Opinion | What Should Chicago Celebrate? (original) (raw)

Opinion|What Should Chicago Celebrate?

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/opinion/what-should-chicago-celebrate.html

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Dec. 31, 2015

Chicago — TODAY is the first Chi-Town Rising, a blowout New Year’s Eve party along the Chicago riverfront. It promises celebrity and musical guests, including, naturally, the band Chicago. As the countdown to 2016 begins, a 70-foot steel star will ascend 36 stories up the side of the Hyatt Regency, the celebration culminating in a fireworks show.

The star — the Rising Star, it’s called — is meant to symbolize Chicago’s “rich history of rising in the face of adversity,” according to promotional material.

This privately funded event was initially billed as free to the public, but that has recently changed. Tickets are now on sale for 99or99 or 99or150, depending on how close you’d like to get to the action. The celebrity and musical guests who were supposed to perform on a public, visible stage have since been moved to ticketed locations.

This is one Chicago: privatized, accessible only to some.

Today is also the third citywide walkout in the past month, another protest demanding the resignations of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Anita Alvarez, the Cook County state’s attorney, following what many saw as a cover-up by City Hall over the 2014 shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer, Jason Van Dyke.

The Chicago protests have been effective so far, most notably forcing the resignation of Garry McCarthy, the police superintendent. The University of Chicago also agreed to calls to build a Level 1 trauma center on the city’s South Side.

These demands are long overdue: the removal of leadership that fails to protect Chicago’s citizens, and systemic and structural change to the oppressive policies that target Chicago’s black and brown communities. In a sea of cynicism and politics as usual_,_ the protesters’ hope is electrifying. This is the other Chicago.

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