Conventional Wisdom: The RNC Hits New York

All eyes in the United States were on New York city this week, as Repub­li­cans held their national con­ven­tion in my home­town. While I had ini­tially con­sid­ered skip­ping town, I ended up stay­ing in the city and vol­un­teer­ing with the New York chap­ter of the ACLU. Fol­low­ing is a quick sum­mary of some of the expe­ri­ences I’ve had dur­ing this incred­i­ble time.

Before the convention

For New York­ers, the Repub­li­can effort started becom­ing vis­i­ble weeks ago, as police tight­ened up the area. Liv­ing only a few blocks from Madi­son Square Gar­den, where con­ven­tion­eers gath­ered, I started to real­ize with some level of con­cern that this con­ven­tion had the poten­tial of being a major annoy­ance. Rumors were fly­ing high of the poten­tial of some pub­lic trans­porta­tion being shut down and, in the absence of actual infor­ma­tion from the city (since none of the plans beyond street clo­sures were revealed until the last minute), most New York­ers made do with rumors.

Feel­ing that I needed to take a break and fig­ur­ing that this might be a good time to skip town, I started plan­ning on tak­ing time off from work for con­ven­tion week sev­eral months in advance. It then hit me that the mass hys­te­ria stirred up by some of the more extreme news­pa­per (The NY Post, for exam­ple) was just media peo­ple play­ing around with facts that had lit­tle ground­ing in real­ity. Besides, hav­ing been through town on 9/11 and then again dur­ing last year’s black­out, I fig­ured that New York­ers had the guts and resolve to face any chal­lenge. Com­bined with the lure of being close to a hot story, this left me with the deci­sion to stick around.

The next ques­tion became how to best expe­ri­ence this. Of course, I knew that I had lit­tle chance to get into the con­ven­tion itself but its perime­ter seemed to offer a mil­lion inter­est­ing sto­ries. With hun­dreds of thou­sands of pro­test­ers at the ready, it seemed to me that a poten­tially huge story could be devel­op­ing out­side the con­ven­tion cen­ter, directly on the streets of Manhattan.

The First Amendment

One of the rea­son I love liv­ing in the United States is its con­sti­tu­tion and attached bill of rights. Go read it, if you haven’t already. It’s quite a combo and of course, com­ing out of jour­nal­ism, I fell deeply enam­ored with the first amend­ment and its pro­tec­tion of the press. How­ever, re-reading it recently, I became more keenly aware of its other parts:

“Con­gress shall make no law respect­ing an estab­lish­ment of reli­gion, or pro­hibit­ing the free exer­cise thereof; or abridg­ing the free­dom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the peo­ple peace­ably to assem­ble, and to peti­tion the Gov­ern­ment for a redress of grievances.”

These con­sid­er­a­tions, in an age of increas­ing uncer­tainty in the bal­ance of civil lib­er­ties ver­sus secu­rity, have led me to be a con­trib­u­tor to the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union, a group that works hard to ensure that the gov­ern­ment lives by this promise.

As a con­trib­u­tor, I get to receive the newslet­ter for the local New York chap­ter and had recently learned from it that there would be a store­front estab­lished dur­ing the Repub­li­can con­ven­tion as part of a wider cam­paign to pro­tect the rights of pro­test­ers. This seemed like a great fit for me and I walked in there on the Sat­ur­day prior to the con­ven­tion, ask­ing if they needed vol­un­teers. They did and I signed up to start on the fol­low­ing Mon­day, the first day of the convention.

Protest­ing

I am not a rad­i­cal left­ist. Nor am I on the right. The best way I could pos­si­bly describe myself on the polit­i­cal spec­trum would prob­a­bly be extreme cen­trist. I believe almost reli­giously in the genius of cap­i­tal­ism. That belief is only trumped by my belief in what I would call “Cap­i­tal D Democ­racy”: A gov­ern­ment of the peo­ple, by the peo­ple and for the peo­ple. Com­ing from Europe, I may have a dif­fer­ent view from most Amer­i­cans when it comes to social issues. I strongly believe that any­one should have access to free health care and free high grade edu­ca­tion. Because those sit at the core of my polit­i­cal belief, and because I grew up polit­i­cally through the Bush father admin­is­tra­tion, fol­lowed by the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion, I would prob­a­bly qual­ify as a fairly con­ser­v­a­tive (small d) demo­c­rat in the United States.

Over the past cou­ple of years, I must say that I’ve drifted a lit­tle fur­ther into that camp, as a direct result of what I’ve expe­ri­enced and what I read. As every­one knows, Sep­tem­ber 11th was a hor­ri­ble day, when many of us lost friends in the Twin Tow­ers. Look­ing back at that time, I still feel that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion did a great job by going into Afghanistan to dis­lo­cate the Tal­iban, which had been a long-time sup­porter of Al-Qaeda. I know that it must have been hard to do so, as no pres­i­dent really wants to put sol­diers in harm’s way. The Afghani mis­sion was an impor­tant one and one that still needs more sup­port than it gets.

How­ever, as many New York­ers, I felt blind­sided when the admin­is­tra­tion decided to start mak­ing the case for going into Iraq. I had read a fair amount about Iraq and the mid­dle east region in gen­eral. As far as I could tell from all the news­pa­pers and mag­a­zine reports I was read­ing, Sadam Hus­sein was a mega­lo­ma­niac who would do any­thing to hold on to power. After being rebuffed from Kuwait by an inter­na­tional coali­tion led by Bush pere, he had focused inland, using chem­i­cal weapons against the Kurds in order to avoid hav­ing them over­throw him. For the fol­low­ing decade, the United Sta­tions enforced sanc­tions that con­tained him while look­ing for more infor­ma­tion about what types of weapons he had. He kept stonewalling them on two major issues: chem­i­cal and nuclear weapons. I per­son­ally believe that this was a tac­ti­cal moved aimed at deal­ing with inter­nal Iraqi issues: By stonewalling the UN, he ensured that ques­tions would be raised as to how many of those weapons he could have. If word that he held chem­i­cal weapons came back into Iraq, along with the remem­brance of what he did to Kurds, peo­ple would be afraid to attempt an upris­ing. Sim­i­larly, if word was spread that he had a nuclear pro­gram, Iran might stay more quiet.

In fall 2002, then CIA-director Tenet tes­ti­fied before Con­gress about the Iraqi thread. His belief at the time (or at least what he told sen­a­tors) was that involv­ing our­selves in Iraq would only increase the ter­ror­ist threat. Hav­ing lived through 9/11, the words increase and threat were not the ones I wanted to hear. At the time, reports from the United States and Europe also pointed out that there was no cred­i­ble reports of evi­dence link­ing Iraq and Al-Qaeda. This was all pub­lic infor­ma­tion avail­able in late 2002 (I do read a lot on the Inter­net, not only by using RSS feeds but also vis­it­ing the web sites of sev­eral news sources in the United States, United King­dom, and France). This led me to believe that the Iraqi threat was being over­stated. How­ever, try­ing to keep an open mind, I lis­ten to argu­ments from the admin­is­tra­tion and, for every point they would make, there would be tens of rebut­tal points com­ing from Euro­pean publications.

I started to feel that peo­ple liv­ing in the US were being bam­boo­zled so I started lis­ten­ing more closely to the peo­ple advo­cat­ing peace. I did not agree with all of them (I believe war is some­times nec­es­sary) but I did agree with them that this threat­ened con­flict (at the time, the war had not started) was one that was unnec­es­sary. I joined demon­stra­tions, I met smart peo­ple there. Over time, I became more acquainted with the issues sur­round­ing them. While I dis­agreed with the most extrem­ist ele­ments, I believed in their rights to free speech.

Last year on Feb­ru­ary 15, a huge march was impeded by the police, which would not let peo­ple get to the proper loca­tion of the rally and where police­men would pro­vide mis­lead­ing infor­ma­tion to peo­ple who were try­ing to legally join the march. The tac­tics prompted an ACLU law­suit which resulted in orders by the court for the police to alter their prac­tices. Know­ing this, I still approached the largest protest set for August 29th with a lit­tle apprehension.

It turned out that I didn’t need to. The police worked hard to keep the peace while respect­ing the rights of pro­tester. Count­less times, I saw police offi­cers doing their job as they should, ensur­ing that things would work out and that pro­test­ers could stay safe. With half a mil­lion peo­ple tak­ing to the streets of Man­hat­tan and a police con­tin­gent that num­bered in the thou­sands, it turned out to be a really great event and made me feel bet­ter about the week that was to come up. All the ten­sion that had existed prior to the protests start­ing seemed to dis­si­pate and free speech was respected, just as the found­ing fathers would have it.

With pro­test­ers as far as the eyes could see (45 blocks of solidly packed peo­ple were taken over by the protest), my wife and I joined the 1000 coffins group, which hon­ored the mem­ory of fallen Amer­i­can sol­diers in Iraq, all the while mak­ing a pow­er­ful state­ment on the impact of this war on our troops.

At the end of the protest route, I had the chance to wit­ness a crowd of hun­dreds of peo­ple fold­ing Amer­i­can flags in a way that was both respect­ful and legal.

The New York Observer

On Mon­day, after some basic train­ing on what to do and what to watch for, I made my first foray in the field. The police pres­ence was strong at every event but, for the most parts, things would run OK dur­ing day­light. Once night fell, how­ever, it seemed that the police turned into Mr. Hyde, arrest­ing peace­ful pro­test­ers rather quickly and work­ing in an intim­i­dat­ing fash­ion oth­er­wise. Many of the clashes I per­son­ally wit­nessed were at night, prob­a­bly as much the result of exhaus­tion (I don’t know how long the police shifts were but it seems that nerves were more frayed towards the end of the day, lead­ing me to con­clude that some of the offi­cers may have been tired).

Much of what a legal observer does is very sim­i­lar to what a jour­nal­ist does. Largely, the job of a jour­nal­ist in the field is to sit around the loca­tion of an event and talk to peo­ple, hop­ing to get some juicy bit. Often, it’s just sit­ting around wait­ing for some­thing to hap­pen. In the case of legal mon­i­tors, the sit­u­a­tion is sim­i­lar; you sit (or stand) around, check­ing whether fenc­ing is locked or not, and even­tu­ally post your­self in a loca­tion where it is likely that some­thing would hap­pen. You then idle around that loca­tion until some­thing hap­pens, and then start tak­ing notes, observ­ing whether police­men are doing their job prop­erly and call­ing in to the main office if infrac­tions are very seri­ous and could lead to fur­ther trou­ble. Your job is, how­ever, not as a par­tic­i­pant but an observer.

Occa­sion­ally, you cross the line into a more active role, at the request of one of the two actors (pro­test­ers or cops) ask­ing you to step in. For exam­ple, I was asked by a cop if I could work as a liai­son to help relay an inquiry to the leader of a protest group. After putting the top offi­cer in charge on the scene with the lead orga­nizer in touch with each other, I watched the inter­ac­tion to ensure that the police was not try­ing to abuse its power. The dis­cus­sion between the two peo­ple was tense but cor­dial and an agree­ment was quickly struck, lead­ing to an even­tual change of loca­tion for the pro­tester so they would not block reg­u­lar pedes­trian traf­fic and a pull-back from the police force so they would not seem as intim­i­dat­ing to pro­test­ers. This was an exam­ple of the two groups work­ing together properly.

While police and pro­test­ers danced around each oth­ers, with legal mon­i­tors and observers like myself check­ing the scene out, other peo­ple seemed intent on dis­turb­ing this tight chore­og­ra­phy. At ground zero, a woman looked at my ACLU T-shirt and exclaimed “the ACLU, those free speech Nazis” (empha­sis is mine).

How­ever, at times, there were fail­ures. I wit­nessed such a fail­ure at ground zero on Tues­day when police worked with a group called the War Resisters League decided to start a march from ground zero to Madi­son Square Gar­den. The police worked out what seemed like an agree­ment to let pro­test­ers go through their march with­out a per­mit and then, a few min­utes later, changed its mind and arrested a num­ber of peo­ple. The Jekyll and Hyde nature of such inci­dent can be con­sid­ered fairly wor­ri­some and a true threat to democracy.

Repub­li­cans in the Square, Dancers in Ele­phant country

For­tu­nately, the real spirit of democ­racy could also be felt this week and it came for a bi-partisan effort to work together. On Tues­day night, a group of about half a dozen Repub­li­cans skipped their atten­dance at the con­ven­tion and headed down to Union Square, where many of the pro­test­ers were gath­er­ing. A dizzy­ing array of dis­cus­sions ensued as peo­ple from the com­plete polit­i­cal spec­trum engage in debate for most of the evening. Groups gath­ered to lis­ten in, some­times throw­ing extra dis­cus­sion points into the flow. Con­ver­sa­tions cov­ered such a wide range of issues such as the recent success/failure of the war in Iraq, the econ­omy, edu­ca­tional reform, job pro­grams, envi­ron­men­tal issues, gen­eral for­eign pol­icy, etc… Kudos to those repub­li­cans for hav­ing the guts to enter their ene­mies’ ter­ri­tory and be will­ing to engage into longer dis­cus­sion on pol­icy mat­ters. If such thing were hap­pen­ing more fre­quently, we would be bet­ter off as a country.

Sadly, how­ever, the cur­rent tenor of the polit­i­cal dia­logue seem to be far from such mat­ters. When dis­cus­sion sur­round­ing can­di­dates are lim­ited to “George Bush is a baby-killer” or “John Kerry is a flip-flopper”, the sys­tem needs fix­ing and it is incum­bent on every­one to get involved in cre­at­ing that fix. There are approx­i­mately two months between now and the US pres­i­den­tial elec­tion so I would urge all my read­ers in the United States to do the fol­low­ing: find some­one you dis­agree with polit­i­cally, and agree to go out to lunch at least once a week to dis­cuss polit­i­cal mat­ters. Sim­i­larly, put pres­sure on politi­cians to dis­cuss issues of sub­stance. Whether John Kerry should have received two or three pur­ple hearts in Viet­nam, or whether George Bush did not tend to his national guards duties dur­ing the same era will have lit­tle rel­e­vance on the future of the coun­try. What does, how­ever, is how they see the future of the coun­try. There are sub­stan­tial dif­fer­ences in how the dif­fer­ent can­di­dates view the world. Dig in, get informed, and go out and get other peo­ple to do the same. It’s part of the home­work required to make a democ­racy work.

And remem­ber that it can all be fun. While there is some home­work, there are occa­sional recesses and some­times some out and out silli­ness. John Perry Bar­low put together some Dance Flash Mobs which were quite a blast to fol­low. Imag­ine a basic street crowd. Peo­ple are walk­ing around, traf­fic is busy. All of sud­den, some­one turns on a boom box. Three quar­ters of the crowd start swerv­ing, slowly; build­ing, build­ing, and then, all of the sud­den, it’s a street party, with 15 to 20 peo­ple out in the street, danc­ing their hearts out. One has to admit that it is a very effec­tive form of protest. A sud­den deriva­tion from the norm by a large group of “nor­mal look­ing” peo­ple can cre­ate quite a dis­con­nect. If you’re a New Yorker, you find such vari­a­tions gen­er­ally amus­ing, part of the great thing about liv­ing in the city. Based on my obser­va­tion at one of the event, that may not be the case if you’re from out of town. They’re is some­thing a lit­tle crazy that feel a lit­tle threat­en­ing. Your real­ity gets shaken for a moment, you pause, not sure of how to react and by the time you real­ize what hap­pened, the crowd has moved on.

Protest Tech

Of course, I couldn’t resist going a whole post with­out stick­ing in some thoughts on tech­nol­ogy. For the most part, tech­nol­ogy at these events was more inter­est­ing because of its per­va­sive­ness, rather than any sin­gle tech­nolo­gies being of inter­est. I’ve learned that the police did use some cam­eras with head mounted dis­plays for mon­i­tor­ing but I do see any. What I did see, how­ever, was heavy use of tech­nolo­gies like text-messaging and push-to-talk tele­phones to coör­di­nate protest efforts. It’s inter­est­ing to me that those are now part of the protester’s arse­nal as they pro­vide with quick ways to deploy small to medium sized groups across a grid. When flash mobs hap­pened last year as a sum­mer diver­sion, I did not imag­ine the poten­tial they could have in the polit­i­cal world. Wit­ness­ing events this week, I’ve come to real­ize that flash mobs can have a tremen­dous power in reshap­ing polit­i­cal dia­logue by quickly cre­at­ing and dis­band­ing protest groups. This will prob­a­bly be a chal­lenge for law enforce­ment offi­cials want­ing to con­trol such thing as they might have dif­fi­cul­ties to locate such events in the future. One could con­sider those to be essen­tially guer­rilla tac­tics empow­ered by tech­nol­ogy and they can rep­re­sent of fairly pow­er­ful com­po­nent of new protests.

The other bit of sur­prise, to me, was to impor­tance blogs have taken for some peo­ple. At one of the events, I was chat­ting with one of the observers, wait­ing for a group of con­spir­acy the­o­rist (yes, their the­o­ries are pro­tected by the first amend­ment too) to wrap up their protest so I could move on to some­thing more inter­est­ing. Some guy seemed to be get­ting a lot of media so I asked the observer if he knew what the deal was with that guy. “He’s a major star. You should check out his web­site at…” I don’t remem­ber the guys name but did check out his site. Basi­cally, it was a badly designed con­spir­acy the­ory site run by a guy who seems to have his own online stream­ing show. When upper mid­dle class peo­ple (the observer is actu­ally a lawyer for a big firm) look at peo­ple as big stars because they have a web­site and a radio stream, you know the Inter­net has become pretty pervasive.