Massive march Sunday will protest the Republican National Convention in New York City

Marching after all

by Geov Parrish

On Sunday, despite all the legal roadblocks put in its way, a massive march will protest the Republican National Convention in New York City. The march — expected by its organizers, United for Peace and Justice, to draw a quarter of a million people — is the kickoff for what will doubtless be a week of tense standoff between anti-Bush protesters and the largest security apparatus ever assembled for a national political party convention.

Even getting this far has been no easy task. It took months of negotiations and court battles to arrive at a march route that would go directly past the RNC’s Madison Square Garden site, and more court battles that ultimately struck down a proposed Central Park rally afterwards. But it is here — not in the restrained, measured tones of the Kerry campaign — that the depth and passion of the case against George Bush will be found.

Generally, protests don’t reach such a size unless a wide variety of constituencies are mobilized to turn out. In Sunday’s case, over 350 groups have endorsed the march, including Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, and 9-11 families. The latter is a direct response to the Republican attempt to exploit the memory of 9-11 by selecting New York City for its convention site and holding the convention as close as possible to the anniversary of the attack.

That attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq being fought in its name are only the most prominent of the endless reasons for people to protest the RNC’s celebration of the Reign of Dubya. There’s the Bush economic malaise, the record deficits, the cutbacks on social spending, the environmental depredations, the corporate corruption, the Bush Administration’s lack of international cooperation, the assault on civil liberties, Guantanamo Bay and Abu-Ghraib... and on, and on. The march will, in its sheer numbers and diversity, make the compelling case against Bush that the Kerry campaign seems so reluctant to make.

Naturally, this has meant that protesters must be kept as far away from both convention-goers and media as possible. During the convention itself, the now-notorious "Free Speech Zone" will doubtless be located somewhere in Queens, as far away from Madison Square Garden as possible. A number of groups, including War Resisters League, have announced plans for nonviolent civil disobedience, and the FBI has for weeks been visiting homes around the country of key protest organizers. For the protests beyond Sunday, the prospects for preemptive arrests and other assaults on the right to dissent, similar to what happened at the RNC in Philadelphia in 2000, seem fairly high.

It’s a risk that needs to be taken. The political conventions, particularly the 2000 ones in Philly and Los Angeles, along with last month’s DNC shindig in Boston, have become key battlegrounds in the right to dissent itself. The FBI visits were conducted as a supposed investigation into the potential for terrorist attack — as though a stray anarchist is a "threat" on a par with Al-Qaeda. One of the hallmarks of the Bush Administration has been the use of 9-11 as a pretext for harassing legitimate dissent by ordinary Americans. But even before 9-11, at the 2000 conventions, the aftermath of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle resulted in a security apparatus that seemed to treat protest, any protest, as a criminal matter.

As the legal contest between organizers and the city has played out in the courts and media, polls suggest that a majority of New Yorkers think the protesters have every right to be there. They do, of course. And while TV coverage is likely to stay inside most of the time, the message carried by the people locked outside the MSG "security envelope" is one not to be ignored. What gives John Kerry a good chance of being the next president is not the stirring visage of Kerry himself, but the depth of passion of the people opposing Bush. For those who care to see it, that passion will be on full display Sunday. It’s a shame the city, and the FBI, doesn’t seem to think it has a legitimate place in our political discourse.

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