I, (non)participant
2004-09-03

A few days ago at the behest of C. I went to a protest - March on the Media on 6th Avenue. I was thinking of going to the NOW protest and attempted to convince C. to head up that way, but I gave in to her choice (chosen because it was close to her work, I guess.) I hadn't protested before and hadn't really planned to, although I was tempted to join up with some people I knew for the NOW protest. Stupidly I didn't cut work and got out too late to join them - thus the protest with C.

I definitely did not fit in with most of the crowd, having come in straight from work (with a stop for pizza on the way,) still decked out in my awesome work-appropriate tank and grey pants ensemble, complete with heels. I chatted for a while with an arrest observer and then Reverend Billy warmed up the crowd with a recital of the First Amendment. I admired Reverend Billy's extravagently dyed and feathered hair, basking in the majesty of his ironically awful haircut. And then away we went.

The enthusiasm was pretty low for most of the way. At one point the cops let the protest spill onto the sidewalk and I ended up getting up onto the sidewalk just to see what would happen. Nothing, as it turned out. The cops stayed well away while the five people on the sidewalk yelled and clapped and got their pictures taken.

The crowd itself was mostly anti-war and anti-Bush. I saw one semi-pro-Kerry sign that read "Hairy Kerry is Better than Bush." That was the limit of the enthusiasm for the official choice Democratic party. People were carrying foam hands cut up to give the finger, blowup dolls of Bush the cowboy, and all sorts of signs. One girl had a photo compilation made up to look like Bush's face - the tiny photos were of 640 dead soldiers.

At one point a woman started passing around flyers which turned out to claim that the U.S. built the World Trade Center specifically to collapse. A yuppie-ish couple behind me got the flyers and the man got into the woman's face about her lies. "3,000 people died!" His girlfriend held him back and pointed out another protester tearing up the flyer into neat tiny little pieces. "See, she doesn't buy it."

The protest was originally scheduled for three hours but by an hour and a half in the crowd wanted to get to Fox. Christina and I made plans to go and just as I started walking away, the crowd started flowing to the Fox building. They got all the way to catty-corner, and we all got some good yelling in. I got tired and began staring at some scary older man and his girl Friday with a video camera. They were standing right over the barricade from me, and the man was scribbling down things on a notepad like a reporter out of a movie. Every once in a while he would smirk and say something, and his assistant would grin back and nod, basking in his world-weary wisdom for he has seen the world, and put it in his Rite Aid notebook. I couldn't make out what paper they were from, they just had the authorizations for the conventions round their necks. Maybe they were hiding their true place of employment, the evil fuckers!

Eventually I got tired and caught the subway home. C. was there in pissed-off glory, angry that we got separated. I was pissed at her because after all her blathering on about how she had to "do something," what she did was call her mom to tell her that she was at a protest. She wasn't fighting the man, she was fighting her mom. Rebel!

The protest - well, I protested. I'm sure it made absolutely no impact. Most of the people we were yelling and waving our fists at weren't even there - the protest started well after work hours and the city was half-deserted anyway. Not surprisingly, the actual protest wasn't heavily covered. The one "mainstream" (I use the term loosely) paper to mention the protest was the Washington Times, in the last paragraph of a story devoted to the triumph of Fox News in the ratings. Nobody outside of the groups that already read sites like Democracy Now would find out what happened. As a pep rally for a group of people, it worked, I guess.

That's what really makes me sad - here are people who are genuinely angry at the system, yet the odds of doing anything about it through political means are so highly rigged against them that they're reduced to standing in pens yelling at buildings from across the street, at hours of the day and night where nobody can see them. Maybe a few people will be converted who are standing right there, but anyone outside a two block radius wouldn't know it happened at all unless they heard Bill O'Reilly or someone like him mocking the protesters or calling them terrorists. Apparently at one point in time protest was a weapon - now it's a sideshow.

But then I feel bad about thinking that way - after all, I'm some schlub who got dragged in by someone who has, to be charitable, an unfocussed idea of her political intent. I sympathize but I'm not active, so who knows what's really going on that I'm not seeing? Maybe this is part of the birth of a real political movement, where the left will finally have a voice in American politics. God knows the pendulum can't swing any farther in the other direction, right? Maybe I'm shortsighted. And maybe next time I'll pick the march.

For those of you who could care less, here is a celebrity sighting second (third?) hand - C. saw Lizzie Grubman get out of an SUV as we walked towards 6th. I missed it, alas, just like I couldn't really make out Parker Posey eating a muffin months ago. Everyone and their damn dog's mother has seen Parker Posey.