An Hour at the Beach

Our time at the Chicago Air & Water Show yesterday pretty short, since it involved standing in high 80s temps at the edge of one of the most crowded beaches I've ever seen, completely unapproachable because of the crowd, most of whom were sitting on folding chairs. To stake out a spot, I figure they had to come pretty early. Last year sometime, maybe.

We were also near the paved bike path that connects most of Chicago's lakeshore. Few bikers were on the path, and those I did see were walking their bikes. It would have been impossible to ride more than a few feet without bumping into a pedestrian. Usually the balance of power on that path is with the bicyclists, but not on Sunday.

We did stay long enough to see some fine aerial maneuvers by both propeller planes and jets. Some larger military aircraft, which I thought might have been cargo planes, also flew by. But not any C-130 Hercules transports, which I'd really like to see airborne.

At first we weren't far from the anti-military booth. Occasionally they would make announcements: "The Air & Water Show is just a commercial for the military!" or some such. The rest of the crowd ignored them. If you asked me, the Air & Water Show isn't military enough. I'd like to see some bombing runs over Lake Michigan, for instance. Dropping real bombs might pose a risk of collateral damage on the beach, but why not substitutes that are about as powerful as commercial fireworks?

Elsewhere, a number of organizations had booths to either give away or sell things. We got some free aluminum disks from the U.S. Navy, so that was a "commercial for the military." Note the similarity of the wave on one of the Navy disks to "The Great Wave." We also got a free beach ball from Shell, promoting one of its gasoline formulations, so I guess that would be a "commercial for Big Oil."

I was willing to watch the planes a while longer, even walk down the bike path to where Michigan Avenue meets Lake Shore Drive, but Lilly and Ann wanted out of the heat. We walked a short distance inland and found a small patch of sandy land under some trees and parked ourselves there. It was next to a part-empty parking lot reserved for the media, which was mostly television crews, though I suppose the aviation press had representatives hanging around somewhere.

Two young men wearing EVENT SUPPORT shirts were watching the entrance to the parking lot, but since most of the media had probably already shown up, they had little to do. So one of them filled the air with an obscenity-soaked tirade against his immediate family -- mother, stepfather, sister. Too bad he didn't actually use any colorful invective worth listening to. That kind of thing is pretty rare. As it was, he got tiresome through repetition, and probably no one was suffering more than the other guy in the EVENT SUPPORT shirt.

I didn't whisk Lilly or Ann out of earshot. Maybe some parents would have. But they need to know that guys like that are out there. Maybe he was just having a bad week at home, but the more I heard him, the more I thought he was one of those people who are angry 24/7, most of the time seething away quietly but sometimes uncorked like this guy. They wake up angry, they go to bed angry. They're angry for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Why? Because society beats them down from day one, or because they're born losers, take your pick.