Bathroom Jesus
On Friday, I sat down in Daley Plaza and ate my lunch. It was raining, but only just. Enough to feel a mist, but not enough to drive me indoors. There are tourists and city slickers, mingling in the rain. They share a space, for a brief few minutes of their day.
Daley Plaza sits in the shadow of the Richard J. Daley Center, a towering black building that holds a presence in Chicago's impressive skyline. Its architecture is characteristic of modernistic Chicago (at least according to Wikipedia, from where I am drawing some background of this place), and even held the title of tallest building in the city for a few years. Functionally, it's an office building with an emphasis on law and governance, with a law library and offices of the local government and police.
Where sit is its accompanying plaza, a square plot of land that features a huge sculpture by Pablo Picasso ("the Picasso"), a fountain pool and eternal flame, a memorial to our country's wartime dead.
In the shadow the towering Daley Center, and the shadow of the Chicago skyline, it has a surprisingly serene quality to it. I sit and pull out my camcorder, prop it up on its legs, and just record the plaza.
A man walks up to me and waves a hand in my face. I look up from my lunch at his face. He smiles and pushes a 2 inch folding minibook into my hand and a little rubber statue of Jesus. I say thank you, and leaf through the booklet as I take another bite. It's the same "find God or go to hell" stuff I've seen enough to know what it says, in broad strokes:
You think you're a good person? Well, it doesn't matter! If you don't accept Jesus into your hearts, you will burn!
Eesh. Why do people choose such hostile gods?
I pocket the booklet, and the little rubber statue of Jesus. I know the booklet will find a waste bin somewhere. But for some reason I can't see the statue finding a similar fate. Maybe it's that good old-fashioned Catholic guilt those fallen like me keep around in the back of our minds for the rest of our lives.
Daley Plaza is itself a multi-purpose site. It's the location of a weekly farmer's market. It's where festivals around ethnicity are centered. It's where movies that need a 'big square with a big building next to it' have filmed key scenes.
Most of you have seen it, even if you didn't realize it. The building is Wayne Enterprises in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins.
Tomorrow, there will be tens of thousands of demonstrators gathering here. Ostensibly a nationwide movement against the self-aggrandizing qualities of the president and its cruel execution that treats immigrants as symbols of "law and order" as opposed to humans with deeply similar hopes and dreams as anyone else here, it will actually respond to a broader set of interrelated issues that stem from the cruel spectacle that sums up this presidency. While it is deeply complicated how a country came to put this man and his sycophants in power, it is comparatively simple how that president operates.
A cruel spectacle.
Daley Plaza tomorrow will bubble and roil with energy, with noise, with music and laughter and life. The weather will start cool, then warm as the sun bursts from the clouds, just as people take to the streets. A million and one messages, coming from a million and one worlds, both imagined for the future and the worlds behind us, will encounter one another.
Daley Plaza will add a new chapter to its history, marked by the bodies and voices there.
Later that day, I stand in a bathroom just outside the Caffe Umbria nearby. I empty my pockets into the trash. The silly little booklet finds a resting place there. My hand bumps into the little rubber statue of Jesus in my pocket, and I turn it over in my hands for a few seconds.
With a shrug, I put it on top of the soap dispenser.
I don't know who will see it next, or how many people will see it. They might smile, they might scoff. They might be reminded of something in their past. Or they may meet up with their friends and tell them how saw a little rubber status of Jesus in a bathroom somewhere.
I don't know, but I do hope that it makes that bathroom mean something to someone somewhere, whatever that is.
