>>56164542Let me put it this way with an apolitical history lesson: last time Chicago hosted the DNC in 1968, a lone Vietnam War protestor rushed a line of police and triggered a riot that injured over a thousand people directly and paved the way for innumerable indirect crimes, injuries, and deaths while the police were focused on the main event. Ever since then, Chicago has lived in existential fear of Richard Nixon lurking in every dark corner even though no conservative has had a position of power since Al Capone was thrown in jail. In 1968, people still believed we were a functional state and protestors still considered themselves American citizens instead of open-air prisoners. Thirty-six years and forty-one thousand murders have come and gone in the city since then. People are convinced the world will end any moment now, that a second Civil War is inevitable or already underway, that anyone who disagrees with them literally wants to genocide them, and we just witnessed an assassination attempt on a former president earlier today.
Chicago's plan for the convention, as outlined in their public statement released months in advance, is to have the majority of the city's police department form a perimeter around the convention center while all other areas of the city are left to fend for themselves.
We have nearly forty years of historical precedence and crime statistics that only move in one direction to suggest that the last week of August will be the fingertip pressed against the city's fading pulse that decides whether or not my hometown can still function as an independent society.
I have no way to know what's gonna happen, but I'm gonna be hugging my Slurpuff plush real tight.
