If you know my friend Rachel Rosmarin, you might also know her brother, Ari, who has been immortalized in this week’s issue of The New Yorker. We ran into each other on campus today.
Ari Rosmarin, a nineteen-year-old Columbia junior who mans the front desk, gave Ezili the telephone number for one of the protest organizers. A little later, a fabric importer who works in the area popped in to say that he thought the civil libertarians were misguided. “After 9/11, this is not the time for protests,” he said. “If you take a hundred cops to protect protesters from getting out of line, that’s a hundred cops not doing what they should be doing, which is protecting me.”
Rosmarin, a genial mop-top from Santa Monica, greets most of the walk-ins. “A construction worker came in and said he wanted a political sticker to put on his helmet,” he said. “It turned out we didn’t have anything except one that said, ‘Marriage for Everybody.'” The hardhat politely declined. His buddies on the job, he said, “already give me enough trouble for wearing a Red Sox T-shirt.” Someone else came in to report that he agreed with one of the signs in the window. It was the text of the First Amendment.
