Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

As many of you know, the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was this past weekend. I could not pass up the opportunity to go, and it did not disappoint. We arrived on the Mall around 10:00, two hours before the rally officially started. There were already thousands of people there, and we ended up not that close to the stage. But fortunately, we positioned ourselves in from of two jumbotron televisions and could see all the action on them.








During the rally, we saw some interesting individuals. A lot of people made signs, mostly jokes about politics or completely unrelated to anything. I have never been to an event that had so many people at it. I believe estimates claim that there were roughly 215,000 people at the rally. This number doesn’t really surprise me.









The entire rally was packed with celebrities. Besides Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, stars included Don Novello (of SNL fame), Sam Waterson (Law and Order), Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman (Mythbusters), and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The Mythbusters led the crowd in “experiments”, collectively making the same sounds simultaneously, performing massive versions of “the wave”, and having the crowd simultaneously jump. Sam Waterson read a very funny poem by Colbert about fear.




Musicians included The Roots, Sheryl Crow, Jeff Tweedy, Tony Bennett, John Legend, Kid Rock, Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), and Ozzy Osbourne. More than half of these were unannounced prior to the rally, leading to collective surprise when they would take the stage. The most remarkable time this happened was when Yusuf Islam came on stage to sing “Peace Train”, supporting Jon Stewarts message of sanity. He was dramatically interrupted by Colbert who brought Ozzy Osbourne on stage to perform “Crazy Train”. The two continued to “duel”, before finally embracing and walking off stage together.













Stewart and Colbert gave out awards to individuals who demonstrated sanity and fear, respectively. One recipient of the sanity award included the “dude, you have no Qur’an” guy. A recipient of the fear award was all the news stations that didn’t allow their staff to attend the rally. Since none of them were there, the award went to someone more courageous, a 7 year old girl.
But it wasn’t all a joke.












Well, it kind of was.

Jon Stewart claimed that his main goal was to put on a good show and for people to have a good time. But he did talk for about ten minutes about his intentions for putting on the rally. You can read the full speech here, but I’ll put some of the parts that intrigued me here.

"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."

"We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is–on the brink of catastrophe–torn by polarizing hate and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done, but the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day!"

"If we amplify everything we hear nothing."
He was essentially saying that the media exaggerates and builds up stories in order to gain viewership. That’s not the way it should be, and truthfully, it’s a disservice to the public. And Stewart was not alone in his proclamations. The majority of the people there, as the majority of the people in the country, are fed up and tired. Tired of the government and tired of the media. Tired of conflict. Tired of a lot of blame and excuses, with little action. It is highly unlikely that this rally was meant to inspire drastic changes, but I think it did portray a common message than a lot of people can identify with.