I was 17 and skeptical when I saw the movie poster for Chicago 10 at the Missouri History Museum where I work. The exaggerated cartoon figures seemed almost comical and when my boss tried to tell me that was I was about to see was like none of the other documentaries we had screened I was decidedly doubtful. Then it began. Then it changed me.

It was in fact, like nothing I had ever seen. It was a partially animated documentary based on the infamous court transcripts of the equally infamous Chicago 8, a trial so infamous that I had never heard of it. The Yippie Party had been omitted from my history textbooks. I had no idea that for three days in 1968 Chicago became a police state. So when I saw the video of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin dance across the screen, when I saw the mob “take the hill” and one man plant the Vietnam flag on a statue only to be beaten by police, and when I saw Bobby Seale gagged and bound, demanding his right to be heard, my pulse raced and my all of my perceptions, about the sixties legacies had to be reconstructed.

As protesters shouted, “The whole world is watching” I watched. When the tear gas and the beatings began, I saw the smallest battle of Vietnam play out outside the Hilton Hotel in downtown Chicago. It was vulgar. It was terrifying. It was radical. And I wished I could’ve been a part of it. I couldn’t keep from feeling a grudging admiration for the radical young men and women who were willing to be beaten if it brought peace. I wanted to join the movement.

The convention was the democrat’s nightmare incarnate. It exposed the cracks in the party’s foundation that had been becoming more and more prominent as LBJ’s war progressed. It was probably the most derisive moment within the Democratic Party in recent history.  It was a plea to start anew and it was a battle; the Yippies’ Last Stand, against a violent society that allowed Vietnam to happen. It was “The Second American Revolution” that heralded Nixon’s presidency.

Yet, the way they protested was actually quite ingenious. Everything they did had a purpose. They created what they called, the Yippie myth and made outlandish claims such as they’d poison Lake Michigan with LSD (clearly impossible) and they would burn Chicago to the ground, claims that were almost as outlandish as the lies coming from Vietnam. They were careful to preach for peace and their recruiting tool was simple, Chicago was a human be-in, they would be-in Chicago’s parks for the convention and that would be enough.

The Chicago 8 used the trial for publicity, to expose the court system as corrupted. They were charged with conspiracy so they answered the phones calling themselves “the conspiracy.” It was all a challenge to authority. It forced Chicago and America to show its totalitarianism thereby proving what the Yippies ultimately wanted to say: Violence was ingrained deep enough in our society it could be exercised on peaceful protesters. They were not just fighting for Vietnam; they wanted to “create a society where Vietnam could never have been possible.”

I admired the radicals. Their demonization seemed like a double standard. The media and politicians could demonize protesters but wouldn’t dare attack Kennedy’s personal life. Their propaganda was extreme, and their language was vulgar but they had to be extreme, they had to be the polar opposite of war.

It wasn’t just their message that was intriguing. It was their speeches and actions. I will never forget hearing Abbie Hoffman respond to reporters when they asked him what his price would be to call off “the revolution.” His answer was “my life.” I’ll never get over the chants of the “whole world is watching” from the convention that preceded the violence. And I’ll always have an image of Bobby Seale being bound and gagged in his chair still struggling to demand his right to defend himself.

During Hoffman’s testimony he called himself an orphan of America.  I could relate. There are undeniable parallels between our society today and the turbulence of 1968. Just like Vietnam, I live in a world where Americans have been lied to about war. I live in a world that was shocked by 9/11 similarly to the shock of JFK’s assassination. The sixties were the epoch of assassinations. Today, guns are taken up against children in our schools. The destruction of the Voting Rights Act has pulled us into the past. Modern America is closer to sixties than it ever has been before. As a millennial. I can look back at the era of turbulence and relate it to my life.

But unlike the protesters in Chicago, the youth in America is refusing to stand up. Our technology is no longer used as a tool for activism but as a distraction that lets us isolate ourselves from the issues. Unlike the rich meaning of rebellious protest music from the sixties, today’s popular music feels soulless, and meaningless. We live in a world where all the components are there to create a movement, and to create change, but no one is willing to take a stand. No one wants to stand up for the greater good.

Now I realize that the Chicago 10 made me awaken to my reality. It’s a reality that desperately needs change. The world of the protesters at the Chicago Democratic National Convention and my own are so similar, so why do I feel so far away from the era of change?  We are making the same mistakes today but have forgotten our spirit of activism.

And I am an orphan of America. Here. Ready. Waiting for a movement.

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“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is not a benevolent organization. NATO is not about the North Atlantic and it’s not about our collective defense.

NATO is a cost-sharing organization that finances aggressive military action. By hiding behind the claim that the organization provides for “common defense,” NATO allows us to wage wars of choice under the guise of international peacekeeping. The most recent example was the unconstitutional war in Libya where NATO, operating under a United Nations mandate to protect civilians, instead backed one side in a civil war and pursued a policy of regime change.”

                                                                                                                                         —Former U.S. congressman, Dennis Kucinich

“What do you call it when the full force of a US/NATO aerial bombardment is coupled with political support for a ragtag rebel group that, when victorious, promises to hand over its oil resources to its Western backers? A war for oil.

Don’t believe for one moment that the US backing for Libya’s opposition was about freedom.”  

—Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation

“When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re a military alliance, every problem looks like it requires a military solution. NATO is a giant, big hammer. The problem is: Afghanistan is not a nail; Libya is not a nail. These are political problems that need to be dealt with politically. And by empowering . . . a military alliance, NATO is really serving to undermine the goal of the United Nations Charter, which speaks of the importance of regional organizations, in political terms, for nonviolent resolution of disputes, not to put such a primacy and privilege on military regional institutions that really reflect the most powerful parts of the world.”

— Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies

NATO’s 25th summit meeting, its largest to date, took place on May 20-21, 2012 in Chicago, Illinois. The official purpose of the meeting was to discuss the future of Afghanistan and plans to end the war, but according to former congressman Kucinich, they met to discuss how to finance the next phase of the occupation.

Outside, thousands protested. The “official” count was 2,000, but a Guardian reporter estimated the crowd was closer to 5,000. Protest organizers said 10,000. So, why were they protesting NATO, and its so-called “humanitarian missions?”

A little history of NATO, from a progressive perspective

In 1949, European nations and the United States formed The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to counteract and contain the political, economic and military aspirations of the Soviet Union. It was created to defend the North Atlantic countries from Soviet invasion, to protect the growth of capitalism in reconstructed Europe, and to serve the interests of Western corporations and governments. Under the Marshall Plan, and then under NATO, European countries shifted their energy use from coal to oil at a time when the United States was the leading oil producer in the world thus greatly boosting U.S. power and influence as well as the fortunes of U.S. oil companies.

After the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union—the original threat for the North Atlantic countries—dissolved, the U.S. rebranded NATO and extended its mandate to regions far and wide. It became the “military hammer” for corporations, and U.S. and western nations, to have their way under the guise of conducting “humanitarian missions” to solve various “global conflicts.” Because powerful interests determine its agendas, NATO has been a force for spreading discord and violence rather than making the world safe for its member nations and others around the world. Often operating outside of UN approval, it has morphed into a powerful rogue organization that can always be counted on to say one thing and do another.

As natoprotest.org aptly points out, from its inception NATO was never intended to represent the interests of the people of its member nations. Although it always claims humanitarian motivation, it  was never intended to protect and defend the people in the countries it bombs and occupies. They end up as collateral damage in the never-ending pursuit of oil, markets, and whatever the “interests” of the United States and its allies may be at the moment. Today, NATO has grown to include 28 member nations.

The “humanitarian mission” of NATO in Yugoslavia

Award-winning Australian journalist John Pilger, writing in 2008, gives a different story of the NATO mission in Kosovo than we saw and heard about in corporate media. In 1999, NATO forces, under the direction of the United States, spent 78 days bombing Serbia and Kosovo, killing hundreds of people in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and television studios as well as destroying economic infrastructure. The justification for the NATO bombing was that the Serbs were committing “genocide” against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo. David Scheffer, U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, spread war propaganda that that upwards of 225,000 ethnic Albanian men may have been murdered. UK’s Tony Blair chimed in with alarmist rhetoric comparing what was happening in Kosovo to the Holocaust in the Second World War.

After the NATO bombing ended, international teams went into Kosovo to find evidence of the so-called genocide. The FBI and a Spanish forensic team, failed to find a single mass grave . A year later, a war tribunal funded by the United States announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo to be 2,788, which included combatants on both sides. As Pilger reports, “There was no genocide in Kosovo. The “holocaust” was a lie. The NATO attack had been fraudulent.”

Soon after the humanitarian bombs stopped raining down on Serbia and Kosovo, construction began on a massive US military base, Camp Bondsteel, which is located in an area of great geopolitical interest to Washington D.C. Constructed by Halliburton subsidiary KBR, It has been described by Alvaro Gil-Robles, the human rights envoy of the Council of Europe, as a “smaller version of Guantanamo.” With more than 7,000 troops,Camp Bondsteel is one of the largest U.S. overseas military bases in the world.

Lenora Foerstel writing at Global Research in 2008:

The main purpose for the Bondsteel military base is to provide security for the construction of the Albanian-Macedonian-Bulgarian oil pipeline (AMBO). The AMBO trans-Balkan pipeline will link up with the corridors between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea basin, which holds close to 50 billion barrels of oil.

A few months prior to the “humanitarian bombings” in Yugoslavia, Clinton Energy Secretary Bill Richardson spelled out the US policy of “protecting the pipeline routes” out of the Caspian Sea basin and across the Balkans:

This is about America’s energy security . . . It’s also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don’t share our values. We’re trying to move these newly independent countries toward the west . . . We would like to see them reliant on western commercial and political interests rather than going another way. We’ve made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it’s very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right.

On to Afghanistan and Iraq

natoprotest.org reports that NATO’s Afghanistan war is the longest in U.S. history, and 2011 was the deadliest year in the Afghanistan war since the U.S. began its invasion and occupation—under the banner of NATO—in 2001. The United States has successfully installed its puppet, Hamid Karzai, to look after its interests in the region. According to Voices for Creative Nonviolence, every day in Afghanistan, 450 people are displaced and 250 children die due to malnutrition. The U.S. is not leaving Afghanistan any time soon. In April 2012, the U.S. and Afghanistan announced a new “strategic partnership agreement” through at least 2024.

On May 23, of 2012, India and Pakistan signed a long-awaited natural gas deal with the Central Asian state of Turkmenistan, paving the way for the construction of a multi-billion dollar pipeline through Afghanistan. So, no, we are not there to fight terrorists, the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Yugoslavia set up the “humanitarian” playbook for Iraq. Slobodan Milošević and his practice of genocide (which turned out not to exist) morphed into Saddam Hussein and his practice of genocide (some of which did exist). When the WMD and al-Qaeda propaganda failed, the bombing of Iraq was presented as a humanitarian mission—to free the grateful people of Iraq from an evil dictator who killed his own people. NATO countries formed the “coalition of the willing, and dutifully lined up to do the bidding of the United States and its best friend, the United Kingdom. Now, in 2012, even the most uninformed American knows we went into Iraq for oil and greater control of the Middle East, not to save the people of Iraq from Saddam Hussein. When he was useful, the United States had a cordial relationship with dictator Hussein. When our interests changed, we took him out.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. has its fashionably dressed puppet Hamid Karzai; and in Iraq, it has its newly minted dictator, Nouri al-Maliki:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has demonstrated an increasingly authoritarian rule as he consolidates power over the country’s institutions and security forces. He has marginalized his political opponents through force and coercion, which has stoked sectarian tensions and even threatened a break-up of the nation.

Libya

The official line is that NATO is an international peacekeeping organization that shares the cost of defense when needed. But in reality its purpose is to intervene militarily in those situations where it can benefit the interests of big money and the Western governments it owns—primarily the U.S. government. For example, as Dennis Kucinich points out, the official story about the invasion of Libya is that that NATO intervened to protect the Libyan people from Muammar Gaddafi, but its real mission was to support regime change to allow multinational oil companies free access to Libya’s vast reserves of high-grade sweet crude.

Some of the so-called “rebels,” who were backed by the United States government and the CIA, were Islamist extremists who had known ties to al-Qaeda, They are now gutting human rights in Libya including the rights of women. The United States and NATO pay lip service to human rights to provide cover for the real reasons for invading another country—access to oil, markets, or other strategic resources. They are fine with Islamist extremists (or ruthless dictators) if they can co-opt and control them for their own purposes—witness what is happening right now with U.S relations with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. No matter what is says publically, the United States is adamantly opposed to free, independent democracies forming in the Arab world outside of its control.

The average citizen in the U.S. believes the mythology that the United States is a force for good in the world—a beacon of democracy and a supporter of individual freedom, civil rights, and human dignity. But any sixth grader who spends a few minutes on Google can discover that the U.S. and NATO have a long and sordid history of supporting brutal regimes that have appalling human rights records. Some of the best “friends” of the United States have been Zine El Abidine Ben Ali,
President-Prime Minister/Dictator of Tunisia 1987-2011; Hosni Mubarak
President/Dictator of Egypt 1981-2011; Mohamed Suharto, 
Dictator of Indonesia 1966-1998; and, Augusto Pinochet;
Dictator of Chile 1973-1990. The list is long and shameful; these are just some of the greatest hits.

Yemen

Supposedly, NATO was on a “humanitarian mission” to protect the people of Libya when it bombed it last year. But, it doesn’t seem to care about the current US drone attacks in Yemen designed to support one of the region’s most ruthless dictatorships. NATO is equally indifferent about supporting the people of Bahrain who are resisting a brutal, U.S. backed dictatorship in that country.

The official reason for the U.S involvement in Yemen is to stamp out al-Qaeda and other terrorists in the region, but the real U.S. interest in having a ruthless dictator/puppet in Yemen is its proximity to shipping lanes leading to the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

Those who resist U.S./NATO backed regimes are often labeled ‘terrorists,” as if they woke up one morning with the sole purpose in life to attack the United States or other NATO countries. The fact that they are protesting poverty, the lack of basic human rights, the U.S. support of repressive regimes in their own countries, and the inability to determine their own destiny is ignored.

As with the previous dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, there is substantial opposition in Yemen to the newly elected, U.S. backed, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, long-time Vice President of Saleh. Saleh was forced to step down last year because of a populist uprising against his brutal regime. Hadi became President through a U.S. rigged “election” in which he was the only candidate on the ballot. Absurdly, Hillary Clinton congratulated Yemen on its successful presidential election. The Obama administration has been supporting Hadi with large infusions of money and military assistance. Libya and Yemen provide instructive examples of how NATO’s interventions are highly selective, and despite the official rhetoric, have little or nothing to do with defense or protecting human rights.

NATO is also in the forefront of the privatization of the military, so tax dollars that go to support NATO end up in the pockets of a growing number of private military contractors. The 1% at home are invested in profiting off this lucrative, permanent war economy at the expense of funding vital human needs, like unemployment compensation, education, mortgage relief, Social Security and healthcare. Taxpayer funded support for NATO translates into a gravy train for defense contractors.

The Chicago protests, 2012

The recent Chicago protests against NATO are protests against the vast U.S. military industrial-security complex, of which NATO is a significant part. So much of what the United States, NATO, and the CIA are doing in the world is done without the knowledge of U.S. citizens who are left footing the bill for trillions of dollars of adventurous wars and dubious interventions on behalf of corporate interests. Those trillions could and should be directed toward social and economic needs at home and be used for promoting peace in the world.

The National Security/Defense complex is a vast money making machine and doesn’t have much to do with “keeping Americans safe.” If anything, our aggression and insistence on global dominance are making us extremely vulnerable in every way. The most morally repugnant aspect of the U.S./NATO partnership is that it is a killing machine, destroying the lives of innocent men, women and children around the world, as well as the members of our military.

 Photograph: Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

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When Unabomber Theodore J. Kaczynski becomes your poster child, you’ve reached a new low. And that’s exactly what happened recently in Chicago, when the Heartland Institute launched an anti-“global warming” ad campaign with a billboard on I-290 [Eisenhower Expressway]. The billboard featured a huge picture of the disheveled letter-bomber Kaczynski. The caption, in large maroon letters, said “I still believe in global warming. Do you?”

The implication, of course, is that only maniacs, murderers and madmen think global warming is real. And the Kaczynski billboard was intended to be just the first in a series that would underscore that point. According to Heartland Institute’s website, subsequent billboards were to have featured Charles Manson, Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and Osama bin Laden—all of whom, claims Heartland, have stated their support for the notion of global warming.

The Heartland Institute is a Chicago-based, libertarian organization that describes itself as seeking “free- market solutions to economic and social problems.” [Wait…hasn’t the free market created a lot of our economic and social problems? But that’s a different post.]

Heartland’s website also says that the organization chose to feature some of the world’s most notorious killers on the billboards “because what these murderers and madmen have said differs very little from what spokespersons for the United Nations, journalists for the mainstream media and liberal politicians say about global warming.”

But don’t jump in the car to get a first-hand look at the billboard. It’s already gone.  Twenty-four hours after it launched the campaign, the Heartland Institute cancelled it. Apparently, the billboard was so extreme that it offended even some global warming skeptics, as well as, of course, people who embrace climate-change science. According to the New York Times, one of its critics was Ross McKitrick, a Canadian global-warming skeptic who was scheduled to speak at a Heartland conference in May. McKitrick said he would not participate in the conference unless the campaign was cancelled.

Apparently, almost nobody warmed up to this particular anti-global-warming campaign. Heartland says it doesn’t apologize for the idea, and that it was all just an experiment designed to get people’s attention, and that it worked. Bottom line, though, it seems that the murderers-and-maniacs approach tells us more about the Heartland Institute than it does about global climate change.

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Chicago will be the site of both the G8 and NATO summits from May 19-21, 2012.  President Obama will act as host, and leaders from around the world will be in attendance. Protesters from around the world are also expected to attend in huge numbers, with the police already promising mass arrests. The buildup to the event is being led by Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, with pushes for more security funding and bigger fines for protesters, while at the same time cutting the city’s libraries.

The Mayor is pushing to raise the fine for “resisting arrest” to $1,000 (about double the previous level) in anticipation of the conference. A Chicago Business editorial speculates that there is concern about a replay of the 1968 Democratic Convention, which is still seen as a black eye for the city. Beefing up the ability of the police force to inflict pain on protesters financially may not be the best way to go about this. “Occupy Wall Street” protests that have been forcefully broken up by police are already resulting in lawsuits, with many more still to be filed and years of court battles in the future.

Comparisons to 1968 are particularly apt, given the early stage planning already being made by OWS and other protester groups. Coordination appears to be progressing rapidly with cooperation from a number of groups already established. Potential protesters are already speculated to be in the tens of thousands. Chicago OWS is attempting to obtain the appropriate permits and lay other groundwork to facilitate the expected influx of protesters.

The last time Chicago faced protests on this scale, the city gained a reputation of having an abusive police force and an out of touch Mayor (the first Daley) who had no respect for the rule of law. Emmanuel may be moving in the wrong direction through massive purchases of security equipment and toughening the fines for “resisting arrest,”a charge frequently abused by police.

Emanuel has requested that local businesses cover the cost of security.The mayor has asked for $60 million in emergency funds to cover the cost of security items –meaning that many of the purchases will be on a no-bid basis. The mayor justifies the “emergency” expenditures as the only method of meeting the city’s requirements. “Only Motorola radios can interface with the city’s infrastructure” for instance.

Henry Bayer of AFSCME Council 31 has responded, “If those people can afford to put up $45 million or $60 million, which is the city’s estimate, why isn’t he out there asking them, `Wouldn’t you be willing to pay a little bit more — just a fraction of that $60 million — which could be used to keep the libraries open’ ” six days-a-week?” The mayor has recently pushed through a measure closing the city’s libraries one day a week to help resolve financial shortfalls. The mayor had originally pushed for even more stringent actions until pushback from city council members caused him to ease off to the current one day a week closure. The mayor’s office claims he is committed to libraries, but, in fact, when funding was needed, security concerns caused him to look for new sources, while libraries got budget cuts.

Crain’s “Chicago Business” has published an editorial criticizing the mayor for the no-bid contracts. The paper notes that Chicago was selected as the site of the conferences back in June, but it is now necessary to purchase items on an “emergency” basis. The editorial goes further and states that the move illustrates either very poor planning on the part of the city, or is a move to throw business at “insider cronies.”

As the story unfolds, reminders of 1968 abound. A Democratic mayor who helped to elect a President and is rewarded with a convention. The mayor believes that dissent can be easily squashed through police action, and no one will care. Protesters who are resolved to face whatever resistance they must.

The eyes of the world are turning towards Chicago as the OWS movement prepares for the first big battle of a new year after a long Valley Forge winter, which has challenged their ability to persevere.  May looks to be an interesting month this year.

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I’ve been quite fortunate to be spending a few days in Chicago while reading Obama: From Promise to Power by David Mendell. Mendell is a Chicago Tribune reporter who followed Barack Obama during his run for the U.S. Senate in 2004.

Virtually anyone who’s been to Chicago knows that it’s a city made for walking. Its neighborhoods are rich in ethnic flavor and all but the wealthiest ones are microcosms of issues facing most Americans. As Mendell points out, Barack Obama knew the neighborhoods of Chicago when he was a community organizer and even during the time between graduating from Harvard Law and first running for political office.

As a community organizer, he kept his anonymity most of that time and essentially went wherever he wanted. He could talk with whomever he liked. He was a sponge; soaking up information from people struggling to pay rent, get the housing authority to remove asbestos, or put more vital resources into schools.

As I walked just a few of the streets of Chicago, I was saddened with the realization that this was something Barack Obama used to do and has not done for years. It may be that the poison fruit was the first campaign contribution he took which took him away from the streets and made him a child of Chicago’s Gold Coast, northern suburbs, and the fashionable part of Hyde Park. What he needed from Chicago then was money and votes. That’s a far cry from the tremendous thirst to learn about how the “common folks” lived.

There was a time when Barack Obama would spend days interacting with people trying to make a go of it on the south side of Chicago. Now he spends most of his days speaking with the likes of Tim Geithner and John Boehner.

A week without Geithner

On TV’s  “Undercover Boss,” the CEO of a company takes on a disguise to learn what life is like for the “ordinary employees” of his or her company. I cannot think of a more enriching experience for Barack Obama. Ever since his stirring speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, he has lived in a bubble. Every action he takes or doesn’t take has been thoroughly scrutinized.

Suppose that he could wear a convincing disguise and come back to his home state of Illinois for a week. He could meet with people in neighborhood restaurants. He could shoot a few hoops on a glass-strewn inner-city court. He could ride public transportation and see the joy, or lack thereof, on people’s faces. He could go to Walgreen’s or CVS and see how many people are scrounging for coupons. He could go to a pay day loan shop and see the anxiety and anticipation on customers’ faces. He could go to a casino and see people drink, smoke, and gamble away what might be meager savings.

He could travel the rural roads south and west of Chicago and talk to family farmers about everything from how new technology is increasing their yields to how they are threatened by big agribusiness. He could visit small towns to learn about how downtown businesses are trying to survive when a new Wal-Mart is about to be built close-by. He could go with a home-owner to a bank to talk about the mortgage that no longer can be paid.

It would be a week of reconnecting with the people who for so many years he was trying to directly help through community organizing including economic development. It would be looking at dollars and cents the way in which most families do; not the way that Tim Geithner or other top economic advisors do.

Back to DC

It would be too great a leap to say that Barack Obama would return to DC and like the “bosses of “undercover boss,” he would be so moved by the hardships that his constituents face that he would change his basic mode of governance. However, he would reconnect with the Barack Obama of earlier years and possibly feel a need to bring some advisors into the White House who don’t even have resumes. They just have life experience.

Not Likely to Happen

For any number of reasons, Barack Obama is not likely to be an undercover boss. But the need remains for him or any other leader to stay connected with the lives of those living ordinary lives or those truly in distress. Maybe he could sneak out of a fund-raiser early and show up unexpectedly at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Maybe he could go into a drug store to buy a pack of cigarettes, and then think better of it and buy a pack of Nicorette. Maybe he could ask a farmer if he could have dinner with the family.

As I walk the streets of Chicago and am constantly stimulated to think about the fiber of the community, I can’t get out of my mind that in that regard, I am more privileged than Barack Obama. He can’t take that walk, or at least he hasn’t been doing it. I just hope that somehow he can find time to reconnect with the people whose needs propelled him into politics, and do so without White House advisors and campaign handlers hovering over him. That’s my dream of my president.

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