Mayor's victory has hollow ring

[ also check out Naomi Klein and Todd Gitlin's debate on DN! -d ]

Mayor's victory has hollow ring
Juan Gonzalez
NY Daily News

Mayor Bloomberg may soon regret the victory he won in court yesterday over
Leslie Cagan and thousands of anti-war protesters.

Cagan, 57, is the chief coordinator of Sunday's giant peace march against
the Republican convention. An all-star organizer of peace marches for
decades, Cagan learned to stand up to bullies from her mother, Jessie Cagan.

Mom survived the political witch hunts of Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. At
the age of 83, she could be found yesterday afternoon answering telephones
at the bustling midtown headquarters of her daughter's group, United for
Peace and Justice.

This mayor of ours spared no expense to welcome the Republicans to town. Yet
he denied the request of Cagan's group to simply hold a peaceful rally in
Central Park - the only place in Manhattan that could comfortably
accommodate a few hundred thousand people on a hot summer day.

The only real "danger" from these massive protests - and I have covered
dozens of them over the years - usually comes from a half-dozen so-called
anarchists, or knuckleheads, bent on vandalizing a few Starbucks or
McDonald's windows. Mix them with a few overanxious police who have not been
properly trained in crowd control, and you getsome half-baked footage for
the 6o'clock news.

But the hysteria and hype surrounding potential vandalism get exploited by
local governments to justify massive restrictions on legitimate protests or
on nonviolent civil disobedience.

Nearly lost in all the hysteria is the more serious story that thousands of
ordinary Americans are coming here Sunday because they are fed up and
furious over the war in Iraq. They want the occupation to end and our troops
to come home now.

And this is not a partisan protest.

If they believed John Kerry would do things differently, the protesters
would simply stay home and wait till November. But most of them see little
difference between President Bush and Kerry on Iraq.

They watch in amazement as the presidential candidates keep fighting over
Vietnam, which ended 30 years ago, while they ignore a conflict that has
already taken the lives of nearly 1,000 troops and thousands more Iraqis and
has cost taxpayers $129 billion.

So the more Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly refuse a Central
Park rally, the more determined the protesters are to go there.

Having bent over backward to please the Republicans, the mayor has chosen
confrontation with Cagan's group of peaceful dissidents. He has created a
march that has no clear end.

That's a prescription for the very trouble he wants to avoid. Unless cooler
heads prevail, it could turn out to be the worst kind of victory for our town.

Originally published on August 26, 2004

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