Peace Abbey members in New York too
By Michael Kunzelman / News Staff Writer
Monday, August 30, 2004

NEW YORK -- While a raucous crowd of up to 250,000 protesters marched past Madison Square Garden yesterday on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Nick Kitchener napped on a bench in Central Park.

You would be tired, too, if you had spent the past month lugging a 1-ton slab of granite from Boston to New York, one mile at a time.
Kitchener, a Natick resident, is one of more than a dozen volunteers from the Sherborn Peace Abbey who helped transport a headstone-shaped monument designed to honor civilian war casualties. They left Boston July 24 and arrived in the Bronx on Friday, just in time for the start of the convention.

Unlike many of the demonstrators who filled the streets of Manhattan yesterday, Kitchener didn't come to New York with an anti-Bush agenda.
"It's completely nonpartisan," he said of his journey. "It's a peace walk. The stone has a clear message on it: This is about paying tribute to the unknown civilians killed in war."

Yesterday's march, organized by United for Peace with Justice, attracted hundreds if not thousands of Massachusetts residents to the site of the convention.

From noon until well after 4 p.m. the protesters braved the sweltering heat to march through the heart of the city, chanting, singing and carrying signs adorned with anti-Bush and anti-war slogans.

"It's an unbelievable amount of energy," said Ridgely Fuller, a Sherborn resident who marched with her 17-year-old son, Ben.
Although a state Supreme Court judge refused to grant march organizers a permit to hold a rally in Central Park, many demonstrators assembled there after the march, sharing the grass with sunbathers and volleyball players.

Margo Roman, a Hopkinton resident who is on the Peace Abbey's board, briefly joined the march before she met her cohorts in Central Park.
"It felt like Mardi Gras," she said. "There were two protesters for every one policeman. They were over-prepared, if anything."
There were no reports of major violence and about 200 scattered arrests.

Police gave no official crowd estimate, though one law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, put the crowd at 120,000; organizers claimed it was roughly 400,000.

Protesters said the outbreaks of violence they witnessed were isolated in nature and quickly quelled by police.
Felicia Moschella, a Holliston resident, saw a small group of demonstrators throw bottles at police officers about 200 yards from the Garden.
"The mob mentality took over for some of the protesters, and it got a little scary for five minutes," she said. "Up until that point, I was quite impressed with how peaceful it was."

David Vincent of Brighton said he saw another group of protesters set a small fire. "The cops came in with riot gear and pulled people out," he said. "There were definitely some arrests."

But the violent outbursts didn't spoil their day.

Moschella, who boarded a bus to New York early yesterday morning with her mother, sister and a friend, felt she "needed to be here."
"I'm tired of Bush and wanted to get a point across," said the 35-year-old school administrator, a Democrat. "I've never done anything like this before, but I felt it was time to make my voice heard."

Her mother, Framingham resident Clare Moschella, hadn't participated in a protest since the late 1960s, when she marched on the Pentagon for an anti-Vietnam War demonstration.

"It has been a long dry spell, but this was important to me," she said. "We need to get Bush out of office. If we have to march to have our voices heard, then it's our duty to do that."

More than 200 members of United for Justice with Peace, a Boston-based group that isn't directly affiliated with the march's organizers, took buses to New York yesterday and returned to Massachusetts last night.

"Before we even came down here, we were looked at as criminals or anarchists," said Vincent, a self-described pacifist. "This is a peace protest. Peace protesters are not violent."

At Central Park, Kitchener and others from the Sherborn Peace Abbey kept a quiet vigil alongside their massive headstone. Their monthlong Stone Walk from Boston to New York, sponsored by Sept. 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, was the second of its kind since 1999.

Dot Walsh, the Peace Abbey's program coordinator, said the group's mission took on a newfound urgency in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Before 2001, people didn't have a clear understanding about civilian casualties because we didn't have a war on our own soil for so long," Walsh said. "After Sept. 11, people understood what civilian casualties are."

Although the Stone Walk is designed to be a nonpartisan enterprise, there was no mistaking where Roman's sympathies lie this week as President Bush prepares to accept his party's renomination.

"We didn't have to rush into Iraq and bombard innocent civilians," she said. "We could have sent everyone in Iraq to Harvard for what we spent on bombing them."