Ford's Theater

Today, I went to Ford’s Theater, the location of Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth.  I thought the museum was well organized; it balanced history and appeal to the public effectively.  The museum had a lot of artifacts from Lincoln’s life, specifically from the night he died.  After a tour of the museum, you are able to go into the theater, which is still an active theater today.  I think that the theater is sometimes overlooked by tourists who come to DC to visit the popular Smithsonian museums, but I would definitely suggest taking the time to visit this museum dedicated to one of our greatest presidents.

Abraham Lincoln's brass knuckles.  Because Lincoln was a badass.

 I have been researching this guy for the past two weeks at the Navy Museum.

The tiny gun.

Once again, I repeat: Lincoln was a badass.

Lincoln's box.

 That's a long way to jump.

Jeff Bridges at the National Press Club

On Wednesday, a few of us from the program went to the National Press Club for one of their luncheons featuring Share Our Strength, an organization that fights to end child hunger.  Although we didn’t get to partake in the food at the luncheon, we did have a good view of the guest speaker, Jeff Bridges (aka “The Dude”).  He spoke about the importance of fighting child hunger, and the goal of ending child hunger by 2015.  Mr. Bridges was extremely passionate and he even got emotional at times.  One of his suggestions included giving more money to school programs to help feed hungry children.

After he spoke, he answered questions about his cause and also his movie career.  When asked what the most important thing he has done as a “famous person”, tears came to his eyes and he struggled to say that this cause was.

Governor Martin O’Malley (MD) was in attendance, and Ayah and I were able to get a picture with him.



Let the Sunshine In

On Sunday, we went to the Kennedy Center to see a performance of Hair.  I had only ever seen the movie version, so this was my first time seeing it live.  The part that caught me off guard was how different the plots of the movie and the stage production were.  It was a very engaging performance, filled with great music and constant action on stage.  At times, the plot was hard to follow and sometimes the music was so loud that we couldn’t hear what the performers were singing.  Despite this, it was a great performance.

Outside of the hall, there was a person playing the harp while another person rode it like a bicycle.
Sometimes I don't understand art.

Pre-show, right before I was yelled at for taking pictures.

In the main entrance, there were tables lined up with around 50 piles of rice that varied in size.  The piles of rice portrayed statistics and populations from around the world.  Some of the piles depicted the population of New York City, how many troops have died in the war in Afghanistan, poverty levels, incarceration levels, and various other statistics.  These numbers are generally very abstract in our minds and it was startling to see some of them visually represented.



I am one of those grains of rice.

Supreme Court

This past Wednesday, we went to the Supreme Court.  Unfortunately, we didn't get to meet any Justices, but it was still awesome to see it.  The architecture, like most government buildings in DC, was very impressive.  There was so much marble!  We did get to sit in on a short lecture by someone from the curator's office, while seated in the courtroom.

While I was there, I just kept thinking that I was sitting in one of the most influential rooms in the country, the location of Brown v. Ed., Roe v. Wade, as well as other landmark cases.  Unfortunately we were not allowed to take pictures while in the courtroom, but I did get this blurry one from the doorway:

Signs of the Time

One of the most entertaining parts of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was the variation in the signs that people made for it. The following are some of my favorites that I spotted while I was there:

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.