McCarthy lowers mayoral campaign bar beyond reach

It's unlikely Gerry McCarthy's 8 competitors to unseat Rahm Emanuel as Chicago mayor, can hit the nadir in campaign rhetoric sputtered by McCarthy over the Dan Ryan and Lake Shore Drive protest marches.

"We're spending money to facilitate criminal behavior. We're slipping into lawlessness." McCarthy then pondered whether State Police, who have responsibility for policing expressways, "should have arrested Chicago Police officers, including Superintendent Eddie Johnson, whey they marched arm in arm with Father Pfleger" on the Ryan. McCarthy then boasted about his preventing major highway shutdowns as Police Chief during the 2012 Chicago NATO Summit. But McCarthy omitted that the NATO protesters were outsiders here for a week. The Ryan and Lake Shore Drive protesters represent hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans trapped in the West and South Side swaths of poverty, despair and death for a century. And unlike NATO protesters, the Chicago protesters will never go away.

Non-violent civil disobedience championed by Martin Luther King and others was devised to disrupt the power structure that ignores truly dreadful conditions for a marginalized people,. It was created in the decade before McCarthy's birth in 1959. He knows its history and the truth that calling such protests 'unlawful' and demanding mass arrests, is the tactic developed by Southern police chiefs to maintain Jim Crow. The moral unlawfulness of those sheriffs dwarfed the technical unlawfulness of the protesters. McCarthy would be wise to pitch his campaign to confront 21st century Chicago problems, not pander to frightened Chicagoans of privilege like 1950's Birmingham Police Chief Bull Connor.

Walt Zlotow

Glen Ellyn