E-Mail This Article to a Friend Students to GOP: Stop exploiting 9/11 BY KEVIN FORD

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2004, NEW YORK — To look at her, you wouldn’t think of Anna Weiner as much of a protest organizer. In a city saturated with images of scruffy, bandanna-wearing hell-raisers in handcuffs, the blue-eyed, pony-tailed high-school senior stands out mostly for how she doesn’t stand out. She looks like the typical American teenager, has a diminutive voice, and the only political activism she’s ever participated in was volunteering for the nonpartisan Rock the Vote organization. Months shy of her 18th birthday, she still can’t vote herself.

Yet her pain is no less real, nor her passion less furious than the pain and passion of those risking arrest on the streets of New York to bring attention to their cause during the Republican National Convention. And after deciding she’d had enough of watching a tragedy she’d witnessed firsthand be used as a political tool, the 17-year-old sent out an e-mail last Saturday looking for a few like-minded individuals. The goal was to get a group of her classmates together to offer their perspective on the attacks of September 11. By Wednesday, she had over 40 students, five legal observers, and a police escort up Chambers Street.

Thus Weiner and her fellow students from Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School marched to Ground Zero on the third day of the RNC to protest what they see as the Bush administration’s use of September 11 for propaganda. The school, whose students must take an exam to gain admission, is located five blocks from the site of the World Trade Center and was closed for nearly a month following the attacks. Gathered outside the school in the hot sun, the protesters wore shirts bearing the message STOP EXPLOITING 9/11. Some carried signs that read RNC ‘COMPASSION’ IS AN ACT and OUR TRAGEDY IS NOT YOUR PHOTO-OP. A few older alumni lent their efforts, but most marchers were seniors, members of the last class to have been enrolled at the time of the attacks.

" New York always votes heavily Democratic, and you see the dissent here," Weiner said. " Obviously the reason the RNC is here is because of 9/11."

As he waited for the procession to start, Josh Weinstein, 17, said he came mainly to take pictures. He did the same on the day of the terrorist attacks in 2001. Weinstein had just started his freshman year and was headed to his third-period class when he emerged from the subway to see the first tower of the World Trade Center on fire. " Everyone thought it might be an accident at first," he recalled. " After the second plane hit, they were all like, ‘What the ...?’ I figured buying a camera might be useful."

Weinstein made it to class that morning before the towers fell. He remembered the lights flickering on and off in the building before officials ordered an evacuation. Weinstein and his classmates walked over 40 blocks up the West Side Highway along the Hudson River. Near the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, a friend’s family took him in and he spent the day watching television before his father picked him up.

" These kids saw things that day no one should ever see," said a teacher who declined to give his name. " Some of them still haven’t spoken about it."

Many of the students claimed their experiences that morning gave them an insight that politicians and strategists could never understand. " Don’t you care? We were there!" went one of the spirited chants as they walked toward Ground Zero on Wednesday. " Don’t use our pain in your campaign," went another. Daniel Karp, 17, said that if anyone had a right to protest the alignment of the Bush campaign with 9/11, he did. " This is my school," Karp said. " Besides the victims themselves, we were hit the hardest."

Katie Berringer remembered the disgust she felt months after the attacks, as the crime scene took on the feel of a tourist attraction. Whenever people in the subway would ask for directions to Ground Zero, she and her classmates would purposely misdirect them uptown. " I’d shout at the buses, ‘I hate you. You’re morbid!’" the 17-year-old said. " It really was painful." Weiner echoed her classmate’s anger. " People shouldn’t pose in front of a mass graveyard and smile," she said. " They don’t understand the magnitude of it."

During the march, a few of the usual hecklers taunted the students. " Get a job!" shouted a painter, laughing as he worked on a building across the street from Stuyvesant. At the corner of Church and Fulton, someone else shouted, " Who cares?" before referring to the marchers as " fucking lowlifes" — a curious description for anyone accepted into Stuyvesant, renowned for its rigorous math and science programs.

Sylvia Darrow, however, took a different approach. She’s co-chair of the Bush campaign in Montgomery County, Maryland, and was in town for the RNC. Dressed in a Bush-Cheney ’04 T-shirt and proudly wearing a Bush-Cheney button, she stopped to take a flyer from Berringer and read what it had to say. Then she politely listened as another student passionately made his case against President Bush and the war in Iraq.

" I was five years old watching footage of the Jews in the concentration camps," Darrow replied. " I remember asking my parents, ‘Why didn’t somebody do something to stop this?’ We couldn’t sit back and let Saddam murder his own people."

The kid from Stuyvesant High acknowledged Darrow’s perspective but remained unconvinced of the parallel. Darrow said he had every right to express his opinion, but so did she. They agreed to disagree, and Darrow walked off still holding the flyer. In a week marked by vitriol in the streets and on the airwaves, it was a rare moment of détente between two people just trying to tell their own sides of the story.