#eric garner protest nyc

Protestors couldn't stop Christmas from coming three weeks early on Wednesday night, but last night there was an advent of an altogether different sort when thousands #shutitdown NYC-wide, on bridges and across boroughs. Regrouped and redoubled, the routed rock-around-the-Xmas-Tree at Rockefeller Center the night before streamlined Thursday's protests into a more pointed singularity of purpose.

At 5 PM sharp, we met at Union Square. At 6, we marched south down Broadway sending up demands into a up into a helicopter-filled sky. It was the tidal wave of outrage that failed to overwhelm the night before, and many in range of the mic-check stopped what they were doing to help mushroom the mainstream of conscience spilling off sidewalks like a Foley Square-bound flood.

Yesterday's demographic was more diverse than Wednesday's. Old white ladies cried for justice alongside rainbow-coalitions of linked-arm preteens while older millennials finally made good on their generational moniker and anchored the myriad by the thousands. Most chanted in earnest, though a few hurled provocative insults in the stonewall faces of not a few sergeants.

Though tensions were taught, things did not escalate. The NYPD seemed resolved not to actualize the accusations against them carved out on 5,000 posters. No more zip-tie handcuffs were bundled onto their belts in plain sight, and they paraded parallel on scooters, the visibility of the jails-on-wheels and plastic shields used to trawl in dissenters like wholesale tuna markedly downgraded. However, that did not mean that the lions laid down with the lambs, and the yellow roses offered by one protestor to police wilted in the romanticism of their own symbolism.

We were received at Foley Square by what felt like a group of at least a thousand. At 6:30, we gathered behind the #ThisStopsNow banner unfurled by the family of 18-year-old Ramarley Graham, who was shot in his Bronx home by a cop in 2012, as well as ten cardboard coffins on which were painted the names of dozens more victims in need of vindication. Those names now resurrected into public discourse are the rippling reverberations of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The march across the Brooklyn Bridge was a funeral procession for them all. The cries of thousands of pallbearers determined to die-in at the Barclay's Center before pushing on to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal were not only for the indictment of Officer Daniel Pantanelo, the eulogy was much bigger than that: "indict, convict, send killer cops to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell!"

We the people truly do stand upon a bridge much bigger than Brooklyn's, but only continued peaceful dissent can determine whether we build or burn it.

NO PARKING TODAY proclaimed the NYPD on yellow signs tacked up on lampposts lining 4th Avenue on Tuesday night, a full 24 hours before the Grand Jury of Staten Island decided that Eric Garner's killer was more difficult to indict than a "ham sandwich." From 11th St. to Union Square (that's three city blocks), scooters, squad cars, vans and barred-window buses bulged curbside. For any making for either of the city's main marquees of muster (Union and Times Squares) the message was clear: NYC's finest were ready.

By 7 PM, Union Square was nothing but a desolate Christmas market.  Protestors were pushing up towards Rockefeller Center to drown out the corporate-fueled bonanza of the annual tree-lighting ceremony. But they were ready for us there too: 5th Ave was cordoned off from 42nd to 53rd  by a network of barricades carefully puzzling out protestors from  pine-seekers. Cops were bouncers, allowing only those wide-eyed and signless to pass in the direction of the great evergreen. The effect was strikingly symbolic; the lines were drawn as ambassadors for either side by the thousands, Disney & Dissent, were carefully sifted on either side of a police barricade.

The NYPD made brilliant strategic use of the labyrinth that already is midtown Manhattan, most effectively shutting down our attempts to #shutitdown. It was all perfectly clusterfucked. Better than a crackdown is a confuse-down. Cries of "No justice, no peace, no racist police!" failed to overtake the crooning of Mariah Carey, Lady Gaga and Idina Menzel. Suburbites fired off selfies with backgrounds of Rockettes and riot police alike while Saks Fifth Avenue remained bravely open for business, with employees stationed outside to "rescue" patrons from the gang of Garner's Grinches. Living foam effigies of shopping on steroids, sequined Mickies & Minnies, Spidermans and Nesquick bunnies, posed for pictures with tourists against backdrops of "CAN'T BREATHE" signage. 

So no. Protestors were not able, in effect, to #shutitdown. And at 9 PM sharp, the humongous pine erupted into light while justice for Eric Garner remained shrouded in darkness.

But hope was not to be extinguished. The lights of resistance, the waving iPhones of protestors, burned later into the night than those of resignation strung up in that tree at 50th & 5th. A score of arrests were made. And at midnight, 1,000 protestors sat down on the Brooklyn Bridge. All one had to do was gaze overhead and track the whir of the choppers dragging cop cars like a magnet does iron filaments from Rockefeller Center up to Columbus Circle over to the West Side Highway and back down again, to know that it was, and still is, far from over.