The following would probably be worth of what my high school
history teachers used to call a “primary source.” Essentially, this is a first-hand
account of a marcher in the People’s March for Climate Change. I'm excited about it because:
1)
I was one of 400,000 marchers/screamers.
2)
This was my first political march in college…as well as
ever, unless visiting an occupied Zucotti Park counts. Does Pride Parade in
Columbus count? Both had overlapping vibes with my experience today. Regardless,
today’s political march was my first as a college student, and I haven’t even
been one for a month.
Last night I did a quick google search of “The People’s
March” to find that similar marches were happening in cities all over the
world, including Sydney, Melbourne, Jakarta, Istanbul, Paris, London, etc. I
suppose the internationalism made sense, since these marches are all leading up
to a United Nations climate summit. And so I kept asking myself “Why am I
getting involved? I’m not particularly passionate about the environment.” My
own answers:
1)
This is part of the college experience! Or the New York
experience! Go to a rally and get arrested1, right? I didn’t have to
go to Oberlin to be an activist!
2)
How much control do I have over climate change? How
much control do 400,000 people have over climate change? How much control does
Obama have over climate change? Where might I find these answers? By talking to
the thousands of activists lined up for blocks and blocks and blocks!
3)
My dear friends from high school, NYU and AU were gonna
be there. So was my long-lost (as far as I’m concerned) second cousin2.
Ditto for my uncle and his friends. Maybe I would get to catch up with some of
these people.
So those are some of the reasons why I dragged myself out of
bed [not really all that] early and met the other SLC kids by the science
building so that we could all ride the Metro North line down to Grand Central
Terminal together. There were maybe 60 of us. Between the station and the march
on 69th street/West Central Park Avenue we lost more and more student, dwindling down
to maybe 20. They had a solid crowd. I ditched them from the subway station on
72nd to hang out with NYU on 69th. I fast-walked down
some avenue, counting down the streets as I passed them. After a brief stroll
around the upper west side I found the mob.
SLC'S Banner with our fearless leader.
No. Mob’s too gentle of a word. The sea of protesting, sign
holding, screaming, elated college students waiting for the march to commence
at 11:30. I found NYU among the crowd, thanks to mobile phones, around 10:50.
That's right, Kenyon College! Don't Frack with Ohio!!
There were lots of Fracking puns.
My friend NYU's sign.
This is the first time I’d seen NYU since we had moved to
the city, and seeing as we were pretty close in high school, you can imagine
how happy I was to have 45 minutes to stand around and talk to her. While the
march officially started at 11:30, 400K people in one place don’t move very
fast, even if they’re all going the same direction. We didn’t really get moving
until about 12:20. NYU had a friend from Middlebury who hung out with us, too.
At one point a boy, maybe 10 years old, tapped me on the
shoulder and asked if I wanted a baby-pumpkin. I write baby in the sense that
it was little, like hand-grenade size, I imagine. I skeptically-jokingly asked
him if the pumpkin was gonna blow up. He looked at me like I was crazy. When I
brought up the idea of drawing a face he adamantly disapproved: “You can’t
deface the pumpkin.” I didn’t. The pumpkin turned into my sign, since all I had
otherwise was a black and red cardboard sign that someone made that read: “ONE
PLANET ONE LOVE.”
Aside from talking we took part in all of the chants,
cheers, and screaming. Normal-case indicates one person screaming while
uppercase indicates hundreds of people screaming.
FAVORITE CHANTS OF THE DAY:
“What do we
want?”
“CLIMATE
JUSTICE!”
“When do we
want it?”
“NOW!” :||3
“Show me
what democracy looks like!”
“THIS IS
WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!” :||
HEY. OBAMA.
WE DON’T WANT YOUR CLIMATE DRAMA. :||
HEY-HEY.
HO-HO. FOSSIL FULES HAVE GOT TO GO. :||
From time to time we would sing “This land is Your Land” and
“We’re not gonna take it.” Whistles blew. Banners and signs waved. I held up my
pumpkin. Helicopters flew back and forth over the crowd. Around 12:30 I decided
to see if I could find my other dear friend AU, who came with her school and
stuck to her new friend. So I abandoned NYU and Middlebury, promising I’d see
her again, and I ran up to 63rd to find AU and her friend standing on
the corner. Yes, sweet reunion. So there was more catching up and hanging out.
We hopped in the march at about 12:45.
12:58 was a particularly anticipated moment. This was the
moment of silence, intended to last until 13:00. Right on time the silence
dropped on the march and thousands of pairs of arms raised in the air. The
silence started in the front and moved back. We heard chants in the back
suddenly halt. The wind blew. The shocking-noise antithesis was stunning. Suddenly
from the back we heard screams. At first I thought it was some sort of siren,
like people were running from something in pain and suffering. The noise
quickly traveled through to the front, and I thought, “Oh god. Something’s
going wrong.” The media’s training us to imagine the worst. But suddenly it occurred
to me that it was just people screaming to scream. So I screamed, because I was
one of 400,000 people. Then we carried on towards Columbus circle.
A bleak view of Columbus Circle.
Getting around Columbus circle was the bottle-neck, and
probably the cause of the start-and-go traffic. But as we waited and waded, giant
TV monitors showed just how overwhelmingly large a mass we were. I didn’t feel
like I was part of something big from within the crowd, but looking at it from
a bird’s eye-view hit home for me that this wasn’t some little parade: this was activism on a level I've never seen it before.
Around 2:00 we had made it to 44th street on 6th
avenue, and AU, her amiga, and I were ready for some food. We tracked down NYU;
she wasn’t far behind us. We decided to head west towards AU’s bus stop. Yes,
the marching was fun and cool, and it was certainly weird to just abandon it,
but we parted, taking our signs, megaphones, and pumpkin with us.
Before AU and her friend had to go back to D.C, the four of
us got some food, wandered past Broadway and Times Square, adventured the
subway system, wandered about Union Square, made a stop in the incredible
Strand Bookstore, and dropped NYU off in her unbelievably stellar, suit-style,
more-like-a-pad-than-a-dorm room dorm. NYU walked us to the subway station
before we split.
Spotted in the aforementioned incredible Strand Bookstore.
I happily walked back with AU and friend back to their bus
stop on the corner of 34th St. and 11th Ave. The march
ended around 11th. About two blocks away from their destination, I
saw a vaguely familiar face headed in our direction on the same side of the
sidewalk. I quickly discovered this was my second-cousin, who I knew would be at the march. But tell me,
what’s the probability than in the biggest city in America, at the site of one
of the largest political marches, that I would walk past my second-cousin, whom
I haven’t seen since I was 13, on the same sidewalk? My plans to go straight to
Grand Central for my train ride home quickly dissipated . I had a lot of
catching up to do. It was delightful; I may be making a trip up to Boston soon.
So then I did have to come home at some point, since I had a
short play to finish4, so I took the C (or the A?) up to the shuttle
train to Grand Central just in time to get the 18:54 train back to Bronxville.
From the window of the train in Harlem I saw my favorite view of New York City:
at sunset. I would take a city sunset over a beach sunset any day.
Students I talked to ahead of the march claimed that they
were, “going to be part of history.” This march, according to them, “is
something my kids’ll study in school, and I’ll say, ‘I was there!’” Given the
number of news reporters, I thought this would be a fairly well covered ordeal.
Yes, lots of new channels had a story about the march, but nothing all that
significant. Nothing that I would notice if I were browsing the news in
Columbus. It did not evoke the same monumental importance that I anticipated.
That’s not to say it didn’t have its impact. It might have had a stronger unity
effect than anything else. 7 year olds and 70 year olds walked side by side. College
students with college professors. The common man and Al Gore.
We’ll see how much coverage it gets. We’ll see how the
politicians react. We’ll see if New York submerges and the ice caps melt. We’ll
see if historians point to today as an important moment in climate change
history. If so, cool. If not, I can say
that I’ve was in a massive political rally in New York. And my brain is fried
from walking all day. I should really stop typing now; it’s okay if blog posts
end abruptly sometimes.
I hope it doesn’t go that way for the planet.
ENDNOTES
1.
One of my friends made this point to me as we were
walking to the train station. In reality, the NYPD was heavily invested in
helping the marchers. I thanked them every time we passed a pair.
2.
She’s my dad’s cousin’s daughter, who’s about nine
months older than me. The last time I saw her was at her cousin’s [another one
of my second-cousin’s] graduation party.
3.
Repetition ( :|| ) was vital! So was volume!
4.
See The New
Friday for context.
"You can't deface the pumpkin." Did he seriously say that??? That is GOLD
ReplyDelete