Shut Down Trump

I had to be up at 5:30am for today’s action, so I tried to get to sleep early. It turned out to be a crazy night where I got woken up by the weird noises and vibrations of road repaving, then by Connor, who had not shown up for dinner, meowing for food which he barely ate. Then I was woken up by a weird feeling like my heartbeat was doing strange things. And then finally noisy drag racers and garbage trucks. I groggily launched myself out into the early morning, leaving behind a bunch of puzzled cats not used to getting breakfast so early. I found Ben in the crowd in front of the Main Library, and we gathered with our assigned group until it was time to march. To keep from being arrested too soon, we marched on the sidewalk filling both sides of 42nd St. As we marched to 2nd ave, I told Ben that I thought all the remembering I have been doing has to do with turning 50 and the feeling that there is more life behind me than there is ahead now. We talked about his mother and my dad, their memory issues, and the feeling of not wanting to outlive our usefulness and become a burden. And then it was time to surge into the street with our signs and sit down. I prefer die ins because I can’t easily sit on the ground for very long anymore. The police had already surprised me by letting us get all the way to 2nd Ave. and they surprised me again by how long they let us occupy the street with media swarming around us. We sat there chanting while their recorded warning message repeated “you are blocking vehicular traffic…” I had to change positions a few time as the pain increased. Eventually an officer grabbed Julie next to me and hauled her to her feet. I knew she wanted to hold a sign in her mouth so I held one up for her as the officer pulled her arms behind her back. He roughly ripped it from her mouth and also tossed the American flag she held on the ground and stepped on it, as did several other officers. She was yelling about that when they got to me. If sitting on the ground is difficult, getting up is a real challenge, so the officer hauled me to my feet. I started to say, “my shoulder is frozen, can you” “We can’t cuff in front,” he said, annoyed. That wasn’t what I was asking – while they do it in DC, I have never seen NYPD do it. “Can you use two cuffs?,” I asked. I know they do that. “We’ll see,” he said, yanking my arm back to cuff me with just one set and then tightening the cuffs again and again. We were being led to a police bus, so I figured if the bus left fairly soon, I could cope with the pain until we got to the holding facility. The day was warming up while we stood in line to get on the bus, and my glasses started sliding down my nose. When I got to the bus door, the officer standing there started to reach to fix them, then caught himself and asked my permission so formally that it was pretty clear someone had lectured him about consent. Once aboard the bus, I found myself surrounded by five officers as the commanding officers already on board tried to organize the arresting officers. Finally one of the officers noticed me standing in the middle of the meeting and sent me to sit down. The bus was not the usual battered old school bus, but a normal passenger bus with padded seats, air conditioning and seatbelts that the officers had to reach across us to fasten. The woman they put beside me was getting arrested for the first time, a retired teacher. I told her my dad had been a teacher, too, and off we went, talking about teaching and activism. I told her about the time Dad, an English teacher who also had a Master’s in french, got drafted to teach French after the French teacher fled the rough school. I told her how Dad had been nervous about teaching a new subject and how he told me he climbed the back stairwell to his classroom because by the time he got to the top, he had inhaled enough secondhand marijuana to calm his anxiety. We had been sitting there a long time by then, and there was still a line of handcuffed activists waiting to get on the bus, and a gathering crowd of supporters chanting on the sidewalk. I don’t know what it is about the NYPD and counting, but this was not the first time I have seen them struggling to count a group of stationary, seated people. One officer kept coming back and counting over again. As time dragged on, the pain in my shoulder was escalating, and the cuffs were pressing into my outer wrists because my hands were not close enough together. When the pressure on the ulna nerve got to the point where my little finger and ring finger were going numb, I called out to Julie, sitting further forward, closer to the officers at the front. When you complain about tight handcuffs, officers are often skeptical, assuming you’re just a snowflake, but when this guy saw my hands, he said “Shit!” and quickly uncuffed me. The deep grooves across the back of my right hand were bad enough, but the pain in my shoulder was so intense it took a while to move my hand in front of me. He was preparing to re-cuff me. “Can you use two pairs,” I asked, and he hesitated, but when my arms were behind my back, I asked him, “do you see the problem?” “Yes, I see the problem,” he said, and fetched another pair. By the time we arrived at the mass arrest processing facility, other people were having handcuff problems too, so when we lined up outside the building we let them go to the front so they would get uncuffed soonest. Inside the building they stuck us in the big holding cells, sorted by gender (according to them). As soon as I got in the cell, Jamie told me they knew how busy my schedule is and that they were glad I could come. They started to talk about the federal war on trans people and the horrifying idea that trans people might not be able to get hormones officially, from doctors. I told them our Board just approved spending the extra money to get our trans clients enhanced IDs so they can get across the borders if things get really bad. It’s such an unthinkable idea that I typed the proposal to the Board with tears streaming down my face, and as Jamie and I talked about what our clients are facing, I started to tear up again and had to wrestle the feelings back into their corner of my mind. As we started to move through the steps of processing, my very young arresting officer was quietly panicking. “I’ve never even been here,” he said to me. It’s in everybody’s interest for the processing to go smoothly, so I quietly told him “I have” and helped guide him through the steps, until we got to the entrance of the women’s cells, which he almost bumbled through despite the large “female only” sign. The woman officer who took over for the search looked at me and said “you are dressed perfectly for this,” so I told her, “I might have some experience.” I wound up in a cell with Molly, an activist I don’t know, who had done a different part of the action, blocking 46th St. on a diagonal, shutting down both directions. She is a Brooklyn based organizer, so we discussed Malliotakis and the problem of getting her out with the big republican vote on staten island. Then she told me about her son’s growing infatuation with his cat. “The other day he called the cat “the baby,” she said. “and I said, ‘did you really call the cat a baby?’” Laughing, I said, “now you’re the grandmother of a cat.” We compared the holding cells to how they used to be, observing the fairly fresh coat of paint on the walls, covering the etchings and messages of past comrades, and the cushion on the formerly bare bench. Later, after she was released because she had gotten there before us, I noticed that the sink seemed revamped, and tested the water. To my surprise, there was actual water after years of not working. The best thing to do alone in a cell is to get as comfortable as possible and try to zone out, but the blasting air conditioning made it hard to get really comfortable. Eventually, it was my turn to be given back my property and receive my two pink summonses. The two summons thing is new, I saw it for the first time at the Trump Tower sit in. The other strange new thing is that your arresting officer has to walk you not just to the gate outside but all the way to the edge of the property, where another officer takes over to walk you down the public street to Foley Square. This doesn’t strike me as particularly legal. It seems to me that once you are released you should be free to walk on any public sidewalk. Waiting for my escort, I said out loud, “I think this is overkill,” and an officer nearby said, “I agree with you.” “We had a big crowd out here once,” said a female officer, “so now we have to do this.”