Rally to Restore Sanity in DC

[photos and video: by WDFloyd, at the 10-30-10 Rally to Restore Sanity in DC]

by WDFloyd

When I saw Jon Stewart announce the Rally to Restore Sanity one night in late September, it seemed like the kind of festivus I would need to attend. Unfortunately, at the time of said announcement I knew I'd be really, really busy during late October and so mostly wrote off the idea. Apparently, one of my good friends didn't catch all of my qualifying statements about attending the rally, because soon after a late night discussion about me "possibly, but not likely" flying to DC, he shot me an email with his flight itinerary and a request for me to pick a good hotel. Lesson to the kids: be careful what travels plans you discuss at 1am at Donn's Depot (I also enter into evidence the horrifying mustache I wore to hike up Colorado's Mt. Elbert).

If you watched the rally on TV, you undoubted know more about what happened on stage than I do. We showed up at the mall around 10:30 and it was already packed. My friends pushed ahead toward the stage, but I elected to hang back on 7th (about halfway between the Capitol and the Washington Monument). Thus, I didn't get any awesome photos of famous people on stage; however, I took a lot of shots of random people in the crowd with their signs and/or costumes (some of which are on my Flickr page, and can be accessed via a widget to the right of this post).

It's been estimated that about 215K people showed up for the rally (about 3.5x what was anticipated on the original park permit). That sounds like a lot of people, which corroborates my experience on the ground and my perception that I was in the largest crowd in which I'd ever been (watch the above video to get an idea of the crowd size). This was novel until the need for snacks set in, and I realized that I was trapped squarely in the middle of the action with no hope of obtaining a Coke or a hot dog for hours.

The crowd, as one might expect from a "Rally to Restore Sanity," was pretty calm and polite. The only incident of name calling came when a bunch of anti-corporate activists in suits marched down 7th St holding a sign entitled "Republicorp" and displaying some anti-business, GOP, and government slogans. These activists were denounced with the chant:"douche bags! douche bags!" It wasn't the content of the sign, though, which raised the ire of the generally left leaning crowd; instead, it was the fact that the activists from "Republicorp" were sporting an enormous sign which was blocking the view of a jumbo-tron.

What was especially nice is that once the official program was finished, thousands of the rally attendees filed down the Mall in an orderly manner and began to visit many of our nation's fine monuments en masse. The rest of the afternoon felt like a mass exercise in observing and respecting America's ethos and history. It was nice, in addition to being a refreshing end to an amusing but long afternoon. And, of course, I was in a pretty good mood already, after having heard Ozzy play "Crazy Train" live.