2004-08-28 - 1:59 a.m.
So the republicans are descending on New York and the city hums in a blanket of humid anticipation while the cops create metal and concrete barricades around Madison Square Garden. I am already spitting a lot of bile about the ways they promise to exploit September 11th and the grief New Yorkers (and people around the country) experienced in order to push their scary agenda. I am sure that I will spend plenty of time over the next week being more angry than hopeful, more confused about how a group of powerful people can ignore almost a whole city (or a whole country, really) and invoke their name/location while creating policy and legislation that directly screws this place over (for more information on this, check out Jack Newfield’s article Bush To City:Drop Dead which was published in the April 19, 2004 issue of The Nation and is available on their web archives at www.thenation.com).
At the moment though I am feeling something quite unexpected and very exciting. The city has been a hive of preparatory activity and I have seen so many people already planning and putting forth neat projects, whether it be poetry readings, newspapers, t-shirts, bike rides, conferences, art shows, marches, discussions, rock shows, that I figure if these jerks are going to come to our city and continue to mess things up for us, at least they created an opportunity for us to utilize where we can come together in our dissent. I have felt an energy that reminds me why I love New York as I printed anti-Bush posters at Emily’s studio (they have a spelling mistake, but other than that they are a lovely brown/pink combo talking about unemployment in NYC under Bush), attending some of the Life After Capitalism conference last weekend, handing out “I Am New York City” papers (interviews with NYC community activists put out by counterconvention.org), going through all of the amazing riffRAG submissions with MLE and Felix, or printing t-shirts with rats and pigeons on them that say “Please Do Not Feed the Republicans” and “New York Says: GOP Out of NYC” in our kitchen. It’s felt really positive and though I don’t know how we can create a different world than the one the rich and powerful want us to live in, I am remembering that there is so much more than their vision. We can and do create our own visions of the world and it is so important to share them and live them as best we can.
Critical Mass tonight was huge and felt really stressful to me at times- I kept wondering when the moment we would all be arrested would be. The police mostly waited until the end, where they made 250 arrests around St. Mark’s Church. Fucking lame. The news is all sensationalizing it of course, but check out www.nyc.indymedia.org for a blow by blow. I did feel good though, a way to remind myself that these are our streets, not the republican party’s, though it also felt like the cops were toying with us and trying to set the tone for the arrests they will make next week. More venom and bile (and some sparks of hope) to come, I am sure.
