I arrived south of Herald Square, near Madison Square Garden, the site of the Republican Convention, at about 6:30PM, along with Monique, a dispersed swarm of protestors, and a burgeoning, flabbergasted conglomerate of commuters. The cops had closed off all intersections by surrounding each corner of the street with metal stockades and orange fishnet-walls. I wasn’t particularly angry; a gathering of republicans were being filmed by MSNBC in the Square, so I wouldn’t have expected the cops to let us anywhere near live national television. I wouldn’t have expected them to let us be counter-protestors, no matter how many times I’ve put up with gauntlets of Bible-thumpers and their homophobic epithets countering my leftist rallies of choice.

I wasn’t particularly angry. I felt I had a right to protest the Convention without being relegated to a distant shouting point, but I didn’t expect to receive that right. Many apolitical commuters, on the other hand, were outrightly enraged. They wanted to get home, and they certainly expected to get home; one man, after an hour of waiting, screamed at the captain, “I was promised two entrances to the Long Island Railroad to be open during the entirety of the Convention!”

“Yeah, well, promises were made to be broken,” was the response. The right to convenience, the ability to get home, is a promise that the daily commuter can’t imagine being broken. Why is it that the right to free speech, freedom, is something I don’t even expect to receive? Why do we only experience primal rage over the little things rather than the big things? Have we been dumbed down so much as to accept the trampling of our rights? Where is the rage, the outburst, when will we all be willing to definitively state, “I will not put up with this!”

At approximately 8:30, the police explained that we should leave, “People wanna go shopping,” pointing to Victoria’s Secrets’ motionless revolving doors.

“Hell no, I don’t wear women’s underwear!” retorted an ornery commuter, but the majority of the crowd followed directions and began to back off. But I sat down, Monique sat down, and three others sat down with us. The police told us to back off with the rest of our “buddies”, but we let them know that we were just fine sitting where we were. Across the street, we saw fellow disobedient sitters expressing their refusal to back off by starting a 15-person conga line.

The Republicans are counting on two things two be reelected. They are counting on the 9/11 imagery they invoke so shamelessly and incessantly, which is why they came to New York. They are also counting on the culture of fear that they have milked like a fountain, which is why the convention was surrounded with such ubiquitous, insubstantial threats of terrorism and anarchy. Sitting down and refusing to comply with the order that we turn our backs to their convention addresses them by making the following statements:

The time and grief of New Yorkers is not yours to exploit.

We are not afraid, not of arrest nor any fabricated threats.

We are not violent; our action is passive; our best weapon is not intimidation, but truth

Quite simply, we say no, and we’re willing to do more than just say it.

So we locked arms and waited to be arrested. And then we unlocked them as soon as we realized they were not going to arrest us immediately. We waited as three different cops pointed camcorders at us, and the rest of them discussed who was gonna arrest who. The crowds of protest-commuters were still there, having moved back no more than 10 paces, with a metal stockade separating us on either side. They tossed us a bottle of water and chanted “Whose streets/Our streets”. We cheered them on; I removed my shirt and Monique wrote “RNC GO HOME” on my chest and “BUSH LIES MANY DIE” on my back. It took the police forty minutes to arrest us. First they had to arrest the fifteen sitting on the south corner, and finally they arrested our five (which had actually dwindled down to four when one of us rejoined the crowd). We didn't stand when they arrested us; we just let them carry us away. We weren’t going to resist the arrest, but we were not going to actively participate in it.

They tied the plastic flexicuffs around my wrist, painfully tight, lifted my limp body up, and carried me to the bus, my feet dragging on the street. Inside of the bus, we chanted, sang songs, and cited our Constitutional rights as boisterously as possible until they replaced a few of the more insufferable flexicuffs on a few of the more belligerently outspoken detainees. Slowly the police tracked down film, and took three Polaroid pictures of each prisoner. They called us “perps”.

“At least they don’t call us ‘preps,’” I mused, “Now that would actually be something to be ashamed of.”

The man sitting next to me had a cell phone, which he took out of his back pocket, and lifted up to my ears, his hands still tied behind his back. I called home and told my father that I had been arrested. I had to repeat it three times, because each time he thought I was saying that I had been “elected”. When Monique called her mother, she thought it was a practical joke. A few hours later, the police officer called her mother, because she is still 15 and thus was treated as a juvenile arrest; the officer had to assure her mother thrice that she wasn’t joking. Apparently, people find it hard to believe that protest is an act people can be arrested for. That doesn’t happen in America, does it? At least, not since Kent State or the Deep South in the 60’s?

Then they slowly cut our flexicuffs so that we could empty our property into marked plastic bags. In a surprising stroke of bad luck, I didn’t have any property, so my cuffs stayed on, burning my skin, biting my bones, and halting my bloodstream for the next three hours. I didn’t complain; I’ve been asked before, “Why do you need to be uncomfortable in order to make yourself comfortable?” Somehow, I would’ve felt very awkward construing myself as a victim. Especially since my arrest was purposeful and voluntary, and hence I should be prepared to experience and deal with all consequences. But deriding our treatment as a group, in solidarity, I will not hesitate to do.

So I should mention at this point that I find it despicable that upwards of 1000 people were illegally arrested. As it turns out, I was one of the only voluntary arrestees of the day; in almost all other cases, people were not given the opportunity to disperse, but were picked up off the sidewalk for nothing worse than walking in the wrong place. Many weren’t even protestors. The police were clearly stealing tactics, or taking advice, from Bush; they were launching bona fide preemptive strikes on the protests. Before I made my way to Herald Square, I came across a group gathering on the steps of the Public Library. Just as quickly, I saw a line of cops slice through their gathering, then corral and eventually arrest all the protestors who found themselves on the wrong side of the line. They didn’t even give protestors a chance to act out of line; they assumed that we would be violent, presumed us guilty, and arrested us while we were still innocent. George Bush preemptively struck Iraq on the claim that they possessed weapons of mass destruction. We protestors were struck because we had our weapons too; the pen is mightier than the sword, and the will of an organized people is mightier than any number of corrupt policies. After 500,000 people marched peacefully on Sunday, striking a harmonious note of opposition before Bush’s convention even started, they weren’t going to let protests steal the glory now that the show was actually going on. Maybe they figured that if they arrested all the protestors, there would be no more protests. Or maybe they figured that if they arrested a thousand people, the rest of America would assume we were all unruly anarchists, every last one. And by extension, perhaps they would think, most laughably of all, that John Kerry is a radical.

I should also mention the despicability of Pier 57, where we spent the first night. I arrived somewhere around 1 AM, after we waited behind eight other busses in a long queue to drop off the perps. As I stepped off the bus, one cop, eyeing my Hendrix tie-dye and African pants, shouted, “Take this kid to the Grateful Dead show!”

Another shout followed him, “Four more years!” At that moment, one would actually hope he was referring to George Bush’s presidency, rather than the duration of our stays in prison. Of course, I didn’t have trouble making that differentiation; I expected to be out by the next morning at the latest. But, unfortunately, we were still at Pier 57 the next morning, meaning our booking process had not even begun.

It was not the greatest place to spend the night. Later I learned that Mayor Bloomberg explained, “It’s not supposed to be Club Med.” Now, I am no fan of luxurious resorts. But when we entered Pier 57, the first thing we saw were signs on the wall warning workers to wear proper protective gear, because apparently it is normally a fueling station. Needless to say, we were not provided with the goggles, reflective equipment, and boots that were prescribed. The ground was oily and sooty, and because we were not provided with blankets of any variety, that filth was what we slept on. After a few hours, all our shirts were blackened, many people’s eyes were burning, and certain others felt quite nauseous, all of which was ignored when brought to the attention of the police. On top of it all, the Transit Workers Union informed the National Lawyers Guild that the building used to and may still contain asbestos. Eventually, we were all told to sit and we were each provided with a single processed-cheese sandwich. And finally, they started to call our names in groups of 10-20 people. It was probably about 8AM that I was cuffed again and loaded into a Corrections Department vehicle.

They brought us to central booking at 100 Centre Street. They cut our painful plastic cuffs, put us in metal cuffs, and walked us like a chain gang through innumerable lines. First they walked us upstairs. Wait. Then they walked us into a holding pen. Wait. Then they walked us through a full-body search. Wait. Then they walked us through a metal detector. Wait. Then they walked us to a new holding pen. Wait. Then they walked us to a third holding pen, without any explanation as to what made this different than the last holding pen. I guess the only thing that made it different was that we were fed another cheese sandwich.

Somebody was stalling. There was no apparent reason for us to be moved back and forth. So, here’s Exhibit A, published by the New York Times:

“’When the mayor bid for this convention, part of his argument, to bring either convention here, was that New York City had the only police force to deal with a modern anarchist threat,’ said Kevin Sheekey, a close adviser to the mayor who served as president of the convention host committee.”

And Exhibit B? When my mother called central booking, she was told, “The demonstrators will be held until the president is done speaking.” This piece of gossip was also repeated to us by our sentries while we were being held.

Clearly, they wanted to keep us off the streets as long as possible. I want to address this “anarchist threat” for just one second. Fox News, the New York Post, and the Daily News ranted and raved about it. If they knew anything about anarchism, they would know that it centers around a utopian pacifism. And if they knew anything about protestors, they would know that most of us are pretty left-leaning, meaning, whether we like to think about it this way or not, that we support a strong government presence, at least in the economic sphere.

A few days before the convention began, I read a Daily News Article about the Nation’s 50 Most Dangerous Anarchists. They mentioned an organization called, redundantly enough, The Organization. I was delighted, because I am familiar with those kids from protests; they’re a bunch of college-aged kids, mostly girls, who wear all grey, dig Che, and every once in a while stage guerilla theater by dressing up as Arabs and dumping fake blood all over each other in public. They might burn the occasional flag or talk about Molotov cocktails, but, as much as they might hate to admit it, they are patently harmless. And they’re the scariest the Daily News could come up with.

But, nonetheless, they wanted to keep us stalled and imprisoned. And that is what they did, deliberately. Exhibit C? The “regular criminals” got to cut all the lines; they were booked, finger-printed, photographed, and arraigned in a quarter of the time we were. I guess free speech is more socially reprehensible than burglary, assault, or whatever the regulars were in for. Exhibit D? Twelve hours elapsed in between our fingerprinting and our mug shots. That’s not mere procedure. They tried to tell us that it was because we got “lost in the computers,” but all the other people on line for mug shots had been on line with us for fingerprints at the same time. What, did they lose every single prisoner in the computers?

This was twelve hours, mind you, spent in a cell that could not have taken up more than 100 square feet. Twenty of us in there, not a one who wasn’t sleep-deprived. But due to space constraints, we had to sleep in shifts. And we who weren’t sleeping, talked. I must say, being locked up with fellow protestors is not the worst company one can ask for. For example, I can't say I minded spending 20 hours with a guy named David Weddingdress (‘Dress’ for short) who looks like Allen Ginsberg and wears a dress every day (today's was pink, tragically browned by Pier 57's soot) to declare his androgyny. We discussed many topics, from where we got arrested, the varying degrees of randomness of our arrest, the pros and cons of the Kerry and Nader campaigns, and general strategy for political organization.

When we requested vegetarian food, they brought us soy-meat sandwiches, specifically ordered to cater to our pinko-hippie needs. But when we requested phone calls, we were nixed by our late-night guard with indifferent scorn. It took thirty-six hours before I was transferred to a cell with a payphone. And when we requested lawyers, we were told that our lawyers were too busy to see us. It was 41 hours before I saw a lawyer; I didn’t see one until I entered the courtroom.

New York law requires habeas corpus within 24 hours (federally, it’s 48 hours). None of us knew what we had been charged with, so this was a clear violation. Arraignment didn’t take more than five minutes, and then I was free to go, so it’s quite obvious that they were dodging arraignment to make it as long as possible before we were all free to go. If they held us until Bush was done speaking, they would have held me for nine hours longer than they did, for a total of 50 hours. All for sitting on a sidewalk.

A few years ago I worked on the political campaign of New York’s leading civil rights lawyer, who was director of the NYCLU for 15 years, Norman Siegel. When my parents found out that I had been arrested, they called him; luckily, he had figured that “concerned parents” would make the best plaintiff group for a writ of habeas corpus, so he had my mother write an affidavit about me as an “honors student” who “did community service in Kenya” and how I “was raised to believe in making the world a better place.” I wouldn't know first-hand, but I assume that’s not the normal parental response to their son’s arrest? And when the judge heard that the central booking phone operator had let slide that we were supposed to be held until Bush was done speaking, he was ready to rule. He ruled that if all prisoners were not charged within the next few hours then they must be released.

Then things started to move. I found out when I entered the courtroom that I had been charged with disorderly conduct (a violation) and resisting arrest (a misdemeanor). The prosecution offered to reduce my sentence to just disorderly conduct, and give me time served. I chose instead to plead not guilty. I didn’t resist arrest; my arrest was quite purposeful, and I let them carry me away. And if they are to convict me of disorderly conduct, they have to prove that I caused public alarm or panic. It took them forty minutes before arresting me after I sat down; they would be quite incompetent to let such an allegedly alarming character keep panicking the public for forty minutes. Moreover, they never dispersed the crowds around me who didn’t join me in my sedentary civil disobedience. The only ostensible “public” in which I might have instilled panic was the “public” who was cheering me on and toss me water bottles.

They probably expected all the protestors to plea bargain and accept time served or an ACD. That’s the only way they can make arrests on such massive a scale; if they don’t have to give a real hearing for each person. When the officers were explaining to us why it was taking so long, they told us that we had “bogged the system”. Perhaps, continuing to bog the system is the only way to keep them from disregarding the judicial and Constitutional system that supposedly runs this country.

So please let everyone know that this is what happened at the Republican Convention. A lot of people showed up to peaceably protest the Bush agenda, and due to pressure exerted by the Bush administration, they were unduly inconvenienced for anywhere from 30-60 hours. Let them know that to the Bush administration, which worked lock-in-key with the Bloomberg administration, Constitutional rights are nothing but trifling technicalities meant for bending and breaking when they stand in the way of political expedience and gain. We already knew he had no problem with Abu Ghraibs and Guantanamo Bays for "alien others", so now let them know that Bush has no ideological qualms about giving a good-old police-state to his own constituents. And let's wait to see how self-proclaimed liberals and the mass media react to this so we can see where they stand.

Just a little further reading I've dug up so far:
Democracy Now: Pier 57
NYTimes DaPlatypusCBB13@aol.com