by Stanley Rogouski, 4/13/06
On Monday, in lower Manhattan, I saw two unwritten versions
of the future. On one hand, a great mass of people from every ethnic group in
the city and almost that many foreign countries came together to protest the
obscenity that is HH4437. On the other hand, in the form of hundreds of police
barricades, a police force the size of a small army, and in the ability of a
sophisticated and repressive big city government to shame and intimidate
100,000 people I saw the power of the state to make HH4437 a reality.
HH4437, in case you haven’t been paying close attention to
the issue, is the draconian immigration bill that passed the House and is
currently stalled in the Senate. Not only would it immediately criminalize all
12 million undocumented immigrants in one cruel stroke of the pen, it would
also make it a felony for the rest of us even to help an undocumented immigrant
stay in the country.
As I made my way down Broadway, evading the police where I
could and retreating when I had to, then finally making it down to City Hall
Park, I noticed, to my dismay, that every block between Church Street and
Broadway had been shut down by the NYPD unless you had the proper documents. Oh
the irony was perfect. Papers please! Where’s your press pass? Do you live on
the block? What’s your business in the area? I’m not from a privileged family.
My ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower. But all four of my grandparents
were born in the United States. My father served in the Marine Corps. And here
I was, underdressed in the chill of an early spring evening, passing block
after block, hoping that I would be allowed only to make a right turn and
return to the demonstration, but to no avail, feeling exactly like an illegal
immigrant, that I was a criminal simply for walking down a public sidewalk.
I tried to imagine what it would be like if the very worst
possibilities of the Bush regime came true. What if we invaded Iran? I’m not
Paul Krugman, Michael Moore or Cindy Sheehan, but what would happen if they
brought back the draft and needed to suppress any and all dissent and I became
a target? It’s not beyond the realm of possibility. When they unlocked the FBI
records of Mario Savio, they discovered that (in the 1960s) he had been on a list
of key activists who were to be rounded up and detained in the event they
declared martial law. Would I be able to evade the state if it came after me?
No, I concluded. The NYPD knew the area better than I did.
They had anticipated every move I would make to evade them. When I managed to
slip around two surly patrolmen on the corner of Chambers Street who were
momentarily distracted by two yuppies upset that they couldn’t get to the 6
train, I strode down the sidewalk, feeing elated, only to discover that there
were two more patrolman in the middle of the block. ‘What the fuck did I think
I was doing?’ they snarled. I had better get back to Church street if I knew
what was good for me.
When I finally made it back to Broadway and looked up at the
huge television screens, where earlier I had seen Hillary Clinton, Chuck
Schumer and Elliot Spitzer, praise the ideals of American democracy behind
police barricades, I had come to the conclusion there would also be no savior
from the Democratic Party. Hadn’t the speakers looked down at the barricades
from the stage past row after row of policemen at the very people they claimed
to speak for and yet, couldn’t mix with? Were we really so frightening that we
needed this small army, these barricades, this well thought out plan of battle
against us just to keep us under control?
Actually yes, I concluded as I looked at the faces of the
police and soaked in their contempt, their lack of respect, and their
aggression. The only thing keeping us behind these barricades was our own fear
and our own respect for authority. There was no way I as an individual I could
evade the repression of the state, but as one member of a crowd of 100,000
people it would be easy. Had the cops just pushed one more women or scared one
more little girl or humiliated one more hard working immigrant in front of his
wife and kids, the crowd could have easily just surged past the barricades and
nothing in the world could have stopped them. Perhaps only the threat was
enough.
All of the marches across the country together had succeeded
magnificently. Just when it looked as the Democrats were, as usual, going to
back down to the Republicans, the march in Los Angeles smashed into our
consciousness and changed the terms of debate in a way that no democratic
politician would have dared. Then when it looked as if the nativists, the
racists, the right-wing republican crypto fascists were going to succeeded in
demonizing the immigrants for flying too many Mexicans flags, the immigrants
themselves turned on a time and presented the whole country with a spectacle no
one could deny, millions upon millions of immigrants marching, in Dallas, in
New York, in Chicago with thousands and thousands of American flags. In the
mainstream press, on photo blogs, on cable TV the image of a Mexican immigrant
literally wrapped in the stars and stripes became an iconic figure, a new
symbol that, only a few weeks before, very few of us could have even imagined.
Where I had previously seen the American flag as something
hateful people put up on their SUVs next to their ‘9/11 Terrorist Hunting
Permits’ and ‘Jane Fonda Traitor Commie Bitch’ decals, I now saw it as the
uniform of a great mass of people demanding their rights as Americans. For the
moment, HH4437 was dead. The cops controlled the streets but we controlled the
national debate. Brute force and contempt had come face to face with a mass of
color and energy and the day ended in a stalemate. History is full of examples
where people who had right on their side fought against tremendous odds and
were victorious. And it is also full of examples of people passively hoping to
wait it out, only to get swallowed up by a horror beyond what they ever
imagined. The future is unwritten. WHICH ONE WE GET IS UP TO US.