Notes on a Saturday of Rallies

The first time my parents brought the family to D.C., we visited all the standard Washington attractions: the museums, the cherry blossoms, the White House.  But when we staggered up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the end of tired day of tourism, we ended up wandering into something really special.   I'm not sure what the occasion was exactly, but there was a man with a boombox playing Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech on repeat from the top of the steps.  I vaguely remember trying to read the Emancipation Proclamation on the wall in the building, watching the sun go down, hearing Dr. King's words echo with the tremor in his voice that has inspired millions over the years, and thinking big ideas to myself.

Shortly after getting to D.C., it hit me that I was going to be here in the city for the anniversary of Dr. King's speech. Awesome.  But it didn't take much poking around online before I realized that this year's anniversary of that speech was going to instead be swathed in controversy, courtesy of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party kids.  Beck organized a rally to "Restore Honor" to America, bringing thousands of disaffected right-wing radicals to Lincoln's doorstep to challenge the government to "step off" and bring our nation "closer to God." Obviously, I found this infuriating.  Glenn Beck was re-appropriating one of the most important stands for equality to proclaim the message that "America is ours, NOT theirs." Not mine, he means. 

Putting aside my political disagreements with these crazies as much as I can, I found myself feeling really uncomfortable in their presence.  The crowd that this rally brought out was kinda Southern, largely middle-aged, really angry, extremely religious, and ENTIRELY white.  I walked around D.C. this weekend feeling a little like I'd wandered into some kind of KKK-renewal convention, and I avoided these people the way they probably avoid young black men, crossing streets and averting glances out of fear of assault, because this guy would happily crucify me:

So, despite all this, Andrew and I decide today is our first Saturday here in the city and thus an optimal time to go see the Natural History Museum on the mall.

You might think, "Wow that's a terrible terrible mistake," and at first I thought so too.  I started entertaining visions of myself being tied up on the Metro and repeatedly pistol whipped by some sweet-looking family of four for being the Obama-hugging, homo-sinning wetback that I was.  Never has the sight of so many Old Navy flag T-shirts struck such terror into my heart.  We even decided to get off the Metro early and walk the next two stops to the Smithsonian to avoid all the "patriotism."

THAT ended up being the best decision of my day.  Three blocks down, we ran into a huge march down Pennsylvania avenue.  HUGE march.  There were no "Don't Tread On Me" flags in this march, no handlebars mustaches, no shirts hand-sewn from American flags.  Instead, there were NAACP signs, MLK T-shirts, and chants of "hope not hate!"  My heart grew as big as the Grinch's during his Christmas redemption.  These were my people, people who supported my beliefs, my identity, and wanted to stand up against being bullied.  I've never been more inspired by anything, I don't think. So I dragged Andrew and we followed them. 

This guy was great, so he let me take a picture with him.

We found out that this was a counter-rally run by Rev. Al Sharpton and a bunch of other local leaders, and they were walking down to the proposed site of the Martin Luther King Memorial right near the Lincoln Memorial.  Most of the Tea Party ralliers were long gone, but the few that remained were kind of just silently contemptuous.  We walked to the site, but we didn't stay because it was about 95º and we'd just spontaneously walked two miles.  I have blisters; completely worth it.  They say thousands showed up, but nobody bothered to do a crowd count because the media was way too concerned with all the hicks in lawn chairs. 

This is getting progressively more biased and as I go along.

Anyway, that was absolutely the coolest part of my day, one of the coolest things I've ever had the opportunity to participate in.  If they think the civil rights movement is dead, they haven't met my fucking generation.  But actually, the crowd was really diverse.  We happened to be walking between a middle aged black couple wearing MLK T-shirts and a very elderly white man with his son, all of whom were equally angry.  Point being, even in the bleakest of moments, I think that we might actually be able to count on humanity sometimes.

We eventually did make it to the Natural History Museum, but by that point I was pretty exhausted.  We have to go back soon because we didn't have enough time to see everything (namely, the IMAX movies), but we did manage to get through the dinosaurs and early life on the solar system, as well as an exhibit on called Written In Bone.  All about bones.  Lots of bones.  Within that exhibit there was this cool feature on what kinds of things you can learn from a person's bones, even if they're more than 200 years old, so they had reconstructed what certain bones had looked like as humans, and estimated how they thought they'd died.  More on that maybe when we go back.