NYC streets swell with protesters

Vietnam vet Bill Steyert, bedecked in anti-Bush buttons, is twirling a white flag with a dove on it at a Green Party rally in Washington Square Park. The rally, on the eve of the Republican National Convention, feels like a scene out of the 1960s, and Mr. Steyert intends to go back to that era by getting arrested Tuesday.

"We're committed protesters," he says of his group, which will be staging a "die-in," acting dead so that police will have to carry them away. "I'll be wearing an all-white shroud with red blood stains," he says. "Well, it's actually permanent magic marker."

As conventioneers and President Bush head to New York, they are drawing tens of thousands of people, there to rally about everything from the war in Iraq to AIDS policies to abortion. There are anarchists holding press conferences to explain themselves. There are large contingents of everyone from atheists to those opposed to genetically modified food. And plenty are vowing civil disobedience - and a willingness to be arrested - in one of America's largest protests in recent years.

"It's the perfect storm for protest," says Nancy Snow, an expert on protest and a professor of communications at California State University, Fullerton. "People are coming to mount one visual, visible display against the Bush administration."

Sunday may have been the most visible of all. The organizers of a massive march hoped to attract 250,000 people who would display their banners and yell anti-Bush rhetoric as they walked past Madison Square Garden, where the convention is set to begin Monday night.

As they gathered Sunday morning, protestors from around the country chanted and waved banners. One was Susan Smith, a Tampa, Fla., homemaker wearing a T-shirt that read, "Patriot for Peace," who worries that her two teenage sons might be drafted. "If it were a just war, I could understand it," she said. "But now I feel we live in perpetual war."

Unlike the situation at the Democratic convention in Boston, where the protests were small and the police arrested only six people, the New York protests are expected to be large and filled with handcuffs. Even before most of the conventioneers arrived, police had arrested hundreds, from naked AIDS activists, to people who hung an anti-Bush banner from the Plaza Hotel, to 264 bicyclists charged with illegally blocking the streets.

"Most people want peaceful protest, they don't want it to look like Chicago in 1968," says Tobe Berkovitz, associate dean of Boston University's College of Communications. "The problem for the city [is] the hard-core anarchists."

Not a big deal, says police commissioner Ray Kelly, who vows to separate the troublemakers from the peaceable groups. "For 18 months now, we've been planning this, and we're in good shape," he says.

The city does not want the marches and rallies to end with the nightly news showing clouds of tear gas. With some 15,000 media members in the city, New York wants to portray itself in a positive light. "They don't want to look like a Patriot Act police state like many claim," says Mr. Berkovitz.

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