It seemed like a pretty simple premise. The Students’ Administrative Council was helping to send a contingent of students down to New York City to protest the Republican National Convention-a week long, highly scripted showcase of the President of the United States. SAC invited The Varsity to cover the event. In conjunction with the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War – an anti-war organization attempting to send a message to the administration of George W. Bush-SAC would chip in about $1500 dollars to help finance the cost of transporting interested students to the protest, which would precede the opening of the convention on August 30. Along with a highly organized collection of labor unions, human rights organizations, minority and woman’s groups, and just about anyone else with a grudge against George W. Bush, 141 Canadians on three buses would leave from Toronto, cross the border, travel all night, march in the protest, and return to Canada.
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I originally heard about the trip by way of an editorial in The Newspaper. In an August 12 opinion piece, Noel Semple lambasted SAC for politicizing its funding, and alleged SAC was sending its execs on a holiday to NYC. Sam Rahimi, SAC’s external vice-president, was one of my guests that day on the weekly U of T radio news show I co-host. I asked him about the editorial on the air, and what he thought of Semple’s claims-that the trip was a hastily conceived summer spending spree. He defended the trip ardently. As the interview grew more rancorous, (he had called George Bush a terrorist and a murder by the end of the segment) he seemed furious that I was questioning the use of the money. After the show was over, he told me he had wanted The Varsity to cover the story, and if I thought the trip was a waste of money, then I should be the one to go. After getting the editorial okay, I agreed, telling Rahimi that I would write a scathing front-page news article about him if the trip began to lean in the direction of a Fifth Avenue shopping excursion, as opposed to a political outing. Like I said, simple premise. What I ended up attending was the most massive political gathering I had ever experienced, and the editors of The Varsity thought a feature about the trip itself – and the largest protest of a political convention in American history-was in order.
I was originally hesitant to write a first-person account of the trip, but given that the political circumstances surrounding the allocation of the money had been written about in several campus newspapers, including this one, I thought a first-person account of the protest might be in order as well. I agreed to do a feature piece and wrote about what I saw. This isn’t meant to be a complete account of the trip, only my account.
About a week before the departure date, the protestors who were signed up to go gathered at Toronto’s former municipal complex, Metrohall, to discuss the logistics of the excursion. The interest in the trip was growing due to local media coverage, and a third bus had been added to accommodate the volume of people who wanted to go. The hour meeting was broken down into three parts: The bus, the border, and the protest. Three soft-spoken and articulate organizers from the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War (TCSW) outlined how we would be getting to New York, and what some of the hazards of the trip would be. As a person who generally digests politics in newspapers, I was genuinely surprised to learn about some of the risks that protestors take while making a political statement on the street. The legal advisor to the TCSW advised everyone to write the name of an American legal hotline in indelible ink on his or her arm in case of arrest, and gave the group some easy to remember tips in case of detention. None of the members of our group actually got arrested, and the organizers told us at the meeting that the risk of being arrested at a large protest that has a permit is actually very small. Still, I wondered why we weren’t advised to write the number of the legal hotline on say, the tongues of our shoes, or on a slip of paper. Trying to push away the visual image of my naked body, soaked in pepper spray, sprawled on the floor of a filthy American jail was made easier by the fact that I had no plans to do anything more confrontational than take pictures of student’s union executives shopping instead of protesting.
For the record, I didn’t mange to catch any of the students on the trip doing anything illicit enough to warrant photographs, unless you consider chanting obscenities at George W. Bush in the sweltering New York heat illicit.
The other thing that stood out about the logistics meeting was how democratic it was. The organizers turned the floor over to the participants numerous times, and the older members of the group gave out unsolicited advice to everyone in the room. Everyone seemed equal, which felt unusual for a group of about fifty strangers. The meeting concluded, and the organizers told us to meet at the eastern edge of the University, just south of Bloor Street, the following Saturday.
When I arrived at the departure point, sleeping bag in hand, notebook ready, there was already a sizable gathering of people listening to organizer James Clarke talk over a loud speaker. Participants, as well as a few members of the television media were listening to a speech about the Bush administration. Three air-conditioned coaches were fueled and waiting, and we were advised to separate into groups depending on what coach we were traveling on. Two of the three buses were headed back to Toronto after the main protest concluded, and the last bus was staying the night in NYC to return the following day.
On the bus, I got my first good look at my U of T bus mates, and interviewed a few of them. I managed to speak to both a PhD student with a long history of activism, and a first-year who told me her decision to protest the Republican National Convention in New York was the most political choice she had ever made in her life. Most of the students on the trip that I spoke with were somewhere between these two extremes. Many had only the most peripheral involvement with the Student’s Administrative Council, and heard about the protest though their friends, via the SAC website, or were U of T students already members of either the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War or a group called the International Socialists-a political organization that prints the rather one-sided Toronto newspaper of the same name.
I learned after I got on the bus that I wasn’t the only person sent to cover the story of the protest. A journalist with the Toronto Star, as well as a documentary film crew from the CBC would be traveling with the group.
We left Toronto at around 7 p.m. Everything seems to proceed as bus trips do. The three coaches were pretty luxurious, and the movie was, fittingly, protest footage produced by a member of the TCSW. The footage of previous anti-war demonstrations in Toronto, their wintry scenes of protest strangely out of place as the August summer streaked by the bus windows, got us to the US border.
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It seemed as though it would be a breeze. We were told later that the US customs officials who strode down the aisles of the three coaches were the last of the evening shift. They checked our passports, and everything seemed in order. They didn’t pull anyone off the coaches for not having the correct documentation, and the official screening passengers on the bus I was traveling on left with out comment. Then we waited. And we waited and we waited. We could see the protestors on the bus ahead of us beginning to file off their coach, and into the US customs office. We continued to wait. And waited some more. Around hour three, a summer thunder storm descended on the Fort Erie US-Canada border crossing, and rain running down in sheets along the side of the bus began to obscure everything – the bus ahead of us melted into a wobbling gray mass. The flashing duty free sign next to our coach, just out of reach on the other side of the border, advertising cheap vodka and cigarettes, became unreadable. And we waited. Around midnight, I made out the rain-obscured forms of the occupants of the first bus returning to their vehicle. We were next. By the time the night shift of US customs invited the passengers of bus two into their office to have their passport rechecked and their luggage searched, it was into the early hours of the morning. Despite the delays, most of the people on my bus seemed jovial enough, if not a little tired out by the idleness of waiting. Most also seemed aware that the officials were only doing their jobs. I asked a few people why they thought we were being held up, and many seemed to suspect that a call to delay us came from higher up.
After about half an hour of waiting in line, bag in hand, I explained to a prim and almost friendly female customs official, standing below two smiling photographs of US Attorney General John Ashcroft, and US President George W. Bush, that I was a student journalist invited by the University of Toronto’s student’s union to write about the students marching in the protest. After a few brisk questions about the Saudi Arabian visitors visa in my Canadian passport, (my parents are ex-pats) I was sent to a second line near the exit door, where a gloved male officer repeated the same questions about my Saudi visa. The same explanation offered, he gave my bag a cursory glance, and I was handed back my passport. I had made it through.
Of the 141 protestors that approached the border, only five were turned away because they lacked the proper documentation. One was from U of T, and was not permitted entry into the United States because he was a minor, and didn’t have the required letter of permission from his parents. Three other protesters stayed behind to “stand in solidarity” with those turned away, as organizer James Clarke put it, and all of the group members who didn’t cross the border got a ride back to Toronto in a van that was following the coaches.
Most people seemed to have a pretty easy time with the US officials, but it was clear we were on their watch, and their watch was ticking pretty slowly. The last bus turned out to have someone traveling on board who was not a Canadian citizen, and US customs officials would not let that person cross the border. Since customs began screening the last bus after we pulled away, the last group didn’t make it to New York City until well after the protest began. As for our bus, the individuals that seemed to have the most problems were the CBC documentary film crew traveling with us. An organizer later told me that since the film crew would technically be “working” in the United States as journalists, their press credentials were heavily scrutinized. Mark, the crew’s producer, the looked so reproachful as he reboarded the bus, I was afraid to ask him what had happened. As we pulled away from the border, it was after one in the morning.
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We arrived in Manhattan at about noon the next day.
I think that Torontonians forget how lucky we are in Canada. For all the talk of under funded cities in this country, we overlook the fact that Toronto is a relatively clean and crime-free place to live. As one drives into New York, the romanticized New York City of the motion picture industry slides by in all its splendor, but after about an hour on the streets, it’s clear that below the familiar skyline, the gutters of the city are clogged with trash, and there is something intangibly grimy about everything you see and touch.
After a short banner waving session outside the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrews, just west of Central Park where the overnight members of the group were staying, and after Sam Rahimi and James Clarke had concluded interviews with CBS television, the contingent descended into New York’s squalid subways for a 10-minute ride south to the protest’s central assembly area.
The protest was organized so that participants could assemble in a set of city blocks south of Madison Square Garden, the site of the convention, and funnel up Fashion Avenue, turn east along 34th Street, and then march back down 5th Avenue to end up in Union Square - a large park near the protest's starting point with plenty of subway access. There had been radio reports that the protest was so large it had begun to bleed down Fashion Avenue ahead of schedule due to the lack of space in the assembly area.
When we ascended from the subway into the sunshine, the sheer volume of people on the street became apparent. It was of impossible to gauge the number of people in attendance. We would learn later that the numbers varied considerably depending on the media outlet reporting them – USA today ran a front page headline putting the number at one hundred thousand, and the New York Times quotes an unnamed NYPD official that put the number at around half a million. All you could really do was climb on something that elevated you slightly, and confirm that every inch of pavement was packed with bodies in either direction, as far as the eye could see. It was also apparent there was a pretty large cross section of Americans present. I was expecting mostly aging hippy activist types and angry anti-globalization punks, and there was a healthy number of both, but the crowd mostly seemed to be made up of, dress-wise anyway, average looking Americans.
Protest wasn’t the only reason many were in the crowd. People promoting events – political and otherwise – were handing out fliers, and many were selling a variety of products, from bottled water to food to clothing. I thought of an article by author Naomi Klein, recently published in The Nation magazine, analyzing the phenomenon of “Bush bashing.” Klein thinks “Bush bashing” has blinded activists from critiquing the policy agenda of the Bush White House. She contends that “Bush bushing” has boiled criticisms of the President down to his “Toxic Texan” personality, and such attacks are useless as political weapons because they are so unintelligent. Well, it appeared that at a gathering where the central defining characteristic is a dislike of George W. Bush, “Bush-bashing” had taken on the status of a cottage industry. Available for sale at various points along the protest were a wide variety of posters, pins, t-shirts, bumper-stickers, horns, hats, whistles, and just about anything else with a slogan-bearing capacity, accusing the President of being everything from the next Adolph Hitler, to the harbinger of World War III. Some of the cleverest placards I have ever seen were visible in the crowd, and unlike rallies for Canadian political candidates, where homogenized signs are routinely handed out, it was rare to see the same sign twice.
The TCSW contingent, all present after catching different subways, entered the slowly creeping river of people behind several hundred protestors that were carrying cardboard coffins in pairs, representing, presumably, dead American soldiers. While the coffins slid by, a massive TCSW banner was unfurled, and the group edged into the fray. Slowly shuffling up the street, most of the faces looked elated.
We did come across a small number of counter-protestors along 34th Street, about midway through the march. Separated from the main demonstration by police barricades and sidelined to the edges of the street, the counter-protestors traded insults with the marchers, and that was about all. One counter-protestor held a sign depicting John Kerry salsa dancing with Osama bin Laden, Kerry’s eyes replaced by communist sickles. While I personally would peg John Kerry as slightly to the right of former Canadian Prime Minster Joe Clarke, the sign seemed to capture the sentiment of the counter-protest, and some of the heckles emanating from it. On the whole however, the group looked a lot like the marchers: standard issue Americans. They just had a different political view, and there was a lot less of them.
In addition to protestors and counter-protestors, there was a healthy contingent of New York’s finest on hand. As the protest began, I didn’t register a lot of police presence, but near the end of the route, the police seemed almost ubiquitous. That’s not to say their numbers belied any bad behavior. From what I observed of the police, they were extremely well behaved. When asked if I could take his picture, an amiable NYPD officer shrugged and nodded, even flashing me a halfway smile as I lifted up my camera-hardly the NYPD of brutal reputation. The police, many of whom were jeered at almost all afternoon in the blazing sun, seemed relaxed and totally professional. Some members of our contingent, who apparently overlooked the fact that the police were present to protect the protestors as much as the occupants of Madison Square Garden, jeered too. It was the only point on the trip I felt uncomfortable being even peripherally associated with the group, and the jeering reminded me that we were all guests in a foreign country.
I was also struck by just how boring militant protest is to cover. By the time the group reached the halfway mark on the route, I had enough pictures to cover the story, and I had heard enough repetitive anti-establishment chanting to last a lifetime. I slipped away from the contingent and headed a little further up the street. When I reached Madison Square Garden, the hissing and screaming had reached an almost fever pitch. “Shame!” “Go Home!” “Pull Out Now!”-they all mingled together to form an almost incoherent barrage of insults-all of them directed at a building.
Some of the insults that day were a little better coordinated. There was a full marching band, all painted green for effect, which sang anti-Bush chants in between belting out crowd-pleasing swing numbers. There was a large green dragon, a banner almost the entire width of the four-lane street, and even a nubile-looking Statue of Liberty on stilts. Portions of the spectacle could have been mistaken for a circus, if the morass of performers weren’t all walking in one direction.
As the day wore on, the crowd got more muted. As the last of the wilted cardboard coffin-holders trudged into Union Square, the ambient sound reminded me of a crowded shopping mall. It seemed as though the militancy and energy present earlier on in the day had evaporated with the heat. Near the end of the protest, organizers for United for Peace and Justice (the umbrella organization coordinating the protest) were asking people via megaphone to get on the subways and go home, as the park just couldn’t accommodate the numbers of people streaming into it. Most seemed pretty happy to oblige, if only to get out of the heat.
Back on the bus, I caught a sense of the exhilaration and the sheer exhaustion among those headed back to Toronto. Soaked in a film and sweat and sunscreen, I curled up into the fetal position, thinking sleep was the best option for the trip home. I began considering under what circumstances a tedious bus trip, followed by eight hours on one’s feet in the sun, holding a banner and screaming angry things at the top of one’s lungs, could be construed a holiday. It felt as though I had just closed my eyes when a rather surly Canada Customs employee awakened me. We were crossing the border back into Canada. This time our inspection took less than 10 minutes. I was asleep again before the bus pulled away.
