The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was held in Washington, DC today, bringing a little levity, correctly-spelled signs and respectfully toned-down rhetoric to the Mall for the first time in just about…forever. Our own SarahMC was there, along with MamaSharper and AuntSharper. I was home in front of the TV, nursing a hacking cough and gchatting with Michelle as she watched it in Toronto. I teared up when Yusef sang “Peace Train”, because it has always been a favorite of my mom’s, who remembers him as Cat Stevens, playing it live at the Kennedy Center during her Vietnam War protesting days. (Reports of his being a radical terrorist-lover are false; he’s chillin’ on the peace train with other moderate Muslims.)
Here is a link to a photo gallery of some excellent signage from the rally. Here’s another one. My favorite was “AMERICANS FOR RESPONSIBLE HITLER COMPARISONS.” Unfortunately, I can’t find a picture of it, but I do love this guy, and apparently so did a lot of other people—it was reported on Jezebel that he got a lot of hugs and handshakes:
A few more of my favorites after the jump:
I was there too! I thought the rally was absolutely huge; much larger than I expected, and very good natured. I loved the “louder, please!” chant, when the sound system was a bit quiet, and the way that the crowd teamed up to co-cooperatively, and humorously get things done. We had a bunch of people shouting “Monica!” to help some dude relocate his wife, and a bunch of people urging others to put down their signs so we could see the jumbotron, and then saying thank you when they did, and a food vendor firmly, but not aggressively, asking some weed smokers to please put it out, as the whole crowd might not like it.
My favourite signs were the the variations on the “We disagree, and that’s ok” type.
My sign said: Want to know what the Constitution really says? Ask a liberal!
Our friend carried a very popular sign that said” Jews Control the Synagogues.
Our son wore a soccer uniform and carried a sign saying, ‘Soccer Is Not Socialism”.
The Mall was massively crowded, to the point of not being able to move, so I peeled out and strolled around the periphery, reading signs and people-watching. There is no way there were only 250k people there. We were estimating twice that. There were lots of superheros and witches, Statues of Liberty, people draped in flags, and just a huge variety of amazing costumes and clever, pointed signs.
It was a pretty white crowd, skewing under 40 but by no means majority young. They appeared, by their t shirts and signs, to be college-educated. I saw people from Texas, California, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Vermont, as well as states near DC. We came from Pittsburgh and there were lots of us Keystone staters in attendance.
The weather was beautiful, the people were friendly and happy to be there, the cops behaved themselves-all in all, a good day.
Oh, and we were on one of two buses that left from Carnegie Mellon University. Of course, they were immediately dubbed the Fear bus and the Sanity bus. We were on the Fear bus, and guess what? It broke down on the way home. But no worries-the Sanity bus came and saved the day!
We were there too! We got stuck in traffic and the general melee trying to get to the Mall so we didn’t actually arrive until 1230. We were back by the carousel, about 2/3 of the way down the mall (that was when it started to get too crowded). We ended up spending the entire rally back there looking at all the signs – people were arriving up until 230.
We had a sign for my 10 month old godson: “I’m too young to have an opinion”. We saw a group with signs saying “Liberals from Alaska”. They really were from Alaska – AMAZING. My favorites were “Hitler had vowels and consonants in his name too!” and “MEH.” Oh, and we found Waldo about 7 times.
@Shadow Boxer: lots of Waldos. And a mock-fistfight between 2 bananas.
My manpanion and I watched at a satellite rally. I thought it was mostly awesome but for two things:
1) Kid Rocks?!?!
2) Although I understand what Stewart was trying to accomplish by doing this, I was…displeased by the false equivalence he drew between the Tea Party and people who think the Tea Party is toxic.
My favorite sign:
http://s-ak.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/terminal01/2010/10/30/17/enhanced-buzz-3270-1288474990-8.jpg
I agree with baraqiel (surprise!). There are genuinely evil people in the world, and the TP is run by some of them. I agree that most of the people who identify with the “movement” are being manipulated by those rich, white, privileged males who jerk them around like the sad puppets they are. But at some point you have to be responsible for your words and actions. There is-or should be-a vast difference between not wanting to pay taxes for health care (for instance) and saying Obama is not American. But the TP has conflated the two kinds of claims. So to me it’s all one evil movement.
Absolutely. The aggressive neutrality of the rally was a disappointment. During the montage of extreme media moments, there was really only one thing to show from the “left”, some clip of Ed Shutlz saying the Tea Party is racist, which they chopped up into ten pieces to make it look like this is said all the time. That just does not equate with the hatred and violent undertone that characterizes right wing rhetoric at the moment.
I often feel that trying to be “moderate” just means the left taking a step to the right most of the time.
My friend and I tried to go, but the Metro was INCREDIBLY packed. Seriously, there were at least 1000 people waiting in line at the Vienna Metro when we got there, Dunn Loring we didn’t go to because we could see it from the road and it had a full tunnel and we could see people lined up along the parallel overpass sidewalk. We managed to find parking at West Falls Church and went in to try, but every train coming into the station was so jam-packed there would’ve been no way to get on. And we had a very important Halloween party that evening that we didn’t want to miss.
Our friend who was coming down from Maryland said she nearly suffocated and they booted everyone off the train at West Falls Church, because the Vienna station was too full of people to be able to discharge anyone there. !!!!!
And I *know* we weren’t the only ones who bailed after seeing the crowds – imagine how big it would have been if we all managed to get there?! Still, we saw lots of fun signs from the people in line, so the afternoon of driving back and forth between Metro stations was worth it.
@Mimi: Wow, that comment just gave me a total suburban VA nostalgia trip! (Ballston & Clarendon, FTW!) I’m with you, though, I would have bailed after seeing the crowds. I’m not claustrophobic but IMO, there’s not much in life that would be worth spending hours dealing with that kind of crowding.
Yeah, Metro was a sideshow, and I did the whole go-to-Vienna-and-loop-around method, which I was sort of skeptical about at first, because my understanding is that the protocol for reaching the end of the line is that everybody is booted off, and the conductor sweeps the train for stragglers, and then he has a cig and a cup of coffee and takes a pee, and then the train starts back up. Guess they rolled wth the punches, because we just sat there for a minute and then started going back east.
Agreed that equivocation sucks, but we do that so as not to offend white working class voters who are always wary that the urban liberal are caling them dumb bumpkins. Ever since the white blue collar zeitgeist has shifted from Tom Joad towards Archie Bunker, it’s harder to get them to vote for redistributionist policies per se and instead they just slow clap for whatever party is in the minority when things get bad (Russ Feingold is about to lose Wisconsin, fer Chrissakes). Lexington had some good insights into this in the Economist last week. My cynical take is that from a big-picture perspective, this whole moderate discourse meme is, ironically, just a Hail Mary ploy to scare this class away from frothy right-wingers by calling their methods “un-American”. It’s a kind of judo-flip by people like Jon Stewart (and me, I suppose) to attract these maddening swing voters.
[...] Becky reported, I attended the Stewart/Colbert rally on the Washington Mall yesterday. The value in the event, for [...]
Hmm… moderation as a Hail Mary for swing voters. Ok, I’ll take that.
@BeckySharper If you’ve been to the Vienna Metro station, let me paint you a picture – there was the usual tie-up at the merge to get into the station, which happens every weekday morning, so I was like, so a bit crowded I guess, but no worries, and then, well the surface lots were full, but they usually were when I was going in on a weekday morning, so I said no worries. Then we get up further and see that there’s a line, 3-4 people wide, extending to the end of the bus shelters! I’m like, holy crap, I’ve never seen that many people here!
Ahem. And then, when we pull past the main entrance, that over-66 tunnel-thingy, I see that actually, we’re seeing less than half of the people there. The line from the other side extended up to and INto the parking garage and we could not see it’s end. And the other line was 4-5 people wide!
Though from what my friend who was coming in said, part of the reason for the discharge at West Falls Church was they started realizing that people were riding back to Vienna from there…because they couldn’t get on the trains coming in!
And I wink heartily at your considering Ballston and Clarendon suburban – Vienna was my primary station when I lived up there because I lived in fucking Chantilly!