According to Eric Clapton, swans live in parks. So do pigeons.

One particular park, Grant, in Chicago, briefly became ‘home’, forty years ago, to two other kinds of animals: ‘pigs’ and ‘Yippies’. Neither pretended to have the elegance of a swan or the humility of a pigeon. Instead, they fought in the streets and threw epithets (and other things) at one another.

August 28, 1968 came to be known as the day a “police riot” took place. The title of “police riot” came out of the Walker Report, which amassed a great deal of information and eyewitness accounts to determine what actually happened in Chicago. At approximately 3:30 p.m., a young boy lowered the American flag at a legal rally taking place at Grant Park. The rally was made up of 10, 000 protestors. The police broke through the crowd and began beating the boy, while the crowd pelted the police with food, rocks, bags of urine, and chunks of concrete. The biggest clash in Chicago took place that day. Police fought with the protestors and vice versa. The chants of the protestors shifted from “Hell no, we won’t go” to “Pigs are whores.” . Tom Hayden, one of the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, encouraged protesters to move out of the park to ensure that if they were to be tear gassed, the whole city would be tear gassed, and made sure that if blood were spilled in Chicago it would happen throughout the city. The amount of tear gas used to suppress the protesters was so great that it eventually made it’s way to the Hilton Hotel where it disturbed Hubert Humphrey while in his shower. The police marched and clubbed the protesters with chants of “Kill, kill, kill.” They sprayed demonstrators and bystanders indiscriminately with Mace.

It gets uglier from there. For those under 55 or so (as I am), a balanced, honest, in-depth study of those days should be requirement of being a citizen so that more people recognize the fragility of our veneer of civility. We don’t need to be moral wizards or rehash history however or, as the Monty Python ‘Holy Grail’ skit goes, “…bicker and argue over who killed who” to recognize that those were some truly ugly times and that there was plenty of blame to go around on both sides. As a friend likes to say, “Satan must have been absolutely lovin’ it”.

Here’s the thought that keeps running through my head as I contemplate what happened on that patch of soil forty years ago and what Barack Hussein Obama is presumptively planning for that same patch of ground in less than two weeks:

What happens when the ‘pigs’ and the ‘Yippies’ join forces? When the worst of living-dead Daley-Chicago ‘all means necessary to win’ politics and the feces-throwing Chicago Seven/Bill Ayers bomb-the-Pentagon just like Osama Bin Laden terrorism come together? What happens when they become the same individual? When both forms of irrational ugliness become embodied in one very attractive, silver-tongued orator who seems entirely rational and full of civility on the surface?

What happens when the worst kind of thuggish, totalitarian impulses marry up with the forces of disrespect, revolutionary chaos and unrestrained, throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater (literally) anti-conservative, anti-social behavior? What happens when both of those ugly, backward strains within our society (within any society, really) unite and gain real power?

I keep coming back to Sarah Palin’s pointed observation: only one of these candidates actually fought for you — for freedom for those struggling against Communist oppression and violence (because we shrank from that mission, several million more ultimately died for it). The forces that animate the other candidate, and that he so ably represents, simply fought. In the streets. With each other. That’s just what those forces do. It is what they’re all about: chaos.