Witherspoon board member Richard Hong reports on his experience of the demonstration against the war in New York City on Thursday, March 20

FROM TIMES SQUARE:
March 20, 2003.

Despite a cold, steady rain which penetrated to your bones, thousands of people descended on Times Square to protest the start of the illegal U.S. attack against Iraq.

I went with fellow students from Union Theological Seminary in NYC. As a part of our witness, we marched the 80 blocks from the seminary to Times Square.

The stated plan of the organizers was to have all of these "feeder marches" approach Times Square from all directions. The police did not want the marchers to fill Times Square, so they set up a perimeter, preventing most of us from actually entering Times Square. There were rumors in the crowd of some beatings and arrests of persons attempting to cross the perimeter. We weren't close enough to see this, but based on the urgency with which people were retreating from the police lines, it seems plausible.

This protest had no formal permit, since it was planned for the day after the start of the war, and no one knew when that would be. So we were told by organizers that as long as we stayed on the sidewalks and kept moving, we were not violating the law. By blocking off Times Square so that only a handful of people could actually enter it (as a result, some news reports of the size of the crowd were ridiculously low), most of the people overflowed onto the surrounding side streets. With thousands of people "moving" (slowly) on these side streets, intersections quickly jammed up.

The police countered by expanding their perimeter, pushing us even further away. However, in order to expand the perimeter enough to disperse the crowds, they had to block every crosstown street from 38th to 44th, between 6th and 8th Aves. If you don't live in Manhattan, you'll have to trust me that this was not a good thing for traffic patterns at rush hour. So in order to keep us from blocking the streets, they blocked the streets (thank you NYPD!) from 5:00-7:00 pm. We made our point.

What was striking was that what you really felt in the streets was the righteous anger of the people, indignant that the U.S. would start a war without fully pursuing alternatives to war, and without heeding the international community. When the "news ticker" on one of the office buildings reported that protesters had descended upon U.S. embassies in dozens of countries, a huge roar erupted from the crowd. I felt like a citizen of the world - God's children uniting for peace against the provincial myopia which sets nation against nation.