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What Happened in New York
February 2003
by Starhawk
The weekend of February 15 and 16 marks an historic,
global uprising for peace. The number of marches
is uncounted: the number of marchers estimated
in the range of ten million. There were marches
and vigils and protests in national capitals and
small towns, in the heartlands of middle America
and in small Pacific islands, in the freezing cold
of Alberta and in the heat of an Australian summer.
Palestinians and Israelis marched together in Tel
Aviv: in the U.S. everyone from Republicans to
socialists to anarcho-punks shared the streets.
And most of these hundreds of events took place
with, apparently, fairly minimal governmental repression.
New York was an exception.
New York, the largest city in the country that presumably
shines as a beacon of global democracy, refused
to grant the organizers of the protest a permit
for a march. Only a stationary rally was allowed.
The denial of the march was only one feature in a campaign of harrassment, that included the circulation of a rumor on the day before the rally that the event had been cancelled, a Code Orange terrorist alert that stationed military guards in the subways armed with automatic rifles, the denial of permission to rent portable toilets for the masses expected at the rally, the mysterious rerouting of subways and busses on the morning of the rally, the cut-off of the phones in the United for Peace and Justice office during the rally, and a repressive, heavy-handed and sometimes brutal police presence that penned the official rally behind barricades and prevented thousands from even getting there.
New York has the largest police force in the world:
forty thousand strong. When they decide to control
public space, they have enormous resources with
which to do so, and generally succeed.
But not last Saturday.
On Saturday something like sixty different feeder
marches started from various points in the city
to march to the rally. Many of them intended to
stay within the law by marching on the sidewalk—an
activity that does not require a permit.
Some took the streets.
Taking the streets was, technically, an act of civil
disobedience, a conscious breaking of a law that
is unjust or unfairly applied. In this case, many
of us felt that the law preventing us from marching
as a unified whole was violating our constitutional
rights to freedom of speech and assembly. And that
if we did not defend our public and political space
at this crucial moment, that space would rapidly
be taken away.
The Performing Arts March and the Labor March were
able to take the streets and march to the rally
without incident. The police simply stood back and
let them go.
The students were not so favored. I was with the
students’ contingent that gathered at Union Square
around ten in the morning. A march from New York
University joined up with us, and together we headed
out on Fourteenth Street, on the sidewalk until
Sixth Avenue, when we swarmed out into the street.
We marched triumphantly up the avenue, in a fast-paced, exuberant mass that was impossible to slow down, though some of us were trying in order to keep the whole crowd of several thousand together.
Around Twenty-first street, the police met us with
a line of cops that stretched across the road.
We were ordered to get back on the sidewalk or face
arrest. The police were being provocative, pushing
and shoving us with their nightsticks, and the students
were doing an admirable job of restraining themselves
from fighting back. Instead, they turned a corner,
swarmed onto a side street, ducked through a parking
lot at a dead run and came out onto another street.
Some of the march was left behind, but it formed
another column to go snake-marching through the
side streets.
We met up again on Fifth Avenue, but then got pushed onto Twenty-third Street and trapped by a line of cops in front and back. I saw one young man pushed to the ground with five cops kneeling on him, twisting his arms behind his back to cuff him.
The street was crowded with masses of students,
and the police decided to run a line of horses through
in order to split the crowd and push people back
onto the sidewalks. The horses, some of which seemed
under only very shaky control, trotted through the
crowd, and then the cops announced that they were
only going to let people out in small groups, about
fifty at a time. Our group got split—half of us
were squeezed out and the other half prevented from
leaving. The cops forced the groups that left to
move on, in order to prevent us massing together
again.
Our small contingent marched up to the Main Library,
on Forty-second Street, where we met up with some
of the lost members of our group, and continued
up toward the Rally Zone.The police had barricades
on all the streets leading east through the Fifties
at Lexington Avenue. People were not being allowed
to go through to join the rally.
Many people were upset and angry, but overall the
mood was creative and determined. Our group went
into a Dunkin’ Donuts to pee—and discovered we could
simply exit through the side door onto the street
behind the barricade. We went on to Third Street,
which was packed with masses of people who were
simply holding their own rally in the street. There
were performers up on kiosks doing skits in giant
masks, radical cheerleaders dressed in pajamas with
pillows shouting ‘Nuclear War—that’s not right!
Bush and Saddam should have a pillow fight!" Groups
clustered around radios to hear bits of the rally,
danced or chanted or simply paced up and down, enjoying
the scene. The crowd was diverse, with a good representation
of many different races and classes and ages. I
saw young students and gray-haired veterans of the
peace marches of the sixties, punks and hippies
and ordinary citizens, ragged street people and
one elegantly dressed woman in a fur coat carrying
a sign that said "Justice for Palestine."
We went on to Times Square, where an unpermitted
convergence had been called, and drummed and chanted
on a corner as the police rapidly erected barricades,
squeezed the crowd together, and refused to let
people in or out. We eventually moved out, encountering
people furious with the cops’ heavy-handed tactics.
One young woman was sobbing into her cell phone
in a panic because she was separated from her mother
and couldn’t get back across the lines, and outraged
because the police had pushed her. We soothed her,
and helped her find her mother. Later that night,
we narrowly missed getting arrested with a group
of about two hundred who were simply marching on
the sidewalk as people had been doing, legally,
all day—and were trapped and surrounded by the cops
and not let go. Overall around three hundred and
fifty people were arrested—most simply trying to
get to the legal rally.
If the police had issued a permit, had given the
organizers a rally space in Central Park as they
originally requested, had allowed and supported
a legal march, people would simply have gathered
and marched, as they did in hundreds of cities around
the world, and not required horse patrols or riot
squads. One official march, and a big rally in an
open park, with no streets to be blocked or potential
targets for vandalism, would have been easier and
cheaper to control. Instead, the police set up a
situation guaranteed to arouse frustration and anger
among a crowd so huge that no amount of force could
have controlled it had it turned aggressive. In
one area a few people did push through barricades
and a fight resulted. Had that happened all along
the lines, we would have seen a street battle that
would have rivaled the storming of the Bastille.
And if violence had broken out, it wouldn’t have
come from militants or anarchists or principled
believers in armed struggles of liberation, all
of whom agreed that this was a moment for a peaceful
protest. It would have most likely come from a few
ordinary people pushed one foot too far who simply
lost their tempers and lashed out. The police were
extremely lucky. Had the crowd rioted, all their
barricades and gear and horse brigades couldn’t
have stopped it.
No one wanted that to happen -- not the organizers
and not any of the political groups involved. For
those of us who advocate nonviolence, who fondly
believe we can train people to stay calm under provocation
and who exhort people to peaceful forms of protest,
it’s important to understand that the crowd’s restraint
didn’t come from any commonly held guidelines or
philosophy. It was too huge and diverse to have
one. Nor did it come from exhortations from the
stage or from leadership—most of the crowd never
got near enough to the stage to hear anything.
In the face of truly uncalled-for police harrassment,
ordinary people kept their cool. The cops kept control,
truthfully, only because people let them.
Some of that compliance came from fear—the police
do have clubs, pepper spray, big horses and weapons.
They can also draw on the full power of the state
to punish anyone who challenges them.
But rage and frustration can overcome fear and caution.
The protest remained peaceful because the crowd
itself wanted to protest for peace peacefully, and
because people tacitly agreed to respect the authority
of the police and not challenge that control.
That tacit agreement rests on the people’s belief
that in some way the authority in question is legitimate.
In a democracy, legitimate authority stems from
the people, not simply from possession of the might
and means to apply brute force. A small elite might
gain control of the weapons, the money, the police
and the military, but the more it resorts to brute
force to keep control, the more it loses legitimacy.
I saw that happen, over and over again, on the streets
of New York. Every person denied access to a legal
rally, every person shoved or bullied lost a bit
of that belief.
Belief in the legitimacy of the authorities is the etheric glue that holds the social system together.
That glue can dissolve. In New York, it held, barely,
but next time it might not.
The authorities don’t much fear the mere expression
of dissent. And they don’t truly fear small factions
engaging in more extreme acts that marginalize and
isolate them. But they would be wise to fear the
loss of their own legitimacy in the eyes of the
masses. The Bush administration was not elected,
and its authority has been shaky from the beginning,
propped up only by the shock and fear unleashed
by the attacks of September 11.
What may finally constrain the warmongers is simply
the possibility that the people will become ungovernable
if the government continues to disregard our will.
If, against such huge opposition, the Bush administration
goes ahead with its aggressive, pre-emptive war,
they will destroy the legitimacy they depend on
for control and unleash the kind of social unrest
that makes governments fall.
Dirty tricks, disinformation, repression and fear
could not keep people from taking the streets of
New York. In the face of injustice and enormous
provocation, people responded with restraint, with
passion and joy, and discovered our collective power.
And that’s what happened in New York. The challenge
before us now is to nurture, consolidate, and decide
how we will use that power: to stop the war, to
address the huge economic, ecological and social
problems the war distracts us from, and to gain
the reality, not the just the myth, of democracy.
Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising and eight other books on feminism, politics and earth-based spirituality. She works with the RANT trainer’s collective, www.rantcollective.org that offers training and support for mobilizations around global justice and peace issues.
Feel free to repost this or use it in nonprofit
or progressive journals. Please check with me before
changing it, at the website www.starhawk.org. All
other rights reserved.
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