Rally to Restory Sanity and/or Fear

Okay, so I've been asked about my trip to Washington, DC - specifically, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. To start, I didn't get a single picture on the day of the rally. I'm WAY too short to have seen over the massive - and I mean massive - crowd. So the couple of picture I'm going to post here will be from Google. They pretty much convey the sheer number of people at the rally. I've seen estimates from reliable sources of numbers between 215,000 people to 250,000 people. It certainly seemed like a lot, on the ground.


It was really a gorgeous day in DC - fairly warm, not windy. The rally started promptly at Noon, after a countdown appeared on the screens. There was no possible way Ben and I (or anyone farther back than 500 feet) were going to see the stage; the rally planning was good, though, and Jumbo-tron screens lined both sides of the mall quite a ways back. We managed to get ourselves in at about 11:30am onto the outskirts of the Mall, sort of in front of a big screen. I realize now what an amazing feat this was, as a vast majority of the people there that day (I later found out) couldn't see or hear anything, stuck on the streets or way in the back.

The rally itself was decent. Not bad, but not great. As usual, Stewart and Colbert were in top form. The music seemed strangely out of place; the first act was some sort of rap, although the Cat Stevens/Ozzy Ozzborne thing was pretty funny. The Mythbusters experiments were neat. It took about a full minute for a "wave" to travel from the front of the rally to the back. That's a long time. Ben could see over people's heads and I remember him saying, "It's coming... it's coming... it's coming..." It took an inordinate amount of time for the waves to reach us, and we were only about halfway or 3/4 of the way back from the stage. Let me reiterate - there were a lot of people there.

Confession: we skipped out early, before what many would call the best part - Stewart's sincere speech. But, honestly, I'm so glad we did. Had we waited for the crowd to clear at the end of the rally, we would've been stuck there for hours. The streets all along the Mall and even a few blocks out were stuffed with people. Literally, we could barely move, even though we were trying to get as far away from the Mall as possible.

The best parts (for me)? The signs and the people. The signs were great. They ranged from "okay" to "extraordinarily witty". It was really nice to see people's sense humor. One of my favorites was a guy of Arab descent holding a sign asking "Am I acting suspicious?" There were many other good ones, too. Some were very political, but, frankly, this was not a political rally. What it really was was an excuse for Stewart and Colbert to do a live show in Washington, DC and watch giddily as hundreds of thousands of people came on a whim. Speak of that - the people were great. As early as the airport in Boston, we heard people talking about the rally. Saturday morning, the Baltimore train station was packed with people all going down to DC for that exact purpose, and all the trains were sold out all day. People were talking happily and reasonably to one another, and some people (on the Mall and in various lines) talked happily and reasonably to us.

So that was the rally: an awesome comedy show by two awesome comedians. I wonder how it feels to command that much power - to bring that many people together so quickly for practically no reason at all?

So what did we do the rest of the weekend? We stayed in Baltimore, MD at the Westin there. I spent a decent amount of time wondering if Ben had ever seen or heard of room service before, since he seemed positively delighted by it and wanted to take all of our meals in our room. I finally had to put my foot down and drag him down to the restaurant one night.

On Sunday, we went back into DC. I expected there to still be quite a lot of people there, but, honestly, there weren't. We walked from Union Station over to the Capitol Building, then all the way down the length of the lawn to the Lincoln Memorial and then back up to the Capital Building. I just looked at the map - that was about a 7 mile walk, not including all the walking we did in each museum. No wonder my feet were tired and it took us all day. Along the way, we stopped at the Washington Monument, as well as the American Art Museum (authentic Norman Rockwells from private collections!), the National Botanical Garden Museum (which has a jungle in it!), the Natural History Museum (skeletons and the Hope Diamond!), and the Aerospace Museum (space-suits and pictures of the sunset on Mars!). Neither of us have ever been to DC, so we got all sorts of touristy pictures (below).









That last picture there? Well, it was Halloween, so you have to expect to see a few crazy people dancing happily in the reflecting pool, right? Right?