The DNC: Walking on Sunshine

Chicago, the city of famous wide shoulders, is also a city of wide, flat, long blocks. If you're a New Yorker or a Washingtonian and I tell you a destination is three blocks away, you think, “OK, that's nothing.” But in Chicago, they live a more muscular life.

I knew this, but had completely forgotten about it when I booked an Airbnb for myself and fellow TNR member Alex Shephard in a neighborhood near Chicago's United Center. On the map, it looked like a few blocks, more or less a straight line down Ogden Avenue. In miles, which I foolishly didn't check, it was about a mile and a half—just about acceptable for walking to the convention at around 6 p.m., but for walking back at 11 p.m. with a sore back after four hours in an uncomfortable seat, it might as well have been Indiana.

I thought it would be a good idea to walk to the arena because, aside from having to squeeze in a daily walk to combat the effects of the greasy food and excessive alcohol consumption that are inevitable consequences of convention week, I had learned from experience that while conventions are generally fun and I know I am privileged to be able to attend, logistically they can be challenging. If you are important or rich or both, you have your own entrances, your own boxes (which were on a level the rest of us couldn't access) and so on. But if you are neither important nor rich, getting to and into the hall is an undignified rugby scrum.

If we were on foot, I thought, we would at least have control over our transportation destiny. Conventional driveways, I reminded myself, are chaos; a deafening and confusing crush of sedans, Ubers, and taxis jostling each other for dominance of the entry lane, and it can take 10 minutes to get one block ahead. On foot, at least, we would be free of that.

So we set out in high spirits on the first night. We walked past nearby Union Park, the designated protest area, where a few hundred people were milling around and protest signs were strewn on the ground. We followed the crowd to Madison and Paulina, where the entrance seemed to be. Everything looked fine – until we saw the line, which was hundreds of people long. We dutifully took our seats; it was moving slowly, when suddenly a security guard shouted, “If you have a yellow badge, you can skip the line!”