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Protesters? Sorry, they look like thieves to me

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

As shopkeepers and volunteers were sweeping up Monday after an overnight looting rampage through downtown Chicago’s ritziest addresses, I already was hearing from taunting emailers like this passive-aggressive troll:

“Can’t wait to see how you spin the blame for this on Trump, the police or white privilege,” wrote a gentleman from Kansasville, Wis. “Unless you choose to conveniently ignore it as you are wont to do with the ongoing, self-induced carnage in Chicago’s Black communities.”

Thanks. That was helpful. Not.

My reader was referring to the hours of looting and destruction early Monday when more than 100 people were arrested and 13 police officers injured, police said. Streets were littered with broken glass and items stripped from shelves and racks in the city’s upscale upper Michigan Avenue shopping district and other areas of the city.

“This was straight-up felony criminal conduct,” said Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. “This was an assault on our city.”

True enough. As a longtime Chicagoan, old enough to remember the riots of the 1960s, the “city on the brink” 1980s, followed by about 30 years of gentrification, I felt nothing short of dismay at the bad news: Here we go again.

 

When I hear from grumpy suburban and rural wags who echo President Donald Trump in bashing “liberal” urban dwellers, I question whether they really want honest dialogue or just want to show off their racial innocence — and vent.

Yet I share with my passive-aggressive reader a frustration with hotblooded extremists who somehow got the wrong message from Martin Luther King Jr.‘s observation back in 1966 that “a riot is the language of the unheard.”

On Monday evening, peaceful protesters organized by Black Lives Matter Chicago held up a banner outside the Central District station that, in my view, showed how far the young BLM movement has drifted away from the passive resistance of King.

“Our futures have been looted from us,” the banner urged. “Loot back.”

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(c) 2020 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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