The Insanity of Sanity

We road-tripped to our nation's capital this weekend for the comedian-led-but-really-quite-serious political rally. It was mostly good. I'm glad we went, even though the driving was long, and the teenager...very much a teenager.

We drove down Friday night (after an interesting soccer game for C...been a long time since I've been called "Toots" by an insecure, and obviously poorly-endowed middle aged man -- but that's a story for another time) and arrived 2AM Saturday at a friend's house. We didn't get up too late in the morning, but needed to be a little social before heading out the door again!

When we finally made our way to the local train station to get into the district we had our first clue of how crowded the event would be. To use the same oft-used, ironic description of the event, it was INSANE. Just getting fare cards! There we started to see some of the awesome signs, however, and costumes.

When we finally got onto a train, we were crammed in like sardines. Truly. Sardines. I held on tight to S's hand and hubby kept close to C and M. We all finally made it downtown but the preshow had long since started while we waited in line to get OUT of the train station. While waiting to get out we saw the 3rd or 100th person dressed like the extreme Senate candidate from Delaware -- but this one had props. She pulled out a clear lucite lighted v*br*t*r from a protective felt bag and showed it off.

There were so many people walking to the event area, and, once there, there were even more. It's a bigger crowd than I've been in since the January 1993 innuaguration. We spent a few minutes trying to figure out where, if anywhere!, we could actually get to someplace to see something, and it was pretty impossible. There were people in and on every possible crevice and surface, including on top of the port-a-potties. For real! We all started to feel a little overwhemed by the crowd and made our way to the steps of the national archives to just sit and regroup and get something to eat (even though vendors were running out of food). We were able to hear precious little of what was going on on-stage - but did catch the strains of Ozzy Osbourne.

THe people-watching, however, was terrific. Sure, there were some signs we discouraged the youngest among us from sounding out, and a couple similar costumes (directing the kids to look elsewhere), but mostly it was a fun, respectful, nice crowd. There were all ages and most colors. After a while, the insolent teenager (having texted how awful this was to all his friends back home) asked if we could try to get on the mall. Sure.

I really don't think anyone anticipated there would be that many people who would go. The permit are was about four blocks of the mall -- large blocks, mind you, completely open -- and we couldn't get onto the mall for another five blocks behind that. The side streets were completely jammed.

But we did make it close enough to hear the closing address. It was a serious message and our polical leaders would do well not to dismiss it. Especially with the size of the crowd there to support the message.

When the rally was over, we stayed put for a while. We talked with people. We observed attendees picking up trash with garbage bags brought from home - and not just their own trash. Yeah, I know this was mentioned at the start of the rally, but people were seriously out to be...reasonable. And nice. It was cool.

After half an hour we made our way through still-big crowds to one of the museums to kill some time before trying to hit the train home. We waited until after five before trying to get to a station...and were once again packed in like sardines on the train-ride home.

Was it worth it? I think so. There's more I want to say about it, but I am still processing much of it. I'll depend on some revisionism by my kids when they think back to this - C said it "sucked" and yeah, it wasn't what we expected/hoped for, but I think the bigger message came through. I think going to this was about more than the actual event.

Plus we got the kids home for trick-or-treating.