Whoever decided to put the air and water show on the Chicago lake front should be institutionalized. As if the Gold Coast and Lake Shore Drive weren’t crowded enough with everyday traffic and throngs of buzzed, obnoxious tourists and people who act as if they’ve escaped from a zoo, this weekend everything was magnified ten times. Driving one block north from Rush to Michigan Avenue took twenty minutes. Twenty minutes. I could have gotten manicure in that time or read the entire contents of People magazine – cover to cover. Seriously, there are so many other things that I could have done other than wait in the traffic of Oak Street to go one block. This is lunacy. And there’s no reason for it.

I wouldn’t mind this infestation of millions if it actually helped out the city. Sorry, there’s no happy ending here, folks. This “show”—and I use the term loosely, is nothing more than a financial drain—as if the city’s finances weren’t in need of life support anyway.

No one of the show attendees patronizes any of the surrounding local businesses; there’s no admission fee helping the City’s budget; simply put, there’s no return on investment for Chicago. Instead, we, the people who live in the area, get assaulted every time this silly show comes to town. The scene is horrific, actually.  There’s those people who actually erect tents on the beach and arm themselves with coolers full of crazy juice, set up full-size barbecues big enough to roast a sow and from all intents and purposes, don’t care one bit about what is happening on the lake or in the air. The police are deployed in full riot gear and “control” the traffic and the people. The mounted police ride the exhausted and overheated horses through the sand to try to instill some fear and order into the watchers. What is all this for? And we have to have two days of this mind-numbing nonsense. It would be smarter to move the show to some vacant land down South where no one except the corn fields, random cows and lone farmer would be bothered.

Being stuck in that twenty minute block ride, I caught some of the air show. I also saw some of the nonsense from my condo. News flash: there’s nothing special there. Some of the planes couldn’t even fly in formation. And really, who needed to see a 747 coming through the buildings—seems a bid morbid, no?