The View From the Middle of the Road

Several weeks ago my mother made a comment to me about free speech in America. She said that it wasn't really free if you got arrested every time you exercised your right to dissent. She's no radical, but the sentiment is becoming clearer and clearer even to those standing most firmly in the middle of the road.

My husband and I cancelled our honeymoon to return to NYC and demonstrate against the war. We had been in Mexico City, but it soon became clear that all of our time was going to be spent either cringing at news reports in internet cafes or trying in our broken Spanish to follow the anti-war chants outside the U.S. embassy. It seemed ridiculous not to return home.

We arrived just in time for the massive March 22nd peace march. We were excited and reassured by the tens of thousands of people who came out to show their opposition to the war, a war being waged largely in New York's name. The police department had fought against issuing a permit for the march, but with the court-sanctioned event underway they were grudgingly cooperative, blocking off our route for us and scowling at smiling protesters in the Saturday sunshine. The march let out on little Washington Square Park, with no culminating rally to tie things up. People didn't want to go home. Bombs were dropping in Iraq, innocents were dying with our tax dollars, and the folks on the street were not eager to melt back into anonymous New York indifference. Thousands of marchers were milling about -- some marching around the park, some through the middle, many just sitting around and appreciating the scene.

The police began to move in. Soon, there were lines of police on the street, in the south of Washington Square Park, I suppose to keep people on the sidewalk. To our right we saw a man, standing and talking with a friend, suddenly pulled from the sidewalk into the police line. We were stunned. For no reason at all the cops grabbed the guy and put him in a paddy wagon. We saw this happen three more times. I was completely confused. It was random, and pointless.

But the March 22 arrests didn't properly prepare me for what happened on April 7th. There was a small nonviolent civil disobedience planned that morning outside an office of the Carlyle Group, a defence contractor. It was bitterly cold on the morning of April 7th, and my husband and I were sorely tempted to stay in bed but we went and were pleasantly surprised to see a good number of people, maybe 200. Everyone congregated on the sidewalk across from the entrance to the Carlyle Group. The folks planning on doing civil disobedience crossed the street and began a picket line in front of the offices. My husband and I stayed across the street with the 'supporters,' people who couldn't participate or risk getting arrested. I felt wimpy as I watched the die-hards across the street leave the moving picket line and sit down in front of the entrance to the building, linking arms and angrily chanting about war profiteering.

The police began to make arrests of the 20 or so protesters who were actually participating in the civil disobedience, blocking the Carlyle Group office entrance. Other officers formed a solid line in the street in front of the observers, the 'unarrestables'. I assumed this was the police playing schoolyard bully as usual, blocking our view and making us feel little and helpless. My husband and I moved further down the sidewalk to get a better and less cop-obstructed view.

But as officers across the street were finishing with their arrests there, two lines of police suddenly came charging across onto our sidewalk. We now had police along the street in front of them, police across the sidewalk on either side of them, and an office building at their backs -- completely penned in. A young man with a camera caught in the path of the police advance was thrown to the ground, smashed into the pavement by a dog-pile of four officers, and then carted off to a paddy wagon. He had been doing nothing but taking pictures.