AUGUST 24, 2008

We sat in a circle on the ground, breaking hunks off a loaf of bread, and discussing — somewhat vaguely — the schedule of events for the coming Thursday night, when this group would be re-enacting the SDS protests of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. There were about twenty of us gathered at the fountain in Wicker Park as the sun went down, the shouts of basketball players faded, and a wealthy family strolled past holding take-out boxes. The group — ragged, mostly white, earnest — were tiring of the specifics: what to do if the police came (“I’ll take one for the team — free blow jobs for cops who don’t arrest us!”); where they would be posting flyers in the coming days (“most of the north side neighborhoods… and Hyde Park”); and whether the provision of a sound system was a sure thing (“if all else fades, we do have a megaphone”).

Liam Warfield, 28, Chip Hamlett, 26, and Yony Leyser, 23, had never planned anything like Re-Enact ’68 before this August. Warfield’s idea to stage a re-enactment came about last year, after he missed out on participating in a Civil War re-enactment. He thought it would be more powerful to stage, “something more controversial and more recent.”

The rest of this group agreed that Warfield was on to something, and, seemingly, so did a lot of the greater Chicago community. “We’ve gotten a surprisingly large amount of attention… the strength of the idea and it being something new and something exciting is a lot of the draw,” Hamlett added. “I think people see this and they kind of get it.”

I will admit I was skeptical — and it wasn’t just the obvious irony in the organizers’ assertion that re-enactment was “something new”. Though I am certainly not opposed to an action calling attention to the similarities between today’s political situation and that of 1968, I am generally intrigued by a growing pattern of I see among my peers — that of constructing and living out a historical identity.

It seems that members of my generation are living in a fluid sort of time, where past decades are present and visible and relevant. This can be great, and it can be dangerous: great if our recognition of the past leads us to learn from our mistakes; dangerous if it leads us to repeat them. From the faces and personalities I encountered at the meeting that Sunday night, I was unsure whether their deepest of individual intentions were to re-enact 1968 in an effort to stimulate the current political discussion, or to re-live the social attitudes, music, and fashion of 1968 because — for whatever reason — this was part of their personal identity.

AUGUST 28, 1968

In August of 1968, the country was reeling from the assassinations of two powerful public figures who were anti-war and pro-civil rights. The democratic president in office was still fighting a war to which much of the country was opposed, and the choice of presidential candidates did not seem representative to the New Left. So the Students for a Democratic Society decided to make themselves heard at the Democratic National Convention.

They gathered in Chicago for five days in August, where they were met with unexpected police brutality. The student protestors were tear-gassed, shot at, threatened, and beaten. Many sustained injuries, as physically blunt as they were politically stifling. Law enforcement in Chicago demonstrated the willingness and the ability to suppress democratic opinion, and the students — who had imagined a peaceful gathering akin to a drug-friendly music festival — were shocked.

Several “survivors” of the 1968 protests spoke at Thursday’s re-enactment, including Peter Butler, a reporter who covered the convention protests in Grant Park and Lincoln Park. Butler described 1968 as the year that everyone in the country underwent a “loss of innocence”. Even the media were overwhelmed by the actions of Chicago law enforcement during the week of the convention. No one in their homes had expected to be watching this sort of violent altercation on live television.

John Schultz, author of No One was Killed and The Chicago Conspiracy Trial, defined it as a true “confrontation” between the war makers and those opposed to the making of war. He recalled the sensation of knowing that reporters and politicians (many of whom approved the continued occupation of Vietnam) were looking down from their hotel rooms in the Conrad, watching the physical meeting of the democratic populace and their repressive government. They watched as the police released tear gas and young people grew weak and nauseous, “puking over the side of the bridge.”

As each speaker concluded and stepped down, reincarnations of the famed Chicago Eight took turns reading transcriptions from the event. Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Seale, Studs Terkel, and Allen Ginsburg were present in spirit through the young organizers of the event. These were passionate and surreal moments — particularly the point in the evening when “Allen Ginsburg” (Leyser) nominated a presidential ticket for the New Left: two live chickens.

Students and adults alike waved signs that read “Make Love Not War”, “Drop Acid Not Bombs”, “Fuck It All”, “Peace Now”. Members of the crowd blew bubbles, tooted their whistles, and shared a hot stew provided by Food Not Bombs.

AUGUST 28, 2008

The group that gathered in Grant Park 40 years after the SDS protests was difficult to define. There were the old hippies, the old New Left, the new younger Left, the intellectuals, the artists, the reporters, and the students. Next to me, sitting on the ground in front of the makeshift stage area, were two girls around the age of 16 or 17. They each held one side of a sign, which they picked up from the organizers and had not read. While one examined her fingernails, the other talked on her pink cell phone, saying audibly at one point, “yeah, we’re at, like, a protest.”

I recalled my own experiences at that age, most certainly my first moments of exposure to the wider world and the end of a childish innocence, and I wondered what these girls would take with them from this experience. Marilyn Katz, in a recent interview, recalled the moment she decided she “couldn’t just write about history, [she] needed to make it.” Would these girls — after hearing so many personal recollections and re-readings of speeches from those five historic days of protest — make that same choice? Would they see this as their fight, or would they find their own cause?

On Sunday evening, Warfield and I had discussed the connection he felt to the DNC protestors. “I think what happened during that week in Chicago in 1968 was a pretty revolutionary moment… protestors were operating at the end of a bayonet, passions were running extremely high, and a lot of things came into focus for people,” he said. “I don’t think there are very many of those moments.”

For me, the value of the re-enactment was not as much an inspiration to become a public actor as it was a reminder that the demons of our history are still present. There was a moment earlier that afternoon when I “got it” — just as Hamlett thought people would “get it” — hearing the shouts and cheers of the group as we crossed the pedestrian bridge toward Michigan Avenue. In the muggy heat of the August afternoon, surrounded by a buzz of historical and present-day politics, I realized I was no longer skeptically questioning the intentions of re-enactment. My mind was flooded with a new set of questions. Suddenly, I was engaged in the skyline, the music we were making, the text messages my peers were typing, the numbers of women around me — all these things that had changed so significantly over 40 years.

Indeed, the very definitions of protest and public space have changed, I thought. As the internet has made information and politics more accessible, we tend more often to neglect the value of public demonstration. I momentarily pondered whether this re-enactment was not just of the 1968 protests of the DNC, but of protest in general. Had this form of resistance become a relic? At the present day in age, is open air protest even accessible to the general public?

Each of us has a unique understanding of history and of the role of past decades in our identity and our politics. The re-enactment of 1968 tapped an element of society with social and political sympathies for that era. Warfield, Hamlett, and Leyser share this passion with many other individuals — as evidenced by the evening’s solid attendance — and it has inspired these people to exercise their democratic rights to speech and demonstration.

In St. Paul, Minnesota this week, protestors who shared a past- and present-day dissent toward foreign war attempted to protest the Republican National Convention and were tear-gassed and arrested in mass numbers. Suddenly, the question of what has changed and what has not is simpler that I realized. We literally saw a real-life re-enactment of the 1968 law enforcement practices, in what may become the inspiration for a new generation of activists.

Our ability to understand politics in a historical context is a valuable characteristic of our generation, and it is important to utilize our historical-identity politics to define goals for the collective. Ideally, my peers and I are not so much living in the past as we all are making the past part of our present, and part of the political discussion. The most important thing we can do is to reach out to each other with our message, and give a voice to those who are defining their passions.

Again, I found a quote from Katz particularly relevant: “You’d better take the public space before the public space becomes non-existent,” she said. “You either create the space or it goes away.”

Photos taken by AJ Kane. For more, visit www.ajkane.com