My grandma, Fay Goleman, died last year at 96, at just around this time of year. She loved this county -- LOVED this country -- and I felt her memory very strongly when I could not physically move out of the arresting officer's way last Tuesday. She was born to refugees from the Czar's Russia, and she knew what police and military intimidation of free speech and free assembly meant. Dr. Goleman, who was barely five feet tall but who had an enormous spirit, marched decade after decade for 70 years: she marched for peace; against the nuclear bomb; for civil rights and so on. She spoke up at town councils and served on local government commissions and believed that people had the responsibility to govern their own communities and to take action and not just complain. She always wore hats and white gloves when she marched, and she held herself in that context with great lady-likeness and civility.
This formality was partly to honor the great gift and great occasion that is the American gift of free assembly. And she always said: "Activism is the rent we must pay for the privilege of living in a democracy. Protest is how you pay your civic rent." (Tiny as she was, she also had no patience for people who were willing to be deterred from the path they knew was right by bullies.)
She taught me that activism and petitioning government for redress of grievances is not a choice if you live in America. If you are American, it is an obligation. The Founders did not give this task to us as an option, but rather demanded it as an obligation: we are compelled by their social contract in the Constitution to protest and engage in free assembly when government has stopped listening to us. That is why the First Amendment comes first: everything else flows from it and is built upon it.
You can borrow my Grandma Fay's example and memory, if it is helpful: I am sure she would not mind and, indeed, would probably get a kick out of it. But you can also borrow Gandhi's or Dr. King's, for that matter, who made enormous disruptions -- the biggest of disruptions -- of daily life in Birmingham and D.C. and Delhi and in the brokerage houses of the London financial markets -- with the great discipline of peacefulness and nonviolence.
Bloomberg is flat wrong, and he doubtless knows it but hopes you won't notice: New Yorkers have no right to be free of any disruption from the peaceful but disruptive free-speech actions of their fellow citizens, and how New Yorkers lawfully and peacefully assert their First Amendment rights is actually not up to him. There is a higher authority than Michael Bloomberg, or than the NYPD, or even than the guy in the white shirt who signaled to his colleagues to handcuff me earlier this week when I stood peacefully on a sidewalk, obeying what I had confirmed to be the law: and that higher authority is called the Constitution of the United States of America.
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