Rally report

[mamajoan]

I'm so far behind on my friends-list, it's not at all funny. I may never catch up, but that's life.

Here's my very lengthy report on the weekend, the main event of which was the HUGE peace rally in NYC. It was fantastic all around, especially as it involved meeting blunaris and helping her enjoy her first-ever rally experience. :)

The rally was *incredibly* chaotic in terms of organization -- not of the people running it, but of the cops trying to contain/control it. In this sense it was quite different from the D.C. ones that we've been to. Frankly, the NYPD had their heads up their collective asses. Everything the NYPD had done was designed to discourage people from rallying -- the blocking off of some streets, the (stupid!) failure to block off others for car traffic, the refusal to grant a march permit, the refusal to allow porta-potties; all of these were tactics that you'd take against the "enemy" to make conditions unpleasant for him/her. Unfortunately, that kind of deterrence was bound to fail. They would have been MUCH smarter to say, "okay, these people are *going* to come, what can we do to handle the situation and make it go as smoothly as possible for us and the rest of the traffic?" NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly is a complete idiot. (Among other things, he's claiming there were only 100,000 people there. Dude, there were 100,000 people on the ONE subway car we rode over on! ;) )

Anyway, to sum up getting there: Friday night, mom and I drove to New Haven and stayed with family. It was cold. My great-aunt Lil baked a lemon cheesecake in a chocolate crust. Saturday morning, mom and I drove into Manhattan and left the car near the home of the people who were putting us up that night, on the Upper West Side.

Then we hopped a bus for downtown to join the rally. We saw a couple of people on the bus who had peace buttons, so we said "oh good, we'll follow you." At the next stop, though, a huge group of about 40 people with peace signs got on and filled the bus, so we knew we were in good company! (Interestingly, that group was affiliated with a nearby church, and each of them had a picture of a candle that had been drawn by a different kid in the church's Sunday School. The priest/pastor/minister/whatever explained that the pictures were based on similar pictures that the kids had received from kids in an Iraqi school, and after attending the march, all the pictures were going to be sent back to the Iraqi school.)

So we followed the crowd off the bus and onto the subway, where there were TONS of other people who were obviously headed the same place. We took the subway to 51st Street and Third Avenue. The main rally site -- with the stage and the people speaking and so forth -- was at 51st and First Ave., so we needed to get over from Third to First, but this was impossible because police had blocked off all the side streets. So we ended up in a HUGE crowd of people parading/marching up Third Avenue. We were nominally in search of an open cross-street (some people were saying that the cops had left 57th or 61st open for us), but really it just basically turned into a peace march, with the waving of signs and the chanting of slogans and the beating of drums. There were enough people just on Third Avenue to make up the size of an ordinary rally -- at least several tens of thousands -- but this was no ordinary rally; remember, as huge as that crowd was, it wasn't even the *main* rally crowd! But this part of it was a lot of fun, at least for us; not so much for the hapless New Yorkers trying to drive down Third Ave. (Again, blame the NYPD for not having prepared properly to contain the rallygoers and keep traffic flowing.)

At one point my mom wanted to stop and find a bathroom -- she was worried that we'd have trouble since the idiot NYPD hadn't allowed any porta-potties -- so I spotted a Marriott and was all, let's go in there. My mom was skeptical, but I just strode into the lobby and kept going -- the trick is to look confident, like you know where you're going. As soon as I saw that there weren't bathrooms in the lobby, I pushed for the elevator. We got into the elevator and it said right there on the buttons, "12th floor, restrooms." So we went to 12 and used the bathrooms and left. Thanks, Marriott. ;)

Anyway, so here we are marching down Third Avenue. I was calling three people on my cellphone: blunaris, my friend David from college, and our family friend Carl. To our complete amazement, we actually managed to meet up with all three of those people, plus David's boyfriend, in the enormousness of the crowd! The miracle of cellphones, I tell ya. At one point as I was trying to cut through the crowd -- my path going perpendicular to the flow of people -- and yelling into my phone telling David to wave his hand in the air and then going "I see you! I see you!" a random woman passing by said to me, "Can you hear me now?" LOL!!! (And if you haven't seen the Sprint cellphone commercial you don't know why that was funny, but trust me, it was.) Finding blunaris was the hardest because we didn't know what each other looked like, but we did manage to connect.

So then we got to Third Avenue and about, I think, 58th Street or so, and the flow of the crowd turned the corner, moving the march onto 58th. As we rounded the corner we started to get separated, so I grabbed everyone except Carl and turned around to find him, and just as I spotted him and reached out my hand toward him, a horde of cops came out of NOWHERE with a metal barrier and thrust it in between us, bodily SHOVING back all the people on the other side (shoving them back onto Third Ave). We were
separated from Carl!! And the cops then set up shop, lining up to block off 58th the same way they were blocking off all the other side streets. They weren't trying to force those of us who were already past to go back, but they also weren't letting anyone else through, even people who had gotten separated from their groups like Carl. We had also lost David and Peter, although they were on our side of the barrier, just had gone farther ahead without us. Carl yelled to us to go on without him, snif.

We (me, mom, and Becky) dithered for a while about what to do, and had just decided to go back onto Third to rejoin the festive marching atmosphere, when a guy went by and said that if we went over to Second or First we could see the actual rally, with, you know, the stage and the speakers and all. So we said, okay, we'll try that. We walked down to Second Ave., where there were also people rallying in the streets although not nearly as many. The stage was on First Ave. and approx. 51st Street, but again the cops had the cross-streets blocked off so we couldn't get from Second to First. We
also saw a bunch of mounted cops patrolling, and as I remarked to my companions, "to add insult to injury, they make us step in horseshit!" ;)

We eventually found a spot where there was one (black, female) cop guarding the barrier to a side street, and we saw her let a few people through. We joined the very small crowd of maybe ten people gathered around her trying to talk her into letting more people through. Most of them soon gave up, but (we realized in hindsight) she was just waiting to let people through in small bunches when not many others were looking, so that she wouldn't be suddenly seen as "the cop who's letting everyone through!" So we stood for a while not harassing her, just standing there, while she let through a few people who could prove they actually lived and/or worked on the blocked-off street, and she also let a few people come *out* from the other direction. Then my mom said, "okay, so a bunch of people have come out, now you can let us through, right?" and the cop did let us through. Yay.

So we finally got to the actual rally street -- First Avenue! yay! We were within sight of the stage, although it was probably about five or six blocks down from us. Those blocks, of course, were *completely* filled with people. We found David and Peter there, and we all stood for a while listening to the speeches. They had loudspeakers set up at various points, but they were also broadcasting the speeches on a local public-access radio station. (The emails that went out all last week had encouraged people to bring portable radios to create sort of a "people's broadcast system" -- if a lot of people had radios tuned to the same station, hopefully you'd be able to hear it even if you weren't near an actual sound system. While marching on Third Ave. we had seen a lot of people carrying radios to help with this, but of course with the marching and chanting and all it had been hard to actually hear.) So anyway, we got near someone with a radio and listened for a while. We were able to hear speeches by Desmond Tutu, Harry Belafonte, a woman named Lieberman who is the ACLU lawyer who helped the rally organizers try (unsuccessfully) to get a march permit, and a few other people; plus we heard Holly Near sing. We had missed Pete Seeger's song, alas. :(

The speeches were great, but now that we weren't marching any more, the cold was REALLY starting to affect us. So after not too long of standing and listening, we decided to bail. David and Peter were staying, so again it was just me, mom, and Becky. We walked back to Second, where the same cop let us through the other way. The big march on Third seemed to have dispersed but now it seemed like everywhere you went there were crowds of protesters milling around fairly aimlessly. We went into a mall in search of bathrooms and decided to try Barnes & Noble. There was a HUGE line of protesters waiting for the ladies' room in B&N; to the credit of the store, the employees did not hassle us or try to kick us out. The whole store was full of protesters, doing much more "sit around getting warm and discussing what to do next" than actual shopping, but the store staff were just leaving us alone, which I thought was quite cool.

It took us about half an hour to get to the front of the line and pee, and then we decided to walk a bit more to try and find a restaurant that wouldn't be completely packed. Eventually we found one, and we ate, and our feet started to kill as they thawed, and then we decided to walk to Times Square and go to the half-price ticket booth and see if there were any good Broadway shows we could see. So we walked over to Sixth Ave. and then down, but when we got to 44th or 45th Street and wanted to cut over to Seventh Ave., it was again blocked off by cops!!! The cop there was a jerk about it, and told us that we could cross over at either 42nd or 47th. So we went down to 42nd, which was -- surprise -- also blocked off. (We later learned that there had been some incidents of protester-vs-cop violence in that area, and that the mayor had been doing something unrelated nearby as well, hence all the super-bitchy cops.) A lot of protesters there were arguing with the cops, and we were all, "but the cop down there said we could cross over here," and the cop here was all, "well, he lied, what can I tell ya."

Then I noticed that right on the corner there was a pizza place. It had one door on Sixth Ave and one on 42nd Street. I told my mom and Becky that we should simply walk through. My mom was up for it, but Becky decided she had had enough, not surprisingly, so she bailed.

Mom and I got through just fine. We simply walked into the pizza place, walked over to the other door, and walked out. No cop noticed, or cared. So we walked to Times Square, which was also COMPLETELY filled with cops everywhere you looked. Parts of it were blocked off too. We got to the TKTS booth and got on line, but they didn't have anything we were interested in, and anyway we were *very* tired and cold, so we decided to bag it.

(My mom insisted on asking a cop where the nearest subway station was even though I was sure I knew, and the cop replied that he was from Brooklyn so he had no clue. Get that!! Manhattan brought in cops from the other boroughs as reinforcement -- and then stationed them in Times Square, where any hapless lost tourist would be guaranteed to get no help from them at all!)

And then we went back to the home of the people who were putting us up, and we had dinner and did random stuff and went to bed. And then on Sunday morning we had breakfast and made our obligatory pilgrimage to Zabar's, and hit the road. We got home around 6pm.

My overall impressions of the rally:
In terms of the type and variety of people there, it was similar to the D.C. rallies; we saw young and old, many races and walks of life. We saw a lot of the same clever signs and a lot of new ones -- unfortunately I didn't write any down because it was too cold. I did notice, however, several signs referencing duct tape. There was one with a picture of Bush, Powell, and Rumsfeld with duct tape over their mouths, but I couldn't see what (if anything) was written underneath. As I commented to the others, it didn't take long at ALL for the duct-tape thing to become an in-joke. ;) We also saw a sign that had a picture of Dubya with the top of his head cut off and the words, "There's an empty warhead in the White House." The ever-popular "Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity" was there, along with its slightly more polite version that says "screwing" instead of "fucking." ;) And my mom was highly amused by the "Re-Elect Carter" signs. :)

However, although the protesters were the same, the cops were very different. I already mentioned the lack of organization; in D.C. the police as a group always seem very together and very competent, ready to handle what's going on, and the individual cops are generally very polite, even friendly. In NYC, by contrast, the "organization" was nil and the individual cops (with the exception of the one chick I mentioned) were generally hostile which, it seemed to me, stemmed from their own fear or uncertainty about the whole protest situation. I hate to speculate wildly, but really most of the cops seemed to have the attitude that you'd expect a cop to have if his boss had said, "These protesters are going to do everything they can to beat you up, fight their way past you, oppose you in any way." They were *expecting* confrontation, whereas the D.C. cops expect courtesy.

We watched the 6pm and 11pm NYC local news, and I was highly gratified by the overall positive tone of the coverage (plus it was *awesome* to see the aerial pictures of First, Second, and Third Avenues just *packed* from end to end with people, for blocks and blocks). I felt the same way about the NY Times' coverage in the Sunday paper; it was generally very positive, mentioning but not making a big deal out of the (250-ish) arrests and the (very few and isolated) violent incidents. The Times even mentioned that most of the blame for the chaos rested on the NYPD for being unprepared. (I haven't seen the Boston Globe's coverage yet. Also, my mom taped the Saturday night national news, and I can't wait to see how the national channels handled it.)

As for how many people were there? I really couldn't say, but I would guess that it was at LEAST a half-million. Honestly, the whole rest of the time we were there, we saw fellow protesters EVERYWHERE. The restaurant where we lunched was packed with them despite being many blocks away from the main rally area. Every time we took the subway, every time we walked down the street -- even the next day in Zabar's, we saw them. It was absolutely fantastic. Despite all the chaos and the trouble with the cops and so forth, the overall mood and feeling was hugely positive -- there was a real feeling of, not just togetherness (i.e. it's nice to be among a lot of people who feel the way you do), but optimism. I think a lot of us finally started to feel like, if there are THIS many of us being THIS vocal, surely it has got to make a difference. At one point someone told us that a million people were rallying in Rome; at another point, someone else told us they had heard there were 750,000 in London, simply sitting in the streets -- a literal sit-in.

Basically, the whole thing was amazing. I've been to a lot of rallies, but I've never been as excited and energized by one as by this one, despite the cold (although my feet may never forgive me ;) ).

Mom had her digital camera there and took many pictures of the crowd as well as many of the gathered cops. I'll try to get hold of her pix and post 'em for y'all to see in the next few days.