Discussion posts: marchers' stories

Subject - 15 Feb London 2m vs 800,000?
Author name - Roger Manser
Date - 20-2-2003

750,000 or 2 million : remembering Feb 15th

Were we two million? Does it matter? Even one million was 2% of the UK population on the streets, saying no to killing. There must be a better way to run the world. Standing on the wall of the Hyde Park underpass, looking back up Piccadilly, we were a mass of placards and black and white faces.

There was a togetherness. No political rancour, no socialist slogans, just a popular solidarity. Going up lower Regent Street, I hear "I'm a Pakistani, I don't know how to make that noise," from a stout, hooded woman. I point her in the direction of my friend Judy who learnt to ululate from the Bedouin.

The atmosphere was light, almost spontaneous. We were there because we had something to say to Bush and Blair. They had done their talking - over our heads. Now we, the people, were having our say. Only 9% of the UK public would support a war without a second UN resolution, I kept reminding myself. Even the BBC weather forecast had told the marchers to wrap up well. That must be a first. It was certainly cold, sharing hats and playing tag in Hyde Park to keep warm.

Perhaps it was like one of the early Aldermastons. I'm too young to remember, though I know my uncle took me on one. Sebald's descriptions of the firebombing of Hamburg in the Guardian reminded me of the horrors that war can bring. It doesn't have to be nuclear - an invasion of Iraq might well repeat the human melt-down that we brought upon the Germans in Hamburg and Dresden. Sebald seems to excuse the bombing, by saying that the Germans provoked the annihilation of their cities; that's not something I can do today. I don't believe Iraq has the means to kill millions, though I know that Saddam Hussein has killed his own people, and will kill more.

We were there supporting the UN. It was deciding the fate of a people; for once, for a moment, the whole world was listening to the United Nations; we were with the rest of the world. So often, our leaders show an arrogance, an imperial presumptuousness, but we were there saying - quietly and calmly, no their threats and warmongering, and yes to a human(e) approach (which I admit still has to be worked out).

Subject - First Avenue Freeze-Out: At the NYC Antiwar Rally, Feb 15
Author name - mfb12
Date - 21-2-2003

Let's get the obligatory thing out of the way first: forget about the official head count. I counted 200,000 people all by myself, from 47th St to 55th on Third Avenue around 2 pm. OK, one guy kept moving, so I may have counted him twice. But there’s no question that this rally was well beyond merely “huge” or “enormous.” The NYPD couldn’t possibly give an accurate count, however, even if they’d wanted to, because on the ground, the event was neither a “rally” nor a “march.” It was a rat maze – a strange rat maze, at that, in which the rats were occasionally charged and driven back by horses.

I left central PA at 6 am in one of the three buses (150 people) organized by Sacha Brown for the Penn State antiwar caravan. We got into Staten Island around 11 and over to the St. George ferry landing around 11:40. The noon ferry got us to the Battery around 12:40 (I was convinced we’d been made to circle Governors Island three times), and then we were given a hard time at the Bowling Green station when we tried to buy $450 worth of tokens. So I told my bus leader there was another subway entrance about 200 yards away (just trying to help, as a former New Yorker and subway aficionado); we went over and bought 84 tokens there, and we were on our way. But the Lex Ave line was running extremely slow, and the 15-minute trip to Grand Central took closer to forty minutes.

I mention this kind of detail because it, too, is lost in the official attendance count: this rally drew people from Vermont and West Virginia and Indiana (that’s just among the people I spoke to). We came from only 250 miles away, and it took us a full 7-1/2 hours, two of which were spent between Staten Island and Grand Central.

And then the real difficulties began. All foot traffic on “side streets” – that is, all east-west streets from 42nd right up into the 70s – was blocked off. Only residents of those streets were allowed past the police barricades. (My grouplet – myself, my friend Laura Reed-Morrisson, and my former student Josh Smicker – spotted someone going through the barricades with dry cleaning and said to ourselves, “now there’s an idea – next time, we bring a few shirts on hangers so that we look like we live here.”) We got through, however, on 47th, and soon joined what seemed to be a Carnival Against War on Third Avenue.

It was spectacular – and polyrhythmic, too. Lots and lots of percussion instruments everywhere. I will never go to another one of these things without a percussion instrument (I’m a drummer, after all). For the record, I now support all antiwar percussionists, even those who have rhythmically criticized ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) in the past.

Everyone’s favorite sign seemed to be “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” Yeah, there were plenty of cliches and tired slogans on signs, too (I got tired of “no blood for oil,” partly because I think the Bush crew are now after much, much more than oil. This is about empire, and the oil just happens to be a nice extra for the oilmen who have taken control of our country’s government). But so what else is new? What struck me this time was the profusion of bitter wit, “Blowjobs Not Blowback” being perhaps the best attempt I’ve yet seen to sum up in three words both the impeachment crisis and the history of US intervention in the Middle East since 1953 (clearly this guy could have won Monty Python’s “Summarize Proust Contest”). Dozens of handmade posters suggesting that empty war heads had been found in the White House, a couple of them with good graphics, Bush and Rumsfeld and company with empty cannisters for skulls. Many many signs remarking on the fact that Bush had not been elected, and many more advocating that he be impeached. At some point in the past week, Todd Gitlin had said that his sign would be “Contain Saddam – and Bush.” I’d replied that mine would be “All We Are Saying is Give UN Resolution 1441 a Chance, Along with a Revised Version of Resolution 661 that Exempts Chlorine from the ‘Dual Use’ Provision and that Places the Regime’s Assets in an International Trust. There – Now Let Those Prowar Fools Try to Say We Don’t Have a Program.” But I opted instead for two buttons, “Save the Constitution – Repeal the Patriot Act” and the resolutely nonsectarian “No War in Iraq.”

The common thread among all the signs and dancers and drummers and chants was simple opposition to the Bush Administration; it was as if this event were a people’s referendum, a massive call for a vote of no confidence in this government. I only wish we lived under a form of parliamentary democracy in which calls for votes of no confidence actually had some effect. And because we don’t, we have to resort to street theater, like the young Latino man at 50th and Third who kept up a mocking chant of “Bush! You liar! Your cowboy ass is fired!” The sheer eccentricity of the chant made for much amusement (hey, I joined in too, in full throat), but still, when his voice finally gave out, Bush was actually still in office.

Traffic on Third Avenue had been stopped altogether for about a mile, from 40th and 60th. Demonstrators were dancing on abandoned postal trucks, calling antiphonally with the crowd, “Whose streets? Our streets!” A guy with a stovepipe hat and a Lincoln beard kept popping up. The street was completely full of slowly moving people drifting vaguely north in the hope that there would be some crossover to First Avenue somewhere. It was a wonder that no one broke through the barricades and opened a vein down to Second. It would’ve gotten ugly, no doubt; every policeman on the East Coast was on the East Side, but the demonstrators would have surely have taken a few streets.

But then things almost did get ugly. Suddenly, around 3 pm, after we’d been marching/ rallying/ cavorting for about 90 minutes, the police blocked off Third Avenue at 53rd St. My friends and I were caught in an eddy of people who apparently believed we were being allowed to walk east on 53rd, and who began crushing forward, not realizing this was a dead end. Then the horses charged, beating people back onto the sidewalk -- and prompting a few young women to improvise new verses of "We Shall Not Be Moved": please don't crush our children, we shall not be moved; this is not our fault, we shall not be moved; Bloomberg is an asshole, we shall not be moved. There were many chants of “shame on you!” directed at the police leading the charge. Mild panic here and there among the crowd. And with good reason: for those of you who don’t know New York, Third Avenue is a very wide street -- six lanes. At one point the entire avenue was full of people, and then within about fifteen minutes everyone was herded onto the sidewalks (that’s a great deal of compression), the traffic was cleared, and dozens of empty buses began moving north.

Now, I saw plenty of police and fire vehicles using the streets to divide and disperse the crowd. That wasn’t surprising. But this was the first time I’d seen New York municipal transit pressed into service as part of an anti-demonstration brigade. Sure, it’s possible that dozens of empty MTA buses had to be dispatched to the Bronx suddenly for reasons completely unrelated to the rally. But I think it’s more likely that the police herded demonstrators onto Third Avenue and then basically ran them down or ran them out.

The result was that tens of thousands of demonstrators did, finally, disperse – slowly and sometimes dangerously. At one surreal moment I was yanked forward as a woman screamed. Somehow, in trying to squeeze by me, she had gotten her hair caught in one of my coat buttons. “Let her go!” her companion yelled to me; I turned and gave him a look somewhere between quizzical and querulous, as if to say, “I’m not going to talk to you until you acknowledge that my coat button did not maliciously grab this woman.” Adopting a different tone, he said, “can we get some help here?” as, weirdly enough, her hair remained wrapped in the button thread. “Sure,” I replied, “as soon as I can move my arm.” We were that packed in. For her part, she’d thought at first that someone had grabbed her by the ponytail. We got her free in a few seconds, but I began to think that only a few more random incidents like this one, a few misunderstandings and some serious pushing and shoving in sardine-can conditions, and we’d have a near-riot on our hands. I suggested to my friends that we wriggle out of this cul-de-sac and walk up Lexington or even Madison until we got our bearings.

And that, I think, is what happened to a lot of protestors. Certainly it accounted for why the streets were thronged all the way out to Madison Avenue, half a mile from First, with demonstrators. Who could possibly say how many of us there were? Unlike the SANE/ Freeze rally in 1982, in which we were all clustered together in Central Park, a million strong, at this event we had no visual sense of our mass. WBAI was covering the event, of course, and we hung out for a while with a tall black man carrying a small and weatherbeaten JVC boombox. We heard that First Avenue was full of people all the way up to 72nd St, over a mile away from the stage, which had been set up on 51st and 1st. We heard that Second Avenue was full; we heard that Second Avenue was empty. It was hard for us to tell from where we were on Third, and even now I would like someone to clear up the Second Avenue Mystery for me. But the object of all this NYPD crowd-management strategy was clear: to disperse and demoralize the rally. They succeeded with the “dispersal” part. (Recent police reports that the NYPD was simply unprepared for the number of demonstrators are almost certainly false; they had blocked off streets miles away from the stage, clearly in anticipation of managing crowds all up and down the East Side.) But because there were so very many of us, spontaneous rallies kept breaking out all over the east side of midtown, and though people were pissed off or bewildered, they were certainly not demoralized.

You have to keep in mind that the Third Avenue events were so far away from the stage (we could neither see nor hear anything going on near the UN) as to constitute a separate rally. And so far I haven’t seen any news reports that even acknowledge the existence of the Third Avenue contingent.

I took my group up Lexington to 60th, where, at Bloomingdale’s, we finally saw a handful of pedestrians who were not connected to the rally – people who apparently thought that this would be a fine day to pick up something at Bloomie’s. Turning right, we eventually snaked our way onto First at 61st St, and eventually made it down to within a block of the stage, long after most of the speakers and celebrities had left.

First Avenue was another story altogether. There were video hookups to the stage about every five blocks and loudspeakers on every other corner (so that even the people up in the 60s could hear and see what was going on up front), and throngs still pouring in at 4 pm. We stayed on First from about 3:30 to 4:30. Speakers were brief and routine (well, it was late in the day by this point), saying mostly "we-must- stop-this-war-and-take-our-country-back-and-organize-against-Bush-at-every-level," and were met with some scattered cheering and more street theater. My favorite: three people dressed as bombs dancing on an enormous heart that had been spray-painted on a sheet that stretched about fifty by fifty feet across the middle of First Avenue at 53rd. Drop Bush not Bombs, the people-bombs said: more votes of no confidence. Dancing on a heart this time.

But let me give the crowd-control forces their due: the system of barricades on First, unlike the closing of the cross streets and the Third Avenue Rat Maze, made some sense. The barriers were opened and closed at each block depending on the size of the crowd; while this gave us the sense of being shuffled through a series of mini-corrals, baaaa baaaa baaaa, it also prevented surges. It also induced various protestors to chant “the people [pause] united [pause] will never be defeated” every time a barricade was opened. And if the entire mass of demonstrators had in fact lined up on First Avenue all the way (who knows how far this would’ve gone; at 1 pm, my friend Bruce Robbins tells me, people were entering First at 71st St, and just imagine if all of us Third Avenuers lined up behind them – we’d have stretched to the Mayoral residence, Gracie Mansion, at 90th), there would indeed have been surges, and that would have been deadly.

Gradually we made our way over to Third again as things started to wind down. 53rd had been completely cleared, and you could never tell that only 90 minutes earlier, dozens of police and thousands of demonstrators had struggled over every square foot of the corner. Au Bon Pain on the SE corner was doing a brisk business: we stopped in for soup and coffee (our first meal since nibbling at grapes and apples on the bus) and found ourselves elbow to elbow with about a hundred fellow demonstrators – and about ten police. Nobody made eye contact with anybody. It was eerie. I read the WWP newspaper and huddled over my cream of potato.

We drifted back to Grand Central, stopping at 50th and Lex for an impromptu crosstown march of a few thousand people chanting “Times Square” as they marched/ rallied/ cavorted over to (you guessed it) Times Square, where they would reportedly be maced. It was 5:30 pm, and still, almost everyone on the streets of East Side was, shall we say, rally- affiliated. We got back to the buses on Staten Island by 6:30 but had to wait until 8:30 for three last stragglers on bus number two. You know, solidarity. Leave no Penn Stater behind. We got back just after 1 am.

So here’s what this means: round trip travel time to the rally from Penn State, nearly fifteen hours. Just over three hours at the rally itself. And I needn’t add that the wind chill put the air temp in New York at about four degrees. But who cared? This day, this amazing day, we were part of something like ten million people around the world desperately trying to check the Bush/ Cheney/ Rumsfeld insanity before it’s too late. Many of us fear what will happen to Iraqi civilians and American civil liberties; I fear this too, but as the impervious Bush imperium machine grinds on, I fear the aftermath of the war even more than the war itself.

A military governorship in Baghdad for at least two years? A Greater Turkey to contain the Kurds in the north? Osama at large and al-Qaeda regrouping in Afghanistan and Pakistan? NATO and the UN in shreds?

What a complete and terrible and deadly mess. Everyone with any damn sense at all knows that if President Gore were sitting in his rightful place in the Oval Office right now, we wouldn’t be on this obsessive and profoundly counterproductive path. Yes, President Gore would have taken out the Taliban and its terrorist training camps immediately after 9/11. And rightly so. But from that point on, there’s almost no point of contact between what Bush has done and what any sane or competent President would have done. That’s why these antiwar rallies are inevitably referenda on Bush. And that’s why it’s so important to keep the grounds of dissent as broad as possible, and the level of public outrage as high as possible, even during and after this war. We can’t call for votes of no confidence before 2004; we have to live with the guy the Supreme Court installed. So we have to contain him until we can remove him.

Subject - Teen Diary - Stop the War Protest
Author name - ilesfamily
Date - 27-2-2003

The march is very quiet, considering the huge numbers of people and the strength of the emotions that many of the protestors feel.
Think of the noise generated from just one school play-ground!

A million people marched. A million people is a dangerous number. One might expect a frightening atmosphere. That is what I am most proud of, the integrity of the protestors. Quiet yet energetic, peaceful protest.

A million people really says something. There was a great feeling of empowerment and united hopes for a safe and happy future.

Read the whole 'Teen Diary' here