In May, Puerto Rican Day Parade officials announced that this year they would be honoring Oscar Lopez Rivera, a convicted terrorist, as their first ever “National Freedom Hero”. Rivera's gang, the FALN, was responsible for the murders of several innocent New Yorkers, including police officers, in the 1970s, in the name of “Puerto Rican independence”. In 2015, the NYC Council, including our own council representative, Elizabeth Crowley, overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging President Obama to offer clemency to Rivera, which he granted at the end of 2016 just before leaving office. A whole bunch of elected officials conspired to do something that was not only dumb but disrespectful to NYC, and they ain't finished yet. At the end of the day, Governor Cuomo and a whole lot of corporate sponsors pulled out of the parade and Lopez Rivera decided that he didn’t want to be honored due to the controversy but that he would still march.