Delivery of Posters and Messages
to Hillary Clinton's Office
On March 18th at the end of the NY Capital Peace Walk, we collected hundreds of posters and messages from participants to be delivered to the Senators of New York State in a huge impromptu memorial at the federal building. Since we knew we could not leave these posters on federal property without some problems, we encouraged participants to write messages on their posters remembering the Fallen Service Members so they could be hand-delivered at a later time to our Senator's offices.
We have been trying to get an appointment with Senator Clinton's Office to deliver these posters and messages ever since the event ended. We focused on delivering these to Senator Clinton because of her candidacy for the Democratic Presidential Nominee.
After several denials of receiving communications from us for any appointment, they offered to meet with us in June, which we said was completely unacceptable.
Then they offered to meet us at the home of one of the organizer's at 7:30 in the morning. Obviously this was an attempt to avoid any media coverage, and o make it harder for us to get people to attend the presentation.
Finally, on April 3rd, with less than 24 hours notice, they agreed to meet us outside the Federal Building on April 4th at noon.
We scrambled, sent our press releases and e-mails, and called all the newspapers and television stations.
At 11:30 a.m. in a downpour of rain, a small group of 7 of us and a television crew from Channel 10, met outside the Federal Building. We had all of the posters and messages gathered the best we could into 3 large moving boxes. These boxes were about 3 feet tall by 2 feet wide by 2 feet deep.
With Channel 10 filming, we fought the wind (again) and rain, arranged the bigger posters around the outside of the 3 boxes and recreated the original impromptu memorial. We had dried and silk flowers that some participants had left at the Federal Building on March 18th, and we adorned the boxes with them.
At noon, we called Hillary Clinton's office to tell them that we were there and waiting for them as per their instructions.
The representatives of her office came downstairs, looked through the glass at us and the television crew, and stopped dead in their tracks. We then saw them instruct a police officer to come out to us, who in turn told us to bring everything inside.
Other police officers brought out a dolly to put the boxes of posters and messages on, and again we scrambled to load everything on to the dolly to bring them inside.
By the time we got inside, the representatives from Senator Hillary Clinton's office had disappeared, and we were not allowed past the security station.
We saw the police officers take the dolly in to the elevator, but we have no idea if they went up to Hillary's office or straight down to the dumpster.
Unfortunately, in our scramble to move the posters onto the dolly, we forgot to take our own pictures of the event. Fortunately Channel 10 filmed the whole spectacle, but as of yet we have not seen Channel 10 report it.
A Times Union reporter contacted us later in the afternoon, and took statements from us about what had happened. They were going to contact Senator Clinton's office to see if they still had the posters and whether or not they, the Times Union, could come and take pictures of them.
What's Next?
We understand that you may have decided to keep your poster from the event. Many people did this. Still others did not see the collection at the Federal Building or did not have time to write out a message, and that's fine.
So, what we ask is that you find the Fallen Serviceperson(s) you walked for, print them out again, and on it write a personal message to send to your Senators and Representatives. You may want to include some of the details of the life of that Fallen Serviceperson and/or what you would like them to do as your elected representative.
Click here to search for the Fallen Serviceperson Database.
Now that the delivery of the posters and messages is over, as disappointing as it was, we will start deliberating on our next action. If you would like help with that, please let us know through the "Contact Us" link.