#BlackLivesMatter: Brooklyn Bridge March
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.
Connect with solidarity movements here & tell the NYPD to fire Officer Panatelo here
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