Our first stop for First Night was the Evanston Public Library, where we bought our tickets to the fair. We encountered a table staffed with war protesters from Neighbors for Peace, there they are in the picture below. Visitors to the library had to walk past the protesters' table to purchase First Night tickets.
As I've remarked many times before, leave it to the Left to politicize and ruin everything. Evanston's First Night is billed as a family event, and yes, they have first amendment rights and all, but sheesh, couldn't they have stayed home that night?
Our second stop for my daughter and I was the necklace making workshop--we decided to walk instead of taking one of the many shuttle buses First Night provided as part of the admission fee. Just two blocks into our walk, we encountered more war protesters, this time from the World Can't Wait (Drive Out The Bush Regime) group. This bunch makes the first lot look conservative. World Can't Wait's endorsers include Harold Pinter, Cindy Sheehan, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Ed Asner, the National Lawyers Guild, and bunch of others who live on the far Left of the political spectrum.
This was my third encounter with these radicals in the last three months and I wasn't going to ignore them this time. I ran past (literally) several of their picket spots in October at the Chicago Marathon. They showed up at the Ward Churchill counterprotest at DePaul University a couple of weeks later, although driving out President Bush has nothing to do with DePaul, Ward Churchill, or yes, the Chicago Marathon.
So I should've expected World Can't Wait to show up at First Night. They were handing out their socialism-drenched fliers to kids as young as five. That did it, so I shouted out to them this familiar phrase, "Leave it to you liberals to ruin and politicize everything." There was some back and forth discussion between us, they didn't seem to get my point as this was a family event and a holiday, couldn't they have just let "the cause" rest one night.
"No" was their answer.
Luckily, they left a few minutes later. And to prove they weren't completely useless, the World Can't Wait folks left some green balloons behind, which I quickly snatched for my daughter, as you can see here.
After some father-daughter ice-block building, we decided once again to skip the trolley bus and walk to a church for an acoustic guitar performance by Michael Kelsey. If you like Michael Hedges, you'll love this guy.
Michael's show ended, so we decided to catch a set by legendary Chicago folksters, The Dooleys.
This time we decided to take a trolley bus. We got on, and quickly we were told to get off. A woman in a wheelchair was blocking the vehicle we were on; she was protesting First Night and it's "refusal" (her words) to use buses that are handicapped accessible. There she is down there in blockade mode. Oh, Evanston!
So we walked to see the Dooleys, who performed a mostly Celtic flavored taste of Folk Music. Pretty good stuff.
The evening ended with a mostly impressive fireworks show in Dawes Park on Evanston's lakefront. A few of the fireworks rockets veered off horizontally instead of vertically, but no one was hurt and nothing started on fire.
So that was our First Night at Evanston. But because of the force-fed politics we had to contend with just going from place to place, it'll probably be our last First Night.
Oh, I dedicate this posting to Orlando Sentinel columnist Kathleen Parker, who says bloggers rarely do their own reporting. Happy New Year, Kathleen! My Mom told me today she likes your writing, though.
Technorati tags: Evanston Happy New Year World Can/'t Wait War protesters Shut up please Chicago metroblogging Chicago Marathon humor Jan Schakowsky Northwestern
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