The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

I was at the rally yesterday and it was a lot of fun - it was enormous, as I'm sure most people know. I've heard two estimates - 215,000 and 250,000, which sounds about right to me. I'm personally wondering if that takes into account how packed the crowd was. When people were interviewed at the Beck rally, interviewers were easily weaving their way through the crowds. At least in my section of the rally, we were packed shoulder to shoulder. I couldn't see a thing the whole time, but I could hear it most of the time. I went in with a friend from Pittsburgh - Kate and another friend of ours stayed home and watched it on TV. I'll have to do that this week - I heard there was some pretty funny stuff going on on-stage.

The signs were all pretty funny. CBS has a sign review here, and Alex Tabbarok has one here. The majority of them were on the theme of staying calm and being civil with others. Lots of "I disagree with you but I'm pretty sure you're not Hitler". I saw a "we may disagree on a lot but I'm sure we agree on some things - do you like toast?". I saw a fair amount of political signs - mostly against Fox News and Glenn Beck. A fair amount against the Tea Party too. Very much in the vein of "I'm not a socialist/I'm patriotic too" - very few hostile to Fox or the Tea Party for anything other than the crap they shoveled on us (i.e. - I didn't personally see any signs accusing them of racism or anything). There were signs refering to Fox News as liars... hard to disagree with that one. Not a lot of partisanship aside from that. People may take issue with this, but you know what - Fox News and the Tea Party are injecting precisely the kind of extremism this rally was intended to combat. I don't see a problem with calling them out on it as long as we don't veer into other things like accusations of racism.

There were, of course, a lot of Halloween costumes there. I saw lots of zombies, one of whom was carrying one of my favorite signs: "What do we want?: Brains! When do we want them?: Brains!".

Best sign of the whole event... "Gee, this orgy is getting off to a slow start".

One other thing worth remarking on - I was surprised at the range of people there. It was an ethnically and geographically diverse crowd - that wasn't surprising. But the age range was. Lot's of senior citizens there, lots of parents with young children. That was pretty cool to see. And of course there were lots of twenty-somethings which wasn't as surprising.