Free wrote:I was on the Brooklyn Bridge. The march from Liberty Park was huge, moving from City Hall onto the bridge, too many to fit on the pedestrian side of the bridge walkway where it was legal to cross, and no protester organizers or police telling marchers not to cross on the road, so the march flowed into both the walkway and the road (illegal due to obstruction of traffic).
Luckily, I was on the walkway, which is elevated. From there we saw everything. The police started calling on their radios, and reinforcements came from the other side to block off the marchers, then started arresting them. The arrests that I saw were peaceful and non violent with hundreds of people overhead filming, snapping photos and chanting "Let them go" some yelling, 'dirty pigs' others 'we still love you', etc. Just heard on the radio that the Brooklyn Bridge is open again, it was shut down outbound until 8:30 or so.
If any of my pictures are any good I'll post them later. I went to Slutwalk too. All in all a glorius, satisfying day... Hallelujah!
The above is a pretty good description of how this went down, except that it doesn't convey how exhilarating it was to SHUT DOWN THE BROOKLYN FUCKING BRIDGE, YO!!!!
As Luther Blissett said, we were there together, and he is a fine young gentleman who you should all be proud of.
As for my fate, well, I managed to get off the bridge just before they fenced off the Manhattan side (they had already fenced off the Brooklyn side). Free mentioned this above, but we were pretty evenly divided between the pedestrian walkway and the road. I was on the pedestrian walkway, taking photos and video of the arrests, although it was difficult to get any really good shots because the cops were standing in front of us and deliberately blocking. I thought that we'd be safe there from any NYPD involvement because I figured that they'd concentrate all of their forces on the road portion of the bridge. I was wrong, though. By the time I left, I'd guess that there were at least 75 cops on the pedestrian bridge, and that was quite enough to kettle everyone in, which I'm certain they did not long after I escaped.
The pre-march group was very interesting. I spent my first hour in a meditation circle. Then, as Luther said, we participated in a sort of Protest 101 workshop, where we were given strategies in dealing with the police and our potential arrest. After that, we witnessed a pretty heated argument between a protester who published a Broadsheet called The Occupied Wall Street Journal and a guy who felt that the publisher should have sought more input from the the people who consider themselves the leaders, and that the movement was being misrepresented by the Journal. The whole thing made me worry about infiltration and I commented to Luther that I hoped there wasn't an operative smiling somewhere and twisting his moustache, saying "nice, my work here is done."
Anyway, again, this was an awesome day, and I'm hoping that it continues to grow at the pace that it grew this week.
Come and protest. We need as many of you as we can get!
As usual, here are some pics:
There are stills from the cell phone vids I'm still processing:
At this point the cops were standing at the edge so that we could no longer film what was going on below on the road.
