Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear) was yesterday. I wasn't there, and I didn't watch it. Too much else to do. But it sounds like a great time was had by all.
Estimates of the number of participants are all over the place, from 150,000 to 6 billion (the latter probably a little high). As far as I can tell, "more than 200,000" is a reasonable estimate. Plus an unknown number of people attending satellite rallies in other cities, of course.
The official website has tons of photos. So do sites like BuzzFeed, where I got these samples. I don't know if these are actually the "100 best signs" at the rally, as they claim, since I've seen many others that are at least as good. But they have a nice assortment in one place.
The Examiner has the full text of Jon Stewart's closing remarks, and it's well worth reading. Here's an excerpt:
I can’t control what people think this was. I can only tell you my intentions. This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies.
But unfortunately one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country’s 24 hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying up to our problems bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic.
If we amplify everything we hear nothing. There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats but those are titles that must be earned. You must have the resume. Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate--just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe not more. The press is our immune system. If we overreact to everything we actually get sicker--and perhaps eczema.
And yet, with that being said, I feel good—strangely, calmly good. Because the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false.
They say that people who watch the most news tend to feel that crime is far more common than it really is. Maybe it's the same way with politics. This Tea Party lunacy gets covered by the media because it's extreme. Heck, that's why I post about it here. Could we Americans be more rational than it seems?
That's not what the polls seem to indicate, although that might be partly a matter of apathy. Say what you like about the Tea Partiers, they're not apathetic. But is the choice really between insanity and laziness? What about rational people who are both sane and willing to participate in our democracy?
Well, isn't that what this rally was supposed to demonstrate, that there are more of us than you might think? It's easy to get discouraged, with Fox "News" braying propaganda day and night, with anonymous attack ads everywhere you look, with pollsters forecasting a turn back to the GOP, the same people who nearly destroyed our country, after less than two years of relative sanity.
(BuzzFeed)
But we're not alone. Our nation is badly split politically, yes. But most of us are decent people. And when you think about it, being able to work together despite our differences is a liberal position. It's the foundation of freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. It's the foundation of racial equality and integration. Even conservatives are more liberal than they might wish to recognize. Their rhetoric might be hateful, but that's just fear talking.
And on the other side of the aisle, note that working together, compromising when necessary, does not mean that you shouldn't stand up for your beliefs - and certainly not that you shouldn't have any beliefs at all. Vigorous debate is actually a good thing. You can be a partisan activist without being insane, you really can. Of course, you might not ever get on TV...
And that brings me to this great quote from the New York Times' article on the rally:
But beyond the goofiness, the rally seemed to be channeling something deep — a craving to be heard and a frustration with the lack of leadership, less by President Obama than by a Democratic Party that many participants described as timid, fearful, and failing to stand up for what they see as the president’s accomplishments.
“I’m proud of Obama, but the Democrats in Congress, they’re just running for cover,” said Ron Harris, a lawyer from Laguna Beach, Calif., who came to celebrate his 64th birthday. “They couldn’t sell bread to a starving mother if God was standing next to them.”
Heh, heh. Great, isn't it? I guess there's one thing all of us can agree on, that we're disgusted with Congress.
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