HELIOLITH

(Guest Entry)
The following is re-printed with permission from the author,
my friend Leyla, who attended the protests yesterday in NYC.

This article: in the Times about the protests yesterday is pretty “fair and balanced” as these things go, but the corporate media has presented an incredibly distorted picture of what went on. That is, if they covered it at all: mostly it’s been All Arnie, All the Time. Which is the reason I’m sending out this little note. Something significant has been happening in the last few days, and hopefully will continue in the coming ones, but you’d be hard-pressed to tell from the outside. Last night, a journalist aquaintance of Jeff’s asked a CNN reporter on the street whether CNN would cover the protests. The reply? “Only if there’s violence.” Well there was violence, but as far as I could tell it was mostly directed against the protestors. And this neatly captures the catch-22 facing those who are trying to make their voices heard: If you use violence, you’re demonized. If you don’t use violence, you’re ignored.

It’s difficult to convey the energy on the streets. And the number of people surprised me: there were a lot of individuals, couples and small knots of friends, people who weren’t part of any organized group but had heard something was going on and had just shown up. These weren’t organized protests so much as convulsions of frustration and rage, and I think in a certain way this might have helped in that it kept things spontaneous and chaotic. It certainly kept the police busy.

We started off the evening by going to Union Square to meet up with the War Resisters League protest on the way to Herald Square for a die-in. But they never made it past Ground Zero. I guess the police were spooked by the violent potential of a bunch of white-clothed pacifists. (They were able to be arrested without violating any of the usual laws, thanks to Patriot Act provisions.) When the news of the arrests filtered out, the people assembled at USQ dispersed to other protest spots being passed on by word of mouth, cell phone and text messages. We followed a group of Stern students from NYU (hint: if MBA students are protesting, your government is doing something very wrong) into the subway and got out at 34th St. From here on, it was, as the article below mentions, a game of cat-and-mouse between protestors and police. As soon as a significant number of people gathered in one spot, the police would use overwhelming numbers and force to break apart the group. People who weren’t arrested would leave and coalesce around anouther spot, and then the police would converge on them again. And so on.

We made our way to the public library on 42nd, arriving in the aftermath of the gathering there. In the maybe five minutes that we stood on the corner of 5th and 42nd I counted over 30 arrests. The police used big orange nets to herd people around like fish, and when they isolated individuals would then cuff and frog-march them to the waiting vans. We were standing on the sidewalk with a knot of other protesters since we had been told that standing on the street was grounds for arrest. Then we were told that standing on the sidewalk was grounds for arrest. The cop in charge told us we had 10 seconds to move and began counting backwards. During the entire time the police are filming and taking pictures of us.

So we moved. In the next several hours we moved constantly, as part of the process described above.

On the way to MSG Adam got into a debate with some kids who demonstrating on behalf of Republican support for Israel. It was funny to see the ensuing dynamic. People began listening in and then a reporter and cameraman stopped, which then of course made more people pay attention. Soon other reporters going by were hesitating and you could see them thinking: Is this something I should get in on? Is there going to be violence? This grotesque focus of many of the reporters and cameramen, combined with a seeming lack of interest in actually reporting what’s been happening, hasn’t inspire me to revise my estimation of the media upwards.

We moved on and shortly found ourselves in one of those surreal protest moments. We had just been blocked from going towards 7th Ave.—Jeff and Adam had to manuver Ann away from launching herself at a cop who shoved her, even though he was literally twice her size—and when we turned around realized that we couldn’t go back because cops were pushing people in the other direction. We were left in a no-mans-land between the two sides. Instead of waiting around to get arrested for not being able to go right or left, we went through. Macy’s, that is, where we were treated to the spectacle of delegates shopping while people were shoving and screaming outside.

We came out on Herald Square, where a rather large protest had developed around the Chris Matthews show, which was being held outside on the traffic island we call the park. There was a constant series of arrests, but it was impossible to see what they were for. People were chanting, yelling, and trying to argue with the police when they forced to move again or pinned into tiny spaces on the barricades. When the delegate buses (all with armed police guards inside and out) would go across 35th St., there were small frenzies of yelling, bird flipping, spitting, booing. After a while, word came around that a die-in spearheaded by the Catholic Workers was in fact taking place on 28th so we headed down there.

The die-in was the only exception to the the violence=coverage equation. By the time we got there, there was a thick scrum of media surrounding the event, all waiting for . . . something. (But James Nachtwey was there, which was pretty cool.) The mood was strikingly subdued compared to the febrile chaos of the surrounding blocks. Everybody, cops and protestors, were mostly silent and respectful, the silence punctuated by applause and shouts when another “dead” protestor was hauled to the waiting bus. At one point, a woman going into the subway stop there started yelling “Babykillers!” at the protestors (an interesting glimpse of how all things identified as “liberal” have been conflated in the popular mind), prompting another woman to reply, “But, um, they’re Catholic.” At another point, protestors who were part of the “Movable Feast” crowd came around to hand out water and fruit, which caused a ripple of tension among the cops until the commanding officers were consulted and it was established that yes, handing out fruit is okay. Ann struck up a conversation with the sad-eyed cop in front of us, and was informed that the NYPD’s guns that night were indeed loaded and the safeties were off, but not to worry: they’re holstered. Which made us all feel just, you know, so much safer. We headed back to USQ after that.

There are so many funny, sad, creepy, inspirational incidents that have happened in the past few days that I want to pass on, but this is already way too long. Check out indymedia.org’s website for good reports and pictures. As I write, still more actions are happening, although we’ll never hear about them through the press. I am proud of New York.