Signs? Check. Chant? Check. Ride to New York? Not Quite.
By MICHAEL BRICK
They are cooks and teachers, college students and salespeople. A fortunate few have found discount airline tickets, while others are boarding buses or piling into cars and vans.
From all parts of the country, spanning a broad range of ages and walks of life, people are scrambling to travel to New York in time to protest the Republican National Convention. Many are finding that getting to the city is the hardest part.
"I'm still hoping something will come through," said Britta Thornton, 22, a student from Mesa, Ariz. She and her husband have been seeking a ride through advertisements on political Web sites. "We're short on funds, so there's not anything else we can do."
The number of protesters converging on the city is anyone's guess. The largest coalition of protest groups, United for Peace and Justice, applied for a permit for a rally of 250,000 people, but that figure is little better than one from a random number generator.
The group's spokesman, William K. Dobbs, said in an interview that he expected at least 100,000 people to participate in the protests, including many who will not need to travel far.
"Certainly, we'll draw heavily from the region," Mr. Dobbs said.
The Police Department, in its official guide to the convention, predicted that it would draw 50,000 delegates, officials, news media representatives and guests, with the vague addendum that "the R.N.C. is expected to draw large numbers of protesters."
Predicting their turnout is a fool's game, but measuring the determination of the protesters is not hard. It is written plainly in the distances they are covering and the last-minute efforts they are making to overcome unforeseen obstacles.
Many demonstrators are advertising on politically sympathetic Web sites for companions to span the nation's highway system. Their postings serve as the electronic age's equivalent of the outstretched thumb, and they hail largely from the nation's urban strongholds of left-wing politics.
"Seeking a ride," the advertisements begin, and from there the list reads like a Johnny Cash song: "Chicago, Seattle, Seattle, Nashville, Atlanta, Montreal, San Francisco, central Indiana, Portland, Ore., Portland, Ore., Richmond, Va., Bellingham, Wash., Los Angeles."
They come largely from the ranks of the working class and middle class, and many can afford an airline ticket or a week off work, but not both.
They mock the city's offer of discount hotel rooms - like $150 a night for a minimum three-night stay at the Hotel Deauville on the condition that they wear buttons identifying themselves as a "peaceful political activist" - as out of touch with their economic limitations.
Dirk Adams, a protester in Boston who plans to catch a ride with a friend or buy an inexpensive bus ticket, designed a button using the smiling Statue of Liberty from the city's buttons, replacing "peaceful political activist'' with "loud angry agitator."
Mr. Adams, 33, an artist and educator, said he was surprised at the dearth of organized transportation he has found in comparison to the chartered buses available for an antiwar rally last year in New York.
"Now it doesn't seem to be that way," Mr. Adams said.
A group called the Answer Coalition has chartered buses from the Washington area, upstate New York and Kalamazoo, Mich., but without a bus-size group, many people are on their own. For those like Mr. Adams, with just a few hundred miles to cover, the options are plentiful.
Several dozen people calling themselves DNC2RNC are even marching to New York from Boston, where the Democratic National Convention was held.
For those farther away, the obstacles are greater.
Cecily Letendre, 30, a circuit designer from Nashville, had arranged for a ride and a place to sleep in a student's apartment near Columbia University, but decided that her time and money would be better spent donating to the Kerry campaign and organizing voter registration in her own state.
Besides, she had her tarot cards read, and the prospects for the New York trip seemed forbidding.
"I don't put much stock in that stuff, but it was really disconcerting," Ms. Letendre said. "One of the cards had a nuclear bomb on it."
Superstition aside, sheer distance is an obstacle. On the West Coast, some people are finding it insurmountable.
"I have made some inquiries with people who are going, but their vehicles are full," said Kurt Kelly, 45, a concert promoter from Los Angeles. "A lot of people aren't even aware it's going on."
Emma Young, 20, of Denver, failed to find a ride, too, but she found a $170 airplane ticket.
"If it had been much more expensive than that, I probably wouldn't be going," Ms. Young said. This is her first trip to New York, and though she is confident that she will find housing and her way around, security concerns have her "a little antsy."
"Gas masks I've thought about in particular," Ms. Young said, adding that she probably will not wear one for fear of angering police officers.
Others are still trying to raise money from friends, asking people who are politically sympathetic but burdened with time commitments to "sponsor a protester." Ben Baity, 49, a salesman who said he lost his job, is seeking sponsorship.
"I just got laid off, so I have the time, but I don't have the money to fly," Mr. Baity said. He is also seeking somewhat more expensive housing. While Ms. Young's generation of protesters is content to sleep on a sofa, he said, "not everybody's interested in crashing at somebody's house."
Some of those who are trying to cover a great many miles are finding that the same online services that engender rapid communication also allow for missed connections and other unexplained phenomena of anonymity.
"There was a guy who was chartering a bus who said that if that didn't happen he was going to take a van," said Trin Kiger, 37, a cook who lives in the Portland, Ore., area and has sought a ride through online message boards, "but we haven't heard from him in weeks."
Others, like Joshua Knapp, 22, an organizer in Seattle with an environmental group called the Native Forest Council, are confronting more conventional obstacles.
"We had a plan, but the guy who was driving us got in an accident," Mr. Knapp said. He is trying to raise money from friends to buy a plane ticket, and he is not ready to give up. "The folks that are getting this protest up want it to be the biggest in history, and we think it deserves to be. So we're doing everything we can to get there."
Still others are earning their way on the road. Musicians like Tony Presley, 23, of Austin, Tex., and Matt Fuller of Bellingham, Wash., are playing sets in nightclubs to pay for gas and sleeping where they are offered a floor, applying the lessons they have learned from concert touring and setting New York as their endpoint.
"If it wasn't for the protests," Mr. Fuller said, "I would have cut myself off at the Mississippi."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
