And With Newly Restored Sanity, I Give You This Post

Before I post anything, I need to plug this election.  GO VOTE.  You must! Here's why:

• If you're persuaded by politics, Republicans are all over this election.  Really awful, anti-gay, borderline racist ones. If they win control of house, it will be even more impossible than it has been in the past to pass major policy (any policy?) through House. 
• This election is being used as a referendum on President Obama, who I think is doing a far better job in office than any of the potential GOP candidates would do. Plus, he's done some cool stuff. 
• Prop 19. 
• Arizona's immigration law is NOT OKAY. Having a Congress who supports that effort really infringes on the civil rights of the 48 million (read: 16 percent of the US population) Latinos living in the United States.
• Most of the GOP candidates really oppose gay rights, some oppose gay rights to LIFE. 

Anyway, I'm angry.  I hope you are too.  Also, not to mention healthcare, education, foreign policy, and the other issues that hang in limbo right now.  Be a good American, hit up your local polling place, and cast a ballot. 

On an entirely contradictory note, I went to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" this Saturday.  The event, designed to be a hilarious response to Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally for Tea Partiers earlier this year, was intended for "people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat," urging America to "simmer down."  Having witnessed the nightmare that was Restoring Honor, I had planned to go to the Stewart Colbert rally long long ago to stick it to the Tea Party to tell them to quit "treading on" my civil rights.  

I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting, but I had really mixed feelings about the rally on Saturday.  Let me run you down on the situation:

I've never exactly been to a rally like that, so I didn't know to anticipate the crowds (or what they would do to the DC Metro system).  There was already a crowd at the turnstiles at the Metro.  We walked all the way down to where the first car sits, and it still took us nearly 20 minutes and three trains to get on.  The experience was something like this (but underground):

By some force of God, we managed to get seats on the train.  We got off at Union Station, got weird-tasting bagels from ABP, and followed the masses down to the rally grounds.  Nobody seemed to know where to go, so everyone was just moving at random like some kind of massive idiotic amoeba.  Everyone was trying to find a good view; a dude next to us brought stilts, and there were a ton of kids climbing trees.  There were a couple girls who really struggled to get into the trees, so the crowds tried to cheer them on (or make fun of them?).  Needless to say, they never got up in the trees, and they got booed when they climbed down.

Anyway, because both Stewart and Colbert had appealed to rally-goers to bring signs to endorse sane and rational ideals, we saw a lot of really good ones while we were walking in. 

We ended up standing behind a lot of really tall people and directly to the left of the second jumbotron, so we were kind of close, but positioned in a place that made it impossible to see anything.  The guy next to us kindly offered to let Katharina climb on his back to take photos, but it didn't help a whole lot.  Right after we got there, The Roots and JOHN LEGEND started playing, which was totally cool.  They were the backup band for the rest of the event.

In fact, potentially the best part of the event was that they had a LOT of awesome random musical performances to play into Stewart and Colbert's banter.  Yusef Islam (the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens) played about 2 minutes of "Peace Train," which was quickly cut off my Ozzy Osbourne playing "Crazy Train," which was epic.  They duked it out for a while, and then the OJs came on and played "Love Train" for good measure. 

Yusef and Colbert

Most of the event was like a giant episode of the Colbert Report.  Stephen entered the event like a Chilean miner from his "fear bunker," he and Stewart sang a song about why America is the greatest country in the world (most of it sarcasm, obviously), and they awarded medals to people in society who demonstrated the greatest "reasonableness" and "fear."  But at the end of all the banter, Stewart made an actually kind of honest speech,  a speech I've posted here and have mixed feelings about.

A lot of what he said rang really true.  We live in a time where policy gets so lost in political rhetoric.  Politicians are constantly telling us what they think we want to hear, and fighting each other by drawing on more and more extreme differences.  I think, in a lot of places in politics, Stewart is right: we're not nearing the end of the world, and we need to fight for common decency and compromise, not a win for our team.

Here's the thing.  Throughout the rally, both Stewart and Colbert tried to play the non-partisan moderate, so they talked a lot about we use the word "racist" too liberally.  And they really glorified free speech, something that I absolutely believe in but I think has definite limits (in light of all the suicides of gay youth and how I feel about hate speech in general).  I still haven't sorted out how I feel about the message he sent, or the message I think people took away from the rally.

Also, here's a video similar to the one made about the Glenn Beck Rally, that probably points to the general stupidity of bandwagon rallygoers, regardless of political orientation:



Anyway, I'm off to grab some Z-Burger.  Typical.  Better post soon!