This rather mild stroll around Hyde Park for Earth Day 1970 was my first introduction to protest marches.  I had walked with my father when his union was on strike protesting wages at GATX back in the late 1940s when I was about nine or ten years old.  However, marches and protests hit a new stride in the 1960s.  Back in the good old days of the 1950s, in my high school years, the most radical thing that I did was debate hot subjects about federal aid to education and agriculture on my school sponsored debate team.  I knew that that there were a lot of civil rights protests and marches, but I was never part of them.  The closest that I came to civil rights protest was my high school speech favoring the unanimous Supreme Court decision on Brown versus the Board of Education that ended the official segregation in all public schools in 1954.  I was so naïve that I thought that this decision would end black segregation in the United States.  Now 70 years later, we still have unofficially segregated schools.  I never thought that those protests and marches were of any value.  How would Hitler have handled them?  I was wrong again.  Seeing these marches and protests on TV did have an impact on Americans.  President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the voting rights act doing away with discrimination in voting, but today some of those actions are considered moot.  I was certainly against the protests and marches against Vietnam.  I had been an Air Force military chaplain and saw the people who were actually fighting the war.  They were not the enemy.  However, despite all my preferences for talk over action, the seminarians of 1970 wanted action, marches, and protests.  I tried to explain to them that all these actions had very little impact on the people making the decisions.  I had seen 1968 from a European perspective.  All the protests and trouble in Chicago only gave the election to Richard Nixon, so that nothing was really accomplished.  Finally, I agreed to go with some of them on a protest in downtown Chicago.  There must have been about a hundred of us all together.  There were no-onlookers.  Nobody seemed to care that we were marching in downtown Chicago.  It was the one and only time that I joined an anti-war protest and march.  I seemed to have made my point.  Nobody asked me to go again.  Have you ever been involved with a protest march?