Welcome Wagon
A strategy for occupation
President tRump is going to send the National Guard into Chicago, and Chicago will need to respond to this illegal deployment, this unnecessary provocation, with everything we can muster…in the way of coffee and pastries.
We need to organize to meet and greet the National Guard with cups of hot jitter juice, pastries with powdered sugar and gooey centers, and a copy of the Constitution.
We should hand out these treats to the National Guardsmen along with fliers and literature explaining that Trump is using them Unconstitutionally, that he is a dictator and a despot, and that following his orders may leave them vulnerable to arrest and prosecution later, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder, if they should open fire and kill bystanders. We need to tell them that we love and respect them and don’t want to see them hurt.
I’m thinking we should give them graphic novels that portray the situation as we see it. Years ago, I worked for Bob Dole’s first or second run for the Senate. I went door to door handing out comic books that told the story of his military career and life in public service. Yes, a lot of kapow and kaboom. It was effective in getting him elected. It wasn’t a thick, heavy book, and it wasn’t a television show. It was an adventure comic. It was a graphic novel.
Today, with everybody watching their screens as avidly as we watched television, I think a good comic book could spread the story of tRump’s illegal use of the National Guard to the men he is controlling, men he is putting in danger - not in danger of assault, but in moral danger, danger of obeying an illegal order and committing a heinous crime that they’ll regret for the rest of their lives.
Comics can show them their own lives, in pictures, being called up, forced away from family and friends in order to boost tRump’s ego, on trumped-up stories of murder and mayhem.
But all this takes time and money and organization. I can’t do it. I would gladly go out and hand out the treats, but I can’t make my wishes into concrete reality.
That would take something like political will on the part of the Democratic Party. They just don’t have it. But I digress…
And while I’m digressing: One thing that makes me sick to my stomach is the way mainstream news media create false equivalencies. Tonight on the local CBS broadcast, one dopey reporter said there was political posturing on both sides. But that’s a false comparison. Governor Pritzker was speaking for his constituents when he told tRump not to send the troops. But tRump was fabricating his excuses. The two statements weren’t comparable. Fabricating and falsifying is certainly “political posturing.” But Pritzker wasn’t fabricating or falsifying anything. He wasn’t posturing. He made no threats. tRump made threats, tRump was posturing like a playground prick. Pritzker was speaking like a responsible adult.
That said, Chicago does have problems. We need resources to fight organized crime. The robberies we see today remind me of stories I’ve been told of Chicago in the 1930’s, when the Italian mob was running wild. We need crime fighters as badly today as we did then. But the National Guard aren’t going to investigate, collect evidence, arrest, or prosecute anyone. They’re not trained to do any of that. They’re not paid to do it. It isn’t in their legal job description - so any arrests they make would be overturned. And as I say, we will hold them accountable for their violations of our rights.
We have all we need to show what a jerk tRump is - the coffee, the pastries, the Constitution, the printing “presses” or copiers/printers, and the ink. And we have the human power, the human capital. Let’s meet them head on in the streets of Chicago…with treats.
We don’t have the mainstream media, the press. That’s unfortunate, but it’s their loss, not ours. As for that twerpy reporter, maybe she thinks that any public servant who holds a press conference is posturing, that talking to people like her defines “posturing.” That’s a high degree of cynicism, or a low degree of self-esteem.