Media Distortion of a Peaceful Protest

As I set out for Saturday’s anti-war march in New York City I felt a sense of déjà vu. The first march I had felt compelled to go to was before the first Gulf War—when I was back in college. I was an idealistic sophomore, full of youthful defiance. I remember my best friend and I declaring that we would be conscientious objectors and go to jail rather than serve in the war. During the march, which probably had 200 people at most, I walked along chanting shyly, in the midst of Vietnam era peaceniks and hippie wannabes from my own generation. Now, it’s 12 years later; according to the playful taunts I heard during my last birthday (which was last week), I am no longer youthful. My idealism has faded somewhat, and yet I’m glad to find that I’ve held fast to the principled, life-affirming defiance that I had as a youth.

Before Saturday’s protest I was already a veteran of several New York City protest marches. I had gone to the Million Youth March, the Amadou Diallo March, and the peace march immediately after September 11th…and yet I had left each of those marches feeling slightly bewildered and isolated—and convinced that the advertised principles behind the march had been lost somehow. The Million Youth March ended up being a farce, free of prescriptions and critical thought; Amadou’s march devolved into a near riot, led by anarchists whose only goal seemed to be causing chaos and egging on the police.

Thus, somewhat unsure about what would happen, I set off for the protest. On the subway ride into Manhattan (from Brooklyn) I encountered people who were obviously on their way to protest. Across the aisle from me there were two middle-aged white men who looked like they were flashing back to their Vietnam protest days. I was reading “The Souls of Black Folk” but I kept being drawn into their conversation. One of their ex-wives was asking him to co-sign a bank loan in order to have breast augmentation surgery—which he referred to less euphemistically as “a boob job.” I didn’t really want to listen—nor to know—but their chatter about an ex-wife with “body image issues” somehow superseded W.E.B. DuBois’ thesis about a talented tenth that deserved access to higher education. It was perhaps then that it began to dawn on me what this protest was about. Most of us were just ordinary people with our share of foibles and preoccupations. I, myself, was missing my beloved Saturday morning cartoons ... But seriously, most of us were just folks who would rather spend our Saturdays relaxing a home—especially as the temperature was in the teens and the city had practically declared us personas non grata. However, we had all searched our consciences and come to the conclusion that the country was heading in a catastrophic direction, and that this might be our last chance to speak up against the impending attack on Iraq and the proposed colonization.

Along with thousands of others, I emerged from the 42nd Street station and headed uptown, towards the U.N. The massive throng took up both sides of the Sidewalk. The telltale signs and placards were everywhere, decrying the idiocy of a war that only the Bush Administration and Tony Blair seemed to find justified. This was a day when people were marching in over 600 cities worldwide. In Johannesburg and Barcelona they were marching; in Chicago and Sydney and all the major capitals of Europe, they were marching. Calls for peace were even ringing out in places as far flung as South Korea, Japan and Syria. All around the globe people were fighting against the mental lassitude being engineered by Bush and his war machine.

In New York City, we moved up the sidewalks—some of us already shivering from the cold, but most of us enlivened somehow, and heartened by the reality of so many thousand (and millions worldwide) joining us to protest. As a veteran of New York City protests, I knew the drill. The police methodology was to control every facet of our movements: to make us take circuitous routes to the site of the protest by strategically blocking off streets and then keeping everyone in pens like corralled animals. The bandstand of the rally was at 49th Street and First Avenue, but after exiting from the subway at 42nd Street and Lexington I was forced to walk up to 61st Street before being allowed to cross over to First Avenue. Others were forced to walk up to the 70s and 80s before they were allowed to walk across to First Avenue. At each street the police officers at the roadblock would tell us to keep walking. I joked to a stranger at my side that soon we’d be in Harlem. Yet, even then the mood was upbeat. The city, citing security concerns, had refused to let us march, and yet we were marching. The northbound column of protesters was growing so massive that people were forced to spill out into the streets. Tactics of containment that had worked when crowds were only one or two thousand strong were now ineffectual. Strangely enough, there was a kind of carnival atmosphere about everything. When we finally turned onto 61st Street there was a huge inflatable globe being carried around. When it was punctured, people joked that the duct tape that paranoid Americans had bought in a panic the week before (at the behest of the Homeland Security Department and our new “Code Orange” status) would be useful. As I was passing by an alley a band suddenly struck up a carnival song, and people began dancing with huge plaster puppets. People were flooding into the street now—they didn’t even pretend to be walking on the sidewalks. The traffic coming off the 59th Street Bridge was hopelessly snarled by our numbers. Cars became insignificant islands in a sea of people. Some drivers grew enraged and honked their horns, but the vast majority of drivers seemed resigned as the throng moved past.

At First Avenue, the street set aside for the rally, there was a huge bottleneck. Then, finally, I was corralled into a pen with a few thousand others. Here we stayed, between 60th Street and 61st. As the bandstand was on 49th Street, and the 59th Street Bridge blocked out all my remaining hopes of directly seeing what was going on, I was resigned. However, in our pen there was one of those huge, truck-mounted TVs, so it wasn’t too bad. Here, I stood for hours, listening to a wide panoply of speakers—everyone from Danny Glover, Desmond Tutu and Al Sharpton, to Susan Sarandon and Angela Davis. There were also lesser-known speakers aligned with everything from the Palestinian cause to the rights of Asian gays and Lesbians. And yet, each speaker spoke the essential truth that joined us: there was something unmistakably evil about this war—and evil precisely because it was being presented in moral terms by the Bush Administration. Here, I reacquainted myself with an historical truth: All the truly evil acts of human history, from slavery to Hitler’s holocaust, were initially presented in moral terms—as either being mandated by God or condoned by Him. Tellingly, none of history’s great evil men had ever claimed to take their cue from the Devil.…

We stood there freezing, yet still invigorated. The numbers were coming out: One million in Barcelona and Rome and London, and hundreds of thousands elsewhere. I was 10 blocks from the bandstand; and behind me, for as far as the eye could see, there were protesters. People were smiling and laughing—and even dancing. When the protest finally ended we all left with a feeling of peace and accomplishment. It was only when I got home and turned on the news that I saw how things were being reported in the media. Tens of thousands of people had actually been kept away by the police. A friend of mine, who had driven all the way up from Virginia, had never made it past Second Avenue—where police, arbitrarily deciding that the rally had gotten big enough, had refused to let them pass. More troublingly, as I watched the news, not only were city authorities declaring that only 100,000 people had showed up, but also their focus (and the focus of the media) was on skirmishes that had resulted as a consequence of these police tactics. The police commissioner complained that it had cost the city $5 million in police overtime to control the protest—which was clearly inflammatory at a time when all of America’s big cities were facing budget crises. This obvious attempt to steer public opinion and to hide the essential truths of the rally was to me the greatest insult. In everything from the Patriot Act, to the civil liberties usurped by the government in the wake of September 11th, the assumption has been that the government knows what is best for us: that we should somehow be grateful to the government in the same sense that children are compelled by the Bible to love and honor their parents.

Now, one day after the protest, the freezing cold has given way to a blizzard. As the streets are being snowed over, I can’t help thinking that the voice of the people is receiving a similar snow job. As with the weather outside, all I can do is try to stay warm and fortify myself when I’m forced to venture out into the world.