"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

...Before the spring blizzard blew us down Church Street, we gathered in the Burrito Bar on Walker and Church, a hilarious retro hippie gringo joint, where we memorized the 1st Amendment by singing it to Stevie Wonder songs. So, cross "...or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press" with "very superstitious... writings on the wall."

Singing the single elegant sentence that is the 1st Amendment is what about 17 of us did, as we walked the six blocks to the sacred construction site. At the mouth of the fifty foot wide stairs that descend into Ground Zero toward the trains, sat a cop car, idling, with two doctors of terrorism sitting there drinking deli coffee in the blue cup with the discuss thrower. Down those steps and the great echoey room, the room with the arrogance, opened up before us. People are walking in from a tunnel under Church Street, straight from the stock exchange, and crossing this wide warehousey space, and then, dropping like another waterfall, the escalators that go down to the train that then descends again, under the river.

This room is about the size of a football field, shiny white linoleum floor, big photos of WTC etc. on the walls, and on the north side, yellow crime-scene tape keeping us from nosing right up to window overlooking the GZ. Over the window is a mesh fence with a New York chauvinist quotation written into it, "If You Can Live In New York You Can Live Anywhere."

A visitor is literally controlled by this advertising then - you have to look through it to see the concrete trucks beyond and have your 9/11 memory. But think about this phrase, "If You Can Live In New York..." As concerned as these officials take pains to appear about the untouchable (except to make war) subject of 9/11, isn't this comment just a tad inappropriate? I'm looking through this calligraphic equivalent of Sinatra's brag-song,
and, well, I'm thinking about 3,000 people who CAN'T live here, not anymore..

The arrogance is more than this one faux pas. The civic aesthetic, wow - the room looks like a bank lobby pumped up by the NFL. And it is very satisfying when our little group is spread
out from end to end and we're all on our cell phones, talking to folks out in the blizzard somewhere, and trying to remember the words to The Amendment.

Trying to remember - shouting, stammering, getting the words out of order then catching yourself or getting corrected by the script holder sitting out in New York at a dry desk, up in a window - as simple as this sounds, it is very energized. It's dramatic.

Our Flash Mob of Conscience has at its heart a very workable dramatic idea. As for the political critique of our first Ground Zero outing. We're still working on that. But the act of trying to remember - memory-recovery -- feels timely. If each decade has a diagnosed society-wide disease that becomes symbolic; the fifties had sexual dysfunction, the sixties had schizophrenia, the 70's depression, etc, well then our disease of the decade would have to be memory loss. The various attention deficits, Alzheimers...Those are the symptoms. I think memory-loss comes from too much mediated experience.

The gathering storm of the 1st Amendment, as we memorize those words and then as we start to remember the freedoms that they were supposed to guarantee us --- we begin to say it louder. As we do this, we begin to walk toward a pre-arranged point, that is, a large blue circular patch on Sari's sweater. She's been standing in the center, with the New York-as-a-brand-name fence behind her. Now we're discovering how much we like this sensation of peaceably assembling, our voices rising to a higher volume again - not singing it, but pronouncing the words. In this scary place, there is a touch of defiance in our voices.

Reading the 1st Amendment again and again - in a place that pretends to be public? I wanted to do this for so long. Ground Zero, I have felt, is a commons that has been stolen, and with it our ability to assemble, our ability to "petition the government for redress of grievances." 9/11 has been a shield for so many atrocities, and one of them is the silencing of compassionate New Yorkers.

When we were gathered in a circle and started shouting The Amendment in unison, three final repetitions clearly, it felt good. Not good, great. I immediately thought - let's do this
every Tuesday. If we do this every week, by July we'll have thousands. Maybe we can retake this place, and shift George Bush's photo op that he plans with the firefighters in August. You just know he wants to come here and super-impose himself into one of the Iwo Jima flag-raising images.

-Then someone held up a cellphone, a new friend on the phone wanted to hear us. One more time!

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

- rev billy
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