10 March 2003
Lovers and fighters: the February 15 rally in New York
by Robert Lopez
This year, my wife and I chose to give each other an unusual Valentine Day’s present: we bought each other tickets on the peace bus to the New York City rally. When we were married in 2001, we chose “Imagine” by John Lennon as our reception theme song, so we’ve always had this belief that all different kinds of love can feed one another and accomplish real social change. To love one’s family, I still childishly believe, should naturally extend to loving one’s neighbors, and eventually, to loving strangers. Stopping war should be first and foremost about loving the people on all sides who may die in the violence of battle.
New York’s peace rally was full of love among the protestors—but the New York City police seemed utterly unmoved by the gentleness and humanity of around 600,000 [which estimate do we trust?] Americans gathered to convey their opposition to the war. The police reaction was violent and undemocratic. After my weekend in New York City was over, I came back to Buffalo even more convinced that if human beings are dedicated to loving one another, they will have to accept a certain amount of conflict—police with night sticks drawn, horses rushing at innocent children, paddy wagons full of storm troopers unloading on otherwise peaceful sidewalks. Even the most nonviolent and innocuous forms of protest, I witnessed, can incite repression and violence.
In other words, the things I saw on February 15 made it clear that resisting war will require its own war.
Perhaps I should begin with my ride down. I was nestled next to my wife with a copy of Livy’s History of Rome, which is of course filled with gore and violence as it recounts, in semi-mythological terms, the evolution of Rome from a scattered tribe of quarrelsome cousins to a stable republic and then, to an empire of totalitarian rule. I was stuck with the sad image of the gates of the Roman temple of Janus. Livy tells us the portal was supposed to be opened during times of war, and closed during times of peace. Only for brief periods under the early ruler Numa and the Emperor Augustus were the doors ever closed. For the rest of the time that Livy knew of [he was writing roughly 25 years before the birth of Christ], Rome kept the gates open, because she was always at war.
Metaphor was on my mind, largely because I’d spent several days combing the Bible for the right chapters and verses to list on my oversized placard that said “GOD HATES WAR—LOOK IT UP.” I’d chosen a passage from Revelations—“he who lives by the sword dies by the sword;” and an Isaiah passage that went, “beware the Babylonians who come on high horses making war, for they will be brought down into the dust.” The commentary I’d been reading said that when the Bible talked about “Babylon” they were really talking about “Rome,” and other religious philosophers had told me they believed that “Rome” was really prophetic code for the United States. Everything fit together. I couldn’t help but imagine us all—the whole four busloads of Buffalo protestors—clamoring before Rome’s gigantic gates and struggling to lock the forces of war inside some vault. Love and peace, the Bible and Livy seemed to be whispering to me, were going to have to involve some kind of showdown against the forces of war and violence.
It had taken me a little while to accept the idea of any showdown at all. For a long time I’d wanted universal love to prevail naturally. In fact, when I was very young, I remembered the more eccentric friends of my parents telling me about the Age of Aquarius, a mythical time just down the road from now, when the bloodthirst of the Age of Aries and the institutional repression of the Age of Pisces would both be defeated by (as the song goes) “harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust…and the mind’s true liberation.” But by Valentine’s Day of 2003 I’d gotten tired of waiting patiently for the Age of Aquarius to arrive. That’s why I was on the bus in the first place—to usher it in, rather than to watch the sky passively for signs of its arrival.
My ruminations on Livy, the Bible, and 1970s hippie love started a chat among the people around me on the bus: an old devout Catholic couple from Niagara County, a Syrian student studying at UB, an African American organizer in his thirties, young anarchists from UB and Fredonia, and countless others. All of them shared my sense of wanting that indescribable moment to come, when a sense of love among strangers would predominate among people. One spokesman from the Iraqi House made an announcement on the bus, that his beloved relatives and friends in Iraq were waiting in terror in their homes. He led some Arabic songs while the rest of us clapped, and we tried, with eyes open or closed, to imagine the strangers of the Middle East as people beside us, real and close enough to feel real affection toward.
This love, though, must grapple with the enormity of its enemies. The story of the weekend took less idyllic turns as we got close to the city. New York City, where I partly grew up, has become increasingly jaded when it comes to such public displays of love for strangers; such gatherings are treated on par with pornography by City Hall, the courts, and the police. First, the permit for the march to the UN was limited to the point of becoming useless. The vast majority of the large crowds who descended on Manhattan had effectively no permit to gather at all, which ironically allowed New York law to undermine the First Amendment right to assemble. Then, there were even more unscrupulous tactics used to disperse us. When we crossed the bridge into Manhattan, we were told that we had to reroute ourselves to Queens, where we would be permitted to disembark. Apparently Manhattan was sealed off in such a way that buses carrying protestors would be stalled or prohibited from unloading.
The detour to the Shea Stadium parking lot in Flushing, Queens, at the very end of the #7 subway line, delayed us for a critical few hours. I watched the time carefully. By around 10:30 AM, our buses were passing under the elevated subway tracks of the #7 train. Had we stepped down there and just walked to the subway station, we would have been in the city within a half-hour. But a police car intercepted us and “escorted” us past the entrance to the subway, down a slow-moving side street, and to a stadium parking lot where the guards kept us delayed in a long negotiation with the bus drivers about where we would be permitted to step down. While we waited at the entrance, a queue of buses from other cities grew longer and longer behind us.
Finally we made it into the parking lot, and everyone stepped down. People formed haphazard groups depending on whom they’d met during the bus ride over. Wanting to form a larger than average contingent, I and one of my busmates gathered together a group of ten people. By now, though, a long line had formed at the token booth of the train station, and we were stuck waiting. Police made searches and seizures of everyone trying to mount the stairs up to the train station. People with anything made of solid wood or metal were told to surrender their potential “weapons” before entering the subway; so scores of people had to break apart their signs and banners while the line snaked impatiently behind them. One sign that said “MAKE LOVE NOT WAR” was deemed dangerous because there was a thicker-than-usual cardboard tube holding it up.
The token booth at the Shea Stadium subway station ran out of cards and tokens, so the police suddenly announced that the gates would be open and everyone could board the trains free of charge. The crowd moved slowly up the narrow stairs to the platform. It was already close to noon by the time we boarded a Manhattan-bound train, while regular passengers harangued us for interfering with their regular trips into the city.
“This is New York City,” one woman yelled at our group. “Nobody cares. You’re just creating a disturbance and interfering with the train route.”
“I’m from New York,” I snapped back at her. “It’s always this crowded during rush hour. Why would you get on the train if you’re not willing to deal with a crowd?” My sense of love was wearing thin. She tried to start an altercation with us but I got my group to ignore her.Random people on the train asked to join our group on their way to the protest, too. A sense of fear about backlash against the protest and police repression prevailed so thoroughly that anyone traveling alone with an antiwar sign or button felt exposed, frightened, and vulnerable. We did our best to stay together, but the delays in Queens basically made it impossible for us to reach the main gathering at the UN. It was well after noon by the time we came out of the subway in Manhattan, and the streets were clogged. The great number of protestors paralyzed the streets from the mid-30s to the 60s, and from First Avenue to Park. The vast majority of these numbers were never counted in official crowd estimates, though, because the NYPD was shrewd at preventing them from making it to the actual rally.
I suspected the cops were smarter than we were. The police had succeeded in setting up barricades on all the side streets that led from Lexington Avenue, where the subway was, east to First Avenue. It was shoulder to shoulder, and music and chanting were everywhere. My group quickly lost the loners who joined us on the train. We were down to the ten of us who had come together from Buffalo. Staying together was hard, because we had to grab each other’s clothes and form a human line through the crowd. It was exhilarating to see the sense of unity and enthusiasm around us, but I immediately became alarmed. The crowd was flowing like a river, but I told the people with me, “they’re all going the wrong way!” Tens of thousands of people on Third Avenue were marching distractedly north and uptown, away from where the main demonstration was supposed to be taking place. The police had barricaded Third and prevented anyone from going south. Then they had barricaded the side streets to make it impossible to move east or west. The only way for the crowd to go was north, away from the main event.
I heard policemen posted at various corners shouting to the crowd, “The protest has been moved to 72nd Street and Park! The events at the UN have been cancelled.” Large sections of the crowd believed this and started moving uptown, even though people with portable radios were playing the broadcast of the speeches going on in front of the UN. Finally large groups of people stopped moving, trying to force the crowd from flowing uptown. Scores of demonstrators started closing in on the police, shouting “bullshit, bullshit, bullshit” every time they tried to tell people the protest had been cancelled or moved.
Before this point, things had been peaceful between the protestors and police. But the crowd had lost its patience. At Third Avenue and East 54th Street, a group of protestors finally overwhelmed the few officers who were there, and knocked down the iron barricades. Thousands of people poured down this street, desperate to reach Second and then First Avenue. People popped out of the windows of the tall apartment buildings and started cheering us on, telling the crowd to push harder against the police barricades on Second Avenue.
“For love and peace!” one man shouted out of his window. “Don’t quit until you make it to First Avenue!”
The police had quickly amassed a phalanx of guards in riot gear blocking any movement at the corner of Second and 54th Street. With their helmets on and their night sticks drawn, they started shoving the protests back into an uptown movement away from the protests. Helicopters soon appeared overhead, and in order to hear each other over the noise, the protestors started to chant slogans like “Drop Bush, not Bombs,” “no blood for oil,” “this is what democracy looks like,” and “1-2-3-4, we don’t want another war.” The chanting was effective at making the crowd feel unified, but it also distracted everyone from the imminent threat of the police. While I was at 54th and Second, I saw at least five rushes at the barricades repelled by the police with their night sticks. By about 1:40 or so, we heard the sounds of horse galloping, and I could see the mounted policemen parting the crowd.
With the arrival of the mounted policemen, there was a clear attempt to push people off Second Avenue and onto the sidewalks. The barricades that restricted movement east and west along side streets, however, left us with nowhere to go. The police advanced slowly at first, as protestors began to retreat onto the sidewalks. The pressure against the glass storefronts grew as the crowd was compressed. We saw a caravan of paddy wagons plowing through the crowd down Second Avenue. The back doors opened up and more riot police poured out with their full gear. My group of ten began to feel afraid we would be crushed, so we finally succumbed to the police pressure and began drifting uptown; others, though, stood their ground behind us. At one point, I looked back and saw the police dragging a man with a Palestinian flag and clubbing him. The crowd was enraged and began shouting at the policemen, but by now there were so many riot guards and mounted policemen that the only way to break their line would be to sacrifice some people on the front line. We found ourselves in a war against war.
In my group there were some people who did not want to get arrested and felt uncomfortable staying at the corner we were at. One man was there with his girlfriend, and she said she was not willing to sacrifice herself before the mounted cavalry. My wife and I were in agreement with her; I did not want to get arrested and let down all the people in Buffalo who were dependent on me. Some in the group wanted to stay. One woman coaxed us, saying, “This is what the police are trying to do; they’re trying to disperse us.”
The police succeeded. Ultimately, we decided it was better for the ten of us to remain together than to split into one retreating group and one group of resisters. Reluctantly we fled down 54th Street to Lexington Avenue, where we regrouped in the lobby of a Barnes & Noble. There was a rift—one group was too frightened by the real violence we’d witnessed, while the other group felt it was crucial for us to push ahead. There were some who felt it was best to split up, but some believed that with real violence taking place around us, the most dangerous thing to do was to break down into more vulnerable groups. So we stayed together, and went out to continue the protest.
It was mid-afternoon, and on Third Avenue the police had basically declared war on the protestors. We pushed toward the corner of 53rd and Third and there, we saw the horses rushing at the crowd. There were more helicopters in the air, and we saw the police clubbing people and throwing them into the paddy wagons. The crowd started shouting at them. Our field of vision was blocked by the people, and when something (I believe another charge by the mounted policemen) sparked a panic, we felt ourselves propelled by a mass of people rushing north to 54th Street.
We broke off at 54th Street and Third Avenue and tried to regroup. Fortunately, all ten of us found one another and we managed to duck into a coffee shop around 56th and Third Avenue to use the bathroom. While we were there, we heard rumors that a larger gathering had formed at Times Square. “Head to Times Square!” people were telling all the protestors who were crowded inside the coffee shop. One man kept exhorting everyone to hurry and head west along 56th Street, then down Seventh Avenue to Times Square. A large group of people left the coffee shop in a rush to follow his advice, and once they were gone, I saw the man walk over to some police guards and chat. My gut told me: the police were playing more tricks to disperse the crowd. Something had been scheduled for Times Square, but far earlier. It was already close to 4:00 by now, and the crowds on the West Side had been long dispersed.
We couldn’t be certain about what was going on, but I made clear to my group that the myth of a gigantic rally happening in Times Square was likely a ruse being used by the police to clear people out of the East Side. We decided to move south down Lexington Avenue in order to see for ourselves where people were congregated. We were ready to “play it by ear.” By this point, though, things on Lexington and 52nd Avenue were extremely violent. Someone had made his way into an office building, gotten onto a high roof, and showered the crowd with pamphlets. My wife and I were at the head of our group of ten, and our plan was to try to weave through the crowds at that corner, but as the pamphlets rained down on us, the people started an indistinguishable howl, and then, as I looked in the distance, I saw the horses starting to rush at crowds, even when there were children, elderly, and defenseless women present.
“A man has gotten trampled!” I heard someone cry a few people ahead of me. Young adults were trying to form a human chain in front of the young children and older people, as the horses went on the offensive. It became harder and harder for me to see anything, because people were running in all directions in a mass panic, and all I could see were figures of policemen looming over the crowd and galloping at us. A groundswell of protestors started rushing away from the police, and in the confusion, our group of ten split up into a group of four and a group of ten. Terrified, one woman who was with my smaller group asked where the subway was; she wanted to clear out of the area immediately. I led them into the nearest subway station, and we took the train to the West Side. This was perhaps my key mistake, because our group would be unable to regroup, and things on the West Side were much more dangerous for protestors.
We came out of the subway on 42nd Street, close to Seventh Avenue. The vast majority of the people on the street were tourists and policemen. The barricades blocking any movement toward Times Square, where there had been rumors of a large gathering, were higher and more preciously guarded than the ones on the East Side. The few protestors we saw were scattered, and looked lost. They were in small groups. Two people in our group of four finally said they wanted to quit the protesting; they put down their signs and went downtown, leaving me and my wife with a group of eight protestors from Brooklyn. With this group we tried to chant our way down Eighth Avenue through the Thirties, but angry prowar people became belligerent and we saw, as we got close to Herald Square, a massive congregation of paddy wagons and police cars like nothing I have ever seen (and in New York City, I have seen many things). Marching in step up Eighth Avenue with helmets and raised plexiglass shields, the riot police seemed to advance toward our small group with no intention of allowing us to pass south at all.
It was close to nightfall when we ran east down 38th Street, and finally made it to Avenue of the Americas, just below Bryant Park and Times Square, where we at last confirmed the fact that there was no gathering at Times Square. There were no cameras and no press in the area, but along Avenue of the Americas, there were hundreds of protestors trying to engage in acts of civil disobedience. The riot police were more aggressive at this point than anything else I’d witnessed all day. Screaming at anyone who had signs or antiwar buttons, they went on the offensive once they’d cleared people violently off the street and allowed traffic to resume. Marching with raised shields, they said that nobody was allowed to remain on the sidewalk on Sixth Avenue (also called Avenue of the Americas) at all. Everyone who was there with the intent to protest had to leave or face arrest.
The crowd of protestors was different on the West Side—they were younger, more scattered, and more cowed. They seemed to be an agglomeration of small groups, like ours, who had broken away from larger groups, and didn’t know each other well enough to coordinate. The police were different too—far more menacing. There were more police here, too, which surprised me because of the smaller numbers of antiwar demonstrators. At some point, a panic broke out, and the police took back Sixth Avenue. People were running away in all different directions.
At last, conceding defeat, my wife and I put away our signs, took off our face paint, and walked past Herald Square to find dinner. By the time we came to a Chinese noodle shop close to Koreatown, we saw that the cluster of paddy wagons and police cars had grown, and the storm troopers had multiplied. Emboldened by their success, the police looked ready to snap and attack at any provocation.
We rejoined with the buses by 8:00 PM. To see the people we’d begun the day with again was a relief—it was like reconnecting with a comrade separated in battle. The buses took us on a red-eye journey back to Buffalo, while mostly people slept.
I could not sleep, though. All I could think about was the tragic reality: to express what I consider the highest form of love—love for strangers—we who oppose this war will have to fight a war. It’s important to remember that we will be fighting for the sake of love; but nonetheless, lovers will have to be fighters in their own way. And the war at home, I fear, will only get worse.
Copyright 2003 by Buffalo Report, Inc.