Comments are flying back and forth about what was revealed at last week’s presidential debate. I arrived back from Long Island feeling that more was revealed outside the debate than inside.
Was I a VIP invite? No, I traveled to Hofstra from New Hampshire with my sister and a friend as part of the 75 percent of voters who have expressed the desire for open debates that include all candidates. I was there to support Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in her protest that she has been unfairly locked out of this quadrennial extravaganza so carefully controlled by the two major parties and prevented from presenting her progressive views to the American public.
Though I am outraged that Stein was escorted off campus, as at the debate four years ago, and that 24 supporters were arrested, what most troubles me is that I experienced firsthand what I call the growing American Police State.
Now, I am not new to protest. I’m old enough to have participated in the D.C. marches against the Vietnam War. I was at the 500,000-strong New York City march against the Iraq War in 2003 and at the climate march. I spent five days at Occupy D.C. in Liberty Plaza in 2011. But this was different and to me a clear indication of change happening in our country.
We expected that areas around the Hofstra Sports Arena where the debate was being held would be closed down early and surrounded by police protection. However, when we drove toward the university, we found that the entire campus and many major streets around the university were closed to automobile traffic at rush hour and full of police. We drove around, looking for a place to park within a mile walk of where we’d been told demonstrations would be. When we stopped at several intersections to ask for advice from the police who were everywhere, not one of them could (or would) give us a single suggestion.
We parked well outside the university and had walked over a mile when one of the thousand police blocked our way, pointed up a residential side street and said we had to be “checked out.” Our frustration was growing but we obediently started walking — one policed intersection, two, three, more — and finally we were allowed to turn in the direction we were headed.
We soon found waiting crowds carrying signs for $15 minimum wage, gun control, Black Lives Matter, no pipelines, peace and Planned Parenthood, and realized that we were in a long line of activists that was moving very slowly. We were being funneled into a narrow single-file cement walled path guarded by police. They were allowing groups of three to proceed to tents where more police subjected us to airport-type scrutiny. A long list was posted — no backpacks, no open water bottles, etc. Divest yourself of anything metal or suspicious, step through the beeper machine and, if you are found to pass inspection, proceed.
But wait — who were they protecting? We were miles from the debate. Were they protecting themselves from wild terrorists? All of these groups came from miles away, took time out of their lives to have their voices heard, but were trapped inside this maze designed to exhaust protesters and keep them silent and hidden from the media.
Once “in,” we were directed to the “Free Speech Zone” — a parking lot on a blocked-off side street off a blocked-off main road far from the university. The zone was surrounded by a high metal fence with a policed entrance where you had to submit to another inspection. Missing from the area or its vicinity were any Porta-Potties. I had heard about this ugly Orwellian caging of protest, which started in earnest under George W. Bush and has been expanded by President Obama. Do we need a place where we can talk only to each other? There was something strange about this Free Speech Zone — it was empty except for a group of police sitting at the ready on bicycles.
We found out that the buses bringing in Jill Stein supporters from the New York City area had not been allowed to stop there and were forced to leave for destinations unknown to us. So, feeling lost, we proceeded to the corner with our signs to where a group of protesters were being contained by police in a very small space. We were allowed to walk several blocks down the crowded sidewalk of the blocked-off road observed only by bored police stationed every six feet at curbside sawhorses, by armed people on roofs and by photo blimps overhead.
At about 8 p.m., we were reunited with a large group of Stein supporters. In the dark we paraded down the sidewalk followed closely by wary police on bicycles. We chanted to no one who cared the old Occupy marching chant, “Tell me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like.”
But it wasn’t what democracy looks like! Nothing could have been further from my idea of what a free democratic system should be.
The capper — as we left, one policeman called out to us, “Thanks for behaving!” as if we were children — or delinquents.
Where is freedom? Have we passed over the line into a police state where protest is severely regulated and kept out of sight; where protesters are treated like terrorists; where the messy business is soon to be diminished and eventually banned all together? Where is recognition that it is dissent that most often brings human progress? And where is dialogue and real debate? Not inside, under the lights and cameras. If there is hope, it’s out pounding the pavement untelevised.
Patricia Baird Greene is a writer and activist. She lives in Canaan.