Halloween’s a good excuse for all manner of inappropriate behavior. You can drink too much, make out with strangers, start a fight, and do something stupid–no one has to know it’s you, after all, and no one really cares if they find out. Last Halloween I got blackout drunk, peed on the floor at a party, let my period flow down my bare legs, then had a little soiree at my place, where I puked and passed out. When random people started hooking up, my kinda-boyfriend freaked out and left, only to end the night by falling off a roof. By November 3 it was all old news.
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Lucky for me, the Chicagoland Anarchist Network’s Halloween plans involved neither gelatinous alcohol nor raging into the wee hours. On Sunday, as part of the national grassroots campaign Don’t Just Vote (I wrote about it last week), about 75 people met in Wicker Park at 2:30 in the afternoon for the first annual Capitalism Gives Me the Creeps parade. Dressed as free-enterprise offenders like Mickey Mouse and Pokemon, dead colonial settlers, deranged businessmen and -women, and such standbys as ghouls, demons, sexy witches, and sexy devils, people from CAN, Radical Cheerleaders, Chicago Indymedia, and DePaul Students Against the War chanted, cheered, and showed each other their signs.
Posters bore slogans ranging from the slightly clever (“Boo to Bush! Boo to Kerry! Revolution Is Necessary!” and “Don’t Eat the Rich–They’re Rotten”) to the woefully misguided (“Vote for Anarchy”) to the totally left field (“Psychiatry Is Scary”). One passerby told me he thinks individuals should take responsibility for consumerist choices “instead of blaming it on the system.” The friend I’d dragged along dismissed the gathering as “the bottom of the pyramid of social awareness.” He asked a good question–“Why dress up on Halloween to fight capitalism when Halloween is a capitalist holiday?”–and took off.
On Fullerton near Ashland a lone police car pulled up, lights flashing. The two officers inside urged us to move to the sidewalk, but no one except a protester dressed as Frida Kahlo, who handed the cops candy from a pumpkin-shaped bucket, paid them any mind. The police car followed us for a few blocks, then made a turn and drove away.
When the cops caught up with us, the commanding officer got out of his car and gestured wildly at the 50 or so people still in the street. “Every one of ’em is going to jail!” he yelled to his colleagues.
Around Roscoe and Halsted we saw the detritus from the Halloween parade: work crews were breaking down a stage and putting away barricades. “Where’s the event we’re supposed to be meeting up with?” I heard someone ask. “We’re going to march east to the park and rest,” said Hammond. “Then we’ll go march again in two hours.” No thanks, about two-thirds of the group decided; they turned around and headed home.
