Life during wartime

My Republican National Convention experience will be extremely limited, if I have anything to do with it.

But I am working in the city this week and will be marginally exposed to the insanity, and I will write my marginal thoughts about it here. You're welcome, all two of you.

Friday night, my father and stepmom were in town, and we went to Union Square to gawk at the protesters. Union Square was also ground zero for activism in the months after Sept. 11, and I must say that the atmosphere was more charged in those days than it was Friday night. Maybe people were just getting geared up. Maybe it's just me -- Dad and Stepmom, uber-hippies of a sort, were mightily impressed with the "energy."

We happened to witness the opening moments of the bicycle protest and were amazed at the sheer number of protesters -- 5,000, according to news accounts. I was also surprised to find out later that 250 of them were arrested, apparently for blocking traffic.

They were certainly an an enormous, traffic-blocking mass when they first got moving, heading south on the east side of Union Square Park. But they seemed to have been spread thin when we saw them about a half-hour later, heading north up Sixth Ave.

In any event, it looks like the cops are really playing hardball, arresting even a guy who simply writes easily-washable chalk messages on the sidewalk. (Links via Gothamist, which is covering this all really well.)

I'm not sure what benefit, if any, the city is getting out of such an approach. While it might intimidate protesters and keep them on their best behavior, it might also frustrate them and raise the potential for greater disturbance later in the week.

Gothamist wonders if the hardball approach will be a PR debacle, but I doubt it -- most people in the country don't give a rat's ass about protesters anyway and will think they're getting what they deserve.

In any event, we stayed away from the weekend's big protests, including the very big one on Sunday. We both rode to work on the subway Monday morning and found conditions not much different than on any other work day, although there were cops looking into the cars at most Manhattan stops.