Saying No to the war
[3-22-03]
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.
I encourage you to participate in similar protests around
the nation. Do I expect the Bush regime to listen to the people? Of course
not. But it was good for my soul to know that so many Americans still had
the basic decency to speak out for the innocent victims of violence, and
that New Yorkers in particular had the empathy not to want the horrors of
9/11 to be visited on the citizens of any nation.
