. The Road Atlas magically appears, at its customary time, of its own accord.

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On the recent protests

     Honestly? The protests that have been roiling the country have not been an occasion for deep re-evaluation on my part. I've long practiced a policy I think of as "Trying not to be a bigot"—judging others as individuals and not by whatever cliched slot their race or ethnicity would place them once upon a time. Evaluating their unique qualities, merits, and deficiencies.
      Note the word "trying" in that policy.  As with any program of moral purpose, I'm imperfect at this. Then again, I believe everyone is. I think we should aim for a world where all of us admit these imperfections and recognize that we have prejudices, then fight against them. That seems more realistic than to assume, mistakenly, that because nobody should, therefore nobody does. That only encourages self-designated avengers fall slavering on the necks of anyone who by accident or design touches a certain racial mousetrap. This tends to allow actual haters a pass, since they exist safe in crazyland, while good-intentioned persons are crucified over some lapse or gaffe. I will never be so woke that I don't like "The Mikado." Judge me harshly if you must.
     Other than that, I try to decry racism as often as useful, from my tiny blown-out bullhorn of a column, and in general stand poised to do my part to nudge our nation forward toward a more equitable, more diverse, more compassionate, more just society. My powder is dry, my taxes paid, my vote ready for whatever Joan of Arc seizes the banner of Justice.
     Oh wait. Joan of Arc. White savior. Sorry. It's so easy to screw this up. That's why so many whites fall silent—fear of being hung-out to dry. But silence, to me, encourages indifference. If we don't comment on it, we don't think about it, and pretty soon it's a distant buzz happening to someone else. As opposed to, in my view, all of our problem, one that demands engagement from each American.
     This is an especially fraught, especially contradictory corner of American politics. On Saturday, without trying at all, I hear both "White silence is violence," on the radio, and a call for white commentators to fall mute so that the black voices they are drowning out can be heard.
     I suppose both can make sense. So this is my attempt to fill the silence. And if you'd like me to fall mute then, heck, stop reading now, forgot what you heard, and go read the always-excellent Charles M. Blow. I won't mind a bit.
     Still here? That's flattering. I'm almost done. All that's left is to remind you that the internet is nothing if not an infinity of space for voices of every kind, and if you feel mine is drowning out yours, well, maybe you should try speaking louder instead of blaming me.
     We are at the third and by no means final stage of the 2020 Year of Crisis—first the society shutting shock of COVID-19, followed by widespread unemployment and economic contraction. And now these protests, and the violence that often follows hard on its heels. Emotions are high, and it is too easy to announce that society has entered some New Phase. I support protests, but I also like those mechanical horses you used to see at Woolworth's. That doesn't make them real horses. Occupy Wall Street was a thrilling protest movement. And then economic disparity got worse.
     That isn't a hope, or a prediction. It's a possibility. 
     But positive signs are there. We've seen how bad can follow good. Barack Obama was the first black president, a careful, active, dynamic man who tried to do important things, and faced the shrieking id of unrepentant American racism. I don't want to say he woke the napping Beast. But Obama exited stage left, while from right strode the weak, petty, gross, perverse, cruel, unfit, incurious, traitorous, lying, fraudulent, excrescence that is Donald Trump. Maybe the pendulum is going to keep going and wrap around the axle. An emboldened police state ruling side-by-side with Trump in his second term, as he grooms Donald Jr. to be his replacement.
    Or maybe the pendulum will reach its maximum displacement this fall, and will start its swing back.  We've seen before how good can follow bad. Maybe the time that begins again is now.
 

Texas Notes: Searched

"New Kids on the Block," by Norman Rockwell. This ran in Look Magazine in May, 1967,
with an article on Park Forest, Illinois, known as a model of integration, with a
human rights committee that would smooth the way for new black residents.

     This singular national moment demands that writers respond, or become irrelevant, and Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey, as always, rises to the occasion.    

     In grammar school a handful of kids in my class had to take a bus to school from the next neighborhood over. Meanwhile, my childhood friends and I carelessly met on corners to walk or we “doubled” on banana seat bikes — two passengers on one bike — to get to the same school, which rested in our safe enclave of what we called West Rogers Park. 

     We’d show up wearing matching Izod Lacoste shirts and tapered jeans, looking like some kind of feathered-hair squad in an after school special. We saw ourselves as friendly to everyone but seven of us in particular were quite the clique. We even poked the tips of our fingers with pins to draw bright red bubbles of blood and rubbed our bloody fingers together to become what we said were real sisters. We walked to each others houses at lunch time and made sandwiches of Wonder Bread, bologna, American cheese and mayonnaise that we tucked Doritos into on our more daring days. We drank cans of Coke and finished boxes of Twinkies and Ho Hos while we watched All My Children, then ran back to school just in time for the bell to ring. We could barely focus on classwork much of the time and our teachers called us the Seven Social Butterflies. Our biggest concerns at school were whose Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers flavor was the best and how many pastel colored puffy stickers we had to decorate our Chandler’s daily planners. As we got older we progressed to obsessing about the cute older boys and holding hands with the guys who were much shorter than us in our own grade. 
     While all this was happening we were unaware that some of our classmates were having a very different experience. One classmate recently shared with me that as a young black man he felt so scared coming from his neighborhood over to our school that he only lasted one year, and then demanded to be allowed to return to his old familiar school the following year. While we traipsed around braiding each others hair and sharing secrets, we felt perfectly safe and sound and had absolutely no idea how to truly welcome the new kids into our world. Appearances might have indicated otherwise, but we did not truly integrate our school — it was just a surface fix.
     As we got older we learned that one of our black classmates had died a violent death near Sheridan and Jonquil Terrace, and yet another the same fate not too far from there. In retrospect I now see that we had absolutely no idea what it must have been like to be a visitor in what felt like our home away from home, Philip Rogers School, from a world so different than ours that it was inconceivable. These kids lived a life much different and often much more stressful than ours.
     The first time my car was taken apart and I was searched was when committing the crime of driving while with black men in the car. Did you know cops can easily remove all of your car’s seats for a thorough search? A few friends and I were trying to get down to the lakefront near the Arie Crown Theatre on a rainy afternoon. As a young driver I’d accidentally turned onto the wide, paved bike path, just an honest mistake. Two white cops pulled me over and I thought it would be the usual “officer, I am so sorry!” and they’d laugh and tell me to be more careful next time. Not so this time. Their countenance was threatening, they were unsmiling and they were going to teach us a lesson. They had the four of us, two teenaged white women and two teenaged black men get out of the car while they exercised their will upon us, notwithstanding the letter of the law. There was no probable cause. There was no warrant. There were just four scared teens standing in the rain for an hour or more while they shamed us, terrified us by their stony and methodical silence, and tore my poor 1978 Chevrolet Caprice Classic station wagon apart. Poor girl, she had no idea what was happening. She’d never been treated like this before. Once the cops realized we were clean as whistles they had to let us go with nary a murmur of apology.
     The next time I witnessed harassment of a black man and was harassed for being white while caring for a black person was during the detainment of a light skinned black male friend who was having a mental breakdown. He had started to decompensate into a manic episode with psychotic features at his father’s house, and his father and I tried to talk him into a better place, and into getting help. Instead, in mental torture he ran away from us down the street to his own apartment and we followed him. By the time we got to the scene unfolding in front of his building he was barefoot and bare chested since he had flung all but his jeans off during his manic episode. He was leaning back against a marked police car smoking a cigarette the best he could with his hands cuffed in front of his body, a heartbreaking scene. We later learned that he had called the police himself on his way home, telling them he was a danger to himself, so they had met him there.
     He smiled at us and cracked a joke, his fight and flight chemicals quieting down, and perhaps relieved that he might be getting the help he sorely needed. Suddenly an unmarked burgundy sedan came screeching up and a gigantic burly undercover white male officer jumped out of the car in what looked like a manic episode of his own, and right up into my five foot four skinny friend’s face. The cop ripped the cigarette out of my friend’s mouth and threw it to the ground. His face crumpled. I said “the other cops said he could have a smoke!” As soon as I said it I realized my grave error in trying to stand up for my friend in the face of an adrenaline filled maniac. He marched over to me, nearly bumping his bullet-proof vested chest into my head, glared down at me and demanded to know who I was. I backed away and said “I am his friend.” I cautiously retreated into the street away from this beast. Then his stocky white female partner approached me and demanded to know my name and to see my ID. I clearly said “I am doing nothing wrong and I do not have to show you my ID.” She told me that I could not stand in the street and I said “yes I can. I am doing nothing wrong and I am allowed to observe this arrest,” shaking as I acted bravely. She backed off and they took him away to the hospital. I was lucky that day. I realized later that it could have ended up a lot worse for me, and I recognized my good fortune in the fact that I somehow found the right words and used them to protect myself and also that this would have gone very differently without my white skin.
     As I look back at my life I recall time after time when I witnessed mistreatment of black men and was mistreated myself for being with them. Since George Floyd’s murder many such stories have been flooding back. They all occurred it the 90s and mostly in Chicago. There was the time I was with a white woman and a black man driving my car near Belmont and Damen. While stopped at a stop sign a group of white skinhead type males surrounded my car and thumped their fists on the windows and hood, causing me to tear off onto Belmont as quickly as I could. They could have caused an accident. We shook and trembled as we left the area, furious but also too scared to do anything more but flee.
     A black man and I were walking to our car from a grocery store on Division and Clark and a white man drove by and shouted “jungle fever!” in a menacing tone, upsetting the previous lightness of our day.
     An Asian woman and a white women picked up two black men, all friends of mine, on Howard Street to get some dinner when the driver noticed flashing red lights behind her. She pulled over to yield and let them pass. Instead of the officers passing, she shockingly realized she was being pulled over but had no idea why. The cops did not explain but told them all to get out of the car. They were scared and complied. The men were patted down and they were all made to stand in the rain waiting for a female officer to show up to pat the women down. The cops thoroughly searched the car. Since there was no illegal activity going on they were let go. In a conversation this week the Asian woman told me that she was terrified that the cops would find somehow find contraband even though there wasn't any. She recalls the surreal feeling of being stopped and searched when none of them had done anything that might have seemed suspicious, other than the color of their skin, which in the cops’ eyes was commensurate with a crime.
     It would seem I might run out of such stories, but alas no. Another car taken apart and this time a strip search by Canadian border patrol as a mixed group of us tried to get to Carabana Festival in Toronto one hot summer weekend. One of the young men had forgotten his identification, and rather than humanely turning us away we were detained for hours. Seats were removed, door compartments forced open. I had no idea my car had such possibility. The most unpleasant part for me was being taken into a small room and mandated to bend over naked and cough as two female officers watched, to be sure I was not smuggling drugs. Of course nothing illegal was found and we were finally let go, but the officers told me that they would keep my license plate number and if I ever tried to enter Canada in that car it would be impounded. I may never forget the visceral feelings of anger, powerlessness and humiliation of that day.
     My stories are nothing in the scheme of things, except to further illustrate the fact that systematic racist policing definitely exists. Until people including me figure out ways to contribute to ending this culture of abuse it will not change. It’s not enough to read about it, to protest, to educate. What will it take to create a just world? For now I have distributed lists of food sources throughout Chicago to friends there, as countless grocery stores and corner stores remain boarded up in the aftermath of or to prevent looting. I attended a days long training about intersectionality and institutionalized racism especially as it pertains to healthcare access here in Austin Texas, where I sat on the hot seat and started to learn how to check my privilege and become a listener. I know that I will do whatever it takes to contribute to the demise of our intrinsically racist society and I will have to come up with every and any way I can think of as well as ally with others to contribute in a meaningful way. Just as I know the stars are in the sky I know that I do not want to live in a world absent of ethical humanism towards every single person. After all, as Dr. Cornel West brilliantly surmises, “justice is what love looks like in public.”

What do protests do? Quite a bit

Protest march at the 2016 Republican National Convention

     So what do these protests do?
     Good question. Space is limited, so let’s get to it.
     Six purposes:
     1). Protests provoke the wrong being protested, flushing it into the light. Civil rights demonstrations worked because Southern sheriffs broke out the dogs and firehoses and showed America exactly what these marchers were talking about. Had they broken out trays of pralines instead, we might still have segregated lunch counters. Protests against police brutality wouldn’t be half as dramatic if some police didn’t, on cue, start being brutal, on camera, blasting peaceful protesters with tear gas. Not many — most showed admirable professionalism and restraint. But it only takes a little spit to spoil the soup.
     2). Protests benefit the protesters themselves. Not content to sit at home watching Netflix after — oh, for instance — a police officer is captured on video slowly strangling a black man who may have passed a bogus $20 bill, they leap up, make signs, pour into the street, march, raise their voices. They’re doing something. True, the problem being protested is never fixed by the end of the day. But it isn’t as if they didn’t try. So points for trying; it’s more than most do.
     3). Protests are informational. The “If the czar only knew” aspect. At the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago, young people covered themselves in chocolate syrup and lay in the street to draw attention to the oil sands situation in Canada. I had never heard of the oil sands situation in Canada before, nor thought of it since. But they did raise the issue.
Is that happening now? Are there really people watching TV, thinking, “What’s this about? Police brutality? Tell me more.” Probably. Never underestimate the vast ignorance of the American people; doing that is like assuming you can wade across the Atlantic Ocean.

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