17 notes &
Yesterday, children of NYC created 5,000 paper hearts with messages of chage they want to see happen in our country. There was one for each peaceful protestor that has been arrested in the past three months for Occupy Wall Street. The children brought their hearts to NYC City Hall to put up for Mayor Bloomberg on the fence since they have it heavily guarded, again peacefully. It was moving to see all the hearts along the city hall fence see the children’s messages being sent out into the world. It was amazing to see how proud these children were with strangers passing by and admiring their work. This was till they called undercover cops in and they locked the gates (the families on oneside the police on the other) and started angrily ripping up the children’s art work, breaking signs over their knees, and paper hearts in half.
It’s one thing to take a piece of work down it’s another thing to make an angry scene of it aggressively acting out in front of children. The children yelled, the parents yelled, the children cried. Then an amazing thing happened, everyone started at the beginning re-sticking new hearts up following right behind the police letting the kids know it’s wrong, we’re going to fix it. A positive energy took everyone over. There were still a couple thousand hearts left in three bags. They ended up being tossed into the air A THOUSAND construction paper hearts floating down peacefully on these angry cop’s heads. An image I will for as long as I live never, ever, forget. They gave up and hid in their glass station till the parents left.
I’m SO proud of these children and parents standing up for themselves. So I ask you this, NYPD are you proud? Ruining children’s art in front of their eyes? Are you proud of making children cry?
disagree w/ ruining the work of children! And, I of course I assume that these same parents and children already had planned to come back to clean it up! BUT, of course the mayor’s office will assume that that won’t happen and complain that the parents and children were loitering!
