Getting around downtown Chicago is a challenge at the best of times.  Weekdays feature a constant flow of carefully and swiftly moving traffic; weekends all the more so.

But it is a city of 2.5 million people, in a tri-state metro area of 9 million. Back in the days when Chicago was known as “The City that Works” – a generation ago, at least – the city fathers took great care to minimize any event that threatened to jeopardize that title.

We had parades occasionally; we had demonstrations all the time.  The Constitution guarantees American citizens’ right to such things.

So the city always allowed them – it had to – but made sure they were kept under control, usually on the front courtyard of the Daley Center or some similar easily-confined location. 

The goal of the demonstrators was never to disrupt traffic, in those days.  As fellow Chicagoans, demonstrators knew that their own neighbors, parents, or siblings had to get to work.  So demonstrators would hold picket signs and recite pithy slogans, and the police would make sure fights don’t break out.

The regular population of downtown – the businessmen and the shoppers, the tourists and suburbanites in town for lunch or a show – could get on with their day unimpeded, but they would receive the message of the demonstrators while walking or driving past.   See? The city still works, and the demonstrators reach an audience.   Win-Win.

Not anymore.

On the afternoon of Saturday, October 21, A.D. 2023, Gentle Reader, this writer had to venture into the city to see a friend’s world premiere performance in an iconic downtown venue.  With the Kennedy under construction and the usual traffic of a Saturday, it was sure to be an unpleasant drive, but nobody knew how unpleasant it was going to get.

There was already a big event scheduled for Saturday– the Halloween Parade, attracting some 50,000 spectators. Back in the days when the infamous Machine still functioned, they would not have granted a permit for a competing event two blocks away on a Saturday afternoon.

But at about 3:00 p.m., thousands of pro-Hamas protesters – both pedestrians and vehicles - converged on Chicago’s downtown, centering around the intersection of Ida B. Wells Drive (named for a famous black Republican journalist of the 19th century) and Michigan Avenue (named for our own Great Lake), mere blocks to the east).

There was no room for this massive, unsanctioned demonstration, so it tied up traffic for hours, as thousands of people carrying full-size flags of the imagined nation of Palestine that the supporters of the terrorist groups Hamas and Fatah hope someday to establish in place of Israel.

I don’t know when people started bringing full-size flags to demonstrations; I certainly don’t recall them in the days when I used to watch (or counterprotest) such things, many years ago.  Conservative demonstrations might have two or three full-size American flags to lead a parade and give the crowd a direction to face for the Pledge.  Leftist demonstrations would have dozens of picket signs.  But it’s not like the demonstrations of the 1970s and 80s had hundreds of Soviet or ChiCom flags flying around.  Even those enemy nations’ own paid agitators (and yes, during the Cold War, there were plenty) knew better than to make their allegiance so blatantly obvious.

But in recent years, it has become common enough for people to drive around Chicago with a full size Mexican flag – or flags of other immigrants’ homelands - sticking out of the sunroof of a car, driving down our city streets, or even sticking out of a side window, presumably held in place by the passengers.

So at this pro-terrorist demonstration, there were indeed hundreds of people with these huge flags cluttering the streets and sidewalks of downtown Chicago on a Saturday afternoon. Visibility is never all that great downtown, with the crush of humanity on the sidewalks, and the SUVs and buses and trucks everywhere else.  Add in all this random fabric flapping in the breeze, and traffic slowed to a crawl, as even our most confident Chicago drivers had to hesitate at every intersection, taking each turn more slowly than usual, from fear of hitting a car or pedestrian because of such obscured sightlines. 

The short demonstration tied up the city for hours, because both before and after the actual speeches or chants, all the participants – with their cars and leaflets and flags and signs – were added to the already dense numbers of people downtown.

One is reminded of an anecdote from the late, great P.J. O’Rourke’s classic work, “Parliament of Whores.”

Not long after Andy (Ferguson) and I met, we were driving down Pennsylvania Avenue and encountered some or another noisy pinko demonstration. “How come,” I asked Andy, “whenever something upsets the Left, you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas whenever something upsets the Right, you see two members of the Young Americans for Freedom waving a six-inch American flag?”

“We have jobs,” said Andy.

-- Parliament of Whores, copyright 1991 P.J. O’Rourke

O’Rourke was making a different point than I am here, since this was a Saturday, making it far easier for even people with jobs to attend a rally.  But it is worth noting that a related aspect still applies. This pro-terrorist rally disrupted the commerce of the city of Chicago, the downtown commerce in fact, which – outside of the airports and our various stadiums on game days – is really the commerce that Chicago counts on to survive.

Why wasn’t this protest broken up immediately, as soon as it was clear that it was going to disrupt traffic?

When you add an hour in traffic to the tens of thousands of individuals, couples, and families in downtown Chicago on a Saturday, what you’ve done is shortened their day in town by an hour. You’ve caused them to miss the first hour of a performance they had paid to attend (or that they were to be paid to perform in). You’ve caused them to miss the dinner or drinks or dessert or appetizer that they were planning on enjoying at one of the restaurants or bars on their day’s agenda.  Or you’ve caused them to skip one or two or three of the shops they were planning on visiting during their day downtown, likely costing each of those businesses a sale.

Every hour of unnecessary additional traffic in Chicago costs the Chicago business community – that means their proprietors and clerks, cashiers and musicians, bartenders and waitresses – hundreds of thousands of dollars at least, but more likely, millions of dollars.

That’s the real result of this traffic-snarling demonstration.  That’s what its organizers costs us, and therefore, what our city leadership cost us by failing to properly enforce the permitting requirements and location limitations traditional for Chicago.  This wasn’t a sudden change with Chicago’s rabble-rousing new mayor; Chicago has been careening on a downward track for years.  They long ago forgot the importance of smooth traffic flow to the business of the city; they never did really understand how dependent their constituents are on a smoothly operating downtown business and entertainment district.

(Perhaps this tells us something about the supporters of Gaza as well. For generations now, especially for the past sixteen years of self-rule, the leaders and residents of the Gaza Strip itself have concentrated on protests and violence instead of on jobs and commerce. Had their own focus been on seeking honest prosperity instead of blood, we might have found peace by now.)

Perhaps the police were afraid that if they utilized the normal tactics of crowd control and actually tried to enforce the law, violence would erupt.  This shouldn’t be a fear, but considering the crowd in question, it can’t be discounted.

This was, after all, a crowd of tens of thousands of Hamas supporters, just two weeks after Hamas committed one of the most horrific pogroms in history (yes, for all intents and purposes, most of the Hamas attacks on October 7 met or exceeded the definition of the worst of history’s pogroms).

Many spectators assumed that after the word came out of the unspeakable horrors of October 7 - the terrorists shooting up a music festival, the tortures and rapes at a kibbutz, the desecration of the bodies of their victims – Hamas would be sure to lose its vocal supporters. Surely nobody would admit to siding with such demonic villains in this day and age. This attack beats most of the barbarity of ancient times.

But no.  It is now clear that Hamas supporters know no shame.  Still they charged into downtown Chicago, as they have filled demonstrations in other cities as well for the past week, furiously calling for an end to American support of our friend and ally Israel. They have the audacity to call Israel the monsters. To claim that Israel practices apartheid, of all things. Even chanting their ghastly song of genocide against the Jews, calling for clearing the country “from the river to the sea.” 

We remember our history books.  We know about the Third Reich.  We know exactly what “from the river to the sea” means.

Still the supporters of independent nationhood for the Arabs of the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria are willing to show their faces in public, even after all that their heroes have done to thousands of  innocent victims in Israel in the past two weeks.

And we remember – for we can never forget – that under U.S. Law, those who support terrorists are terrorists themselves. Know your enemy.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional and consultant.  A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009.  His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II).

Image: Screen shot from NBC News Now video, via YouTube