In her acceptance speech, Kamala Harris called for a ceasefire and acknowledged the suffering in Gaza, while also making clear that an arms embargo was out of the question—all this practically in the same breath. The speech occurred as the marches that called for both a ceasefire and an embargo wound down. No Palestinian American was allowed to give a speech from the main stage. Uncommitted delegates staged a sit-in at the United Center. Beyoncé did not show up.
The final march, on Thursday, felt smaller than the one on Wednesday—and the one on Wednesday was smaller than the one on Monday. At the pre-march rally, an anarchist told me that he missed the energy from 2004. He was in his fifties, he’d taken the Zephyr down from Berkeley, and he’d take it back on Friday. I’d been walking around at the exact time that my three-year-old usually gets cranky and has meltdowns: My three-year-old wasn’t with me, but there was definitely a three-year-old at the rally, and she was definitely having a meltdown. And that meltdown felt, for a hot second, like the most energetic thing in Union Park.
Even as the last march was about to start there was a sense that things were winding down. People had said what they wanted to say. They had said it again. They would keep saying it.
I’d been there for hours: I sat at one of the Union Park picnic tables and a woman, Shalanda, sat down by my side. She wore a bright red Harris/Walz shirt with the words “Registered Republican” underneath. She’d made the shirt herself. She’s Black, an attorney from Arizona, and until recently a lifelong Democrat. She had switched parties right around the time that it became clear that there’d be no embargo, no threat of withholding aid. Her switching parties was her protest, she said. But also: She had traveled to Chicago for the Democratic Convention, she was one of the volunteer drivers.
We talked for a while, and everything about her clarified, to some degree, the ambiguity I’d been feeling all week. She was excited to be at the convention, excited to help elect what could be the nation’s first woman president, the first woman of color—so many firsts. But she was also clearly proud and eager to see what the march was all about, and to tell me how unambiguously she felt about Gaza. She wanted a ceasefire and an arms embargo, though she doubted that Harris would apply the pressure necessary to effect the embargo. She planned on voting for her anyway—enthusiastically so. That was the whole reason she was here in Chicago. But she had also come to Union Park. She’d taken a photo with a sign that read “Free Palestine,” which she sent me later. All of these things were true, could be true, at the same time.
Throughout the week, I was struck by how the volume and intensity of the chants shifted—decreased—when the verse went from calling out “Genocide Joe” to “Killer Kamala.” I asked a couple of people around me, to make sure it wasn’t me just looking for an easy observation. But others agreed: People definitely went full throttle with Joe, less often with Kamala. I don’t think it means all that much, and I didn’t go around asking everyone who they intended to vote for. All the same I did get the feeling that quite a few of the protestors would be voting, and that they’d be voting for the people they were protesting against. Shalanda wasn’t alone.
Praveen had also shown up early on Thursday. He works IT for a major credit card company, he comes from a small farming town in southern India, he’s been waiting for years for his Green Card. He is still on a temporary visa, an H-1B, even though he has a family here. If he were to become unemployed, he would have thirty days to find a job in his profession or he would be expected to self-deport. He canvassed for Bernie Sanders in 2012 and 2020. He loves politics. He had driven to Union Park partly to see if he could find some of his favorite progressive podcasters, who had also come down for the week. Praveen can’t vote, but he’s here because he wants others to, and because he feels that corporations are out of control—that the companies he’s worked for are out of control. If he could vote, he would also vote for Harris.
There are other voices, of course. I don’t mean to say that the ambiguity I saw and felt was everywhere. But it was definitely there, alongside the signs that insisted that both parties are equally complicit, that the whole system is broken, that nothing short of system upheaval would effect any real change.
On Monday I had stopped by the global McDonald’s attached to Hamburger University, a fifteen-minute walk from Union Park, to charge my phone and have what the UK believed was a Philly cheesesteak. There, I saw a protester grab his order, holding his sign down. Walking by later in the week, I saw DNC delegates in the morning and a scrum of police in the afternoon. We were all there alongside the tourists, all of us agreeing on this much at least: We liked too much sugar, we liked too much salt. Just off Union Park was the Lyon & Healy harp showcase. Their motto? Harpmakers to the world. I kept thinking of the flags I saw in the march, how entangled and insistent the various causes were—how the suffering of one group, one part of the world, related in messy and complicated ways to the suffering of others. How everything traveled.
Later during the march on Thursday, I caught up with the three-year-old and her mother. The mom was named Kim, the toddler Charly. Charly was now totally happy, totally not cranky. Kim had brought Charly from Toledo. They weren’t here just for the protests, but they very much wanted to participate, to let their voices be heard. Like Shalanda, Kim will be voting for Harris. Kim is hopeful, after hearing the acceptance speech, that Harris “will do the right thing and put pressure on Israel to end the war.”
That was what I observed this week—a confluence of people coming together to ask for mostly the same thing, trying to be heard, and then going home. The anarchist on the train back to California, and Shalanda back to Arizona, and Praveen back to the suburbs, and Kim and Charly back to Ohio. Thousands more, too. They were all here, hoping to be heard.
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