So on Friday after I got off work and forced myself to go to the gym despite my mounting and increasingly intolerable anticipation, I hopped into the car with a weekend’s worth of clothes, a homemade reddit t-shirt, and only 5 hours of sleep under my belt.  Appropriately, I happened to have a podcast of NPR’s Selected Shorts queued up to a reading of a T. C. Boyle short story read by Stephen Colbert (what a holy alliance!).   I felt a little like the fanatic fan Jon Stewart jokingly described when he first announced the Rally to Restore Sanity: just strapping on a diaper and aiming my car in the general direction of Washington D.C.  In truth when I finally made it to the District and had to make my way though a wall of rally-related traffic in order to get to my brother’s apartment in Alexandria, I may have been wishing for that diaper.

In case you’ve been under a rock for the last month-and-a-half, the Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear, as it came to be called) was a call to arms aimed at people who normally aren’t inclined to take up arms.  Stewart announced it as an opportunity for the voices of the silent, moderate, reasonable 80% to be heard.   He said he wanted the gathering to be for those who felt they had no representatives in this age of highly polarized 24-hour news channels like Fox News and MSNBC, or highly inept ones like CNN.  It would be an opportunity to show that there are Americans out there who want a reasonable, rational discussion, and who are willing to consider alternate viewpoints.  As one commercial put it: make your voice heard, but use your inside voice.

The running gag was that, not to be out-done, Stephen Colbert, perpetual one-ups-man, would hold a “March to Keep Fear Alive” elsewhere in DC.  From the get-go, Stewart’s rally had more prospective attendees on Facebook than did Colbert’s.  Whether this was the reason the two combined into one rally or, more likely, that they had planned a combined march from the beginning, you couldn’t be sure.  What you could be sure of was that Colbert’s more subtler satire would create the perfect mock-tension to drive the narrative of rival rallies.

Beyond the fact that the ideals of rational discourse and cooperation were political music to my ears, I was particularly invested in attending this rally because I believed its impetus to be in the social news site, reddit, to which I am blissfully addicted.  Before there were even whisperings of a rally from Jon and Stephen, someone on reddit proposed that Colbert specifically should do a satirical counter-rally to Beck’s.  It was then suggested that the best way to bring this idea to Colbert’s attention would be for members of reddit to donate to his favorite charity, Donors Choose.  We raised more that $100,000 in that effort, breaking that charity’s record for donations (we got it to half a million two days before the rally proper).

So when a week or two later Stewart and Colbert announced their respective rallies, the reddit community naturally assumed that the faux-pundits had heard its call and answered.  Colbert even mentioned reddit and its philanthropy once or twice on his show.  This theory was later disproven, when, at a post-rally press conference, Stewart and Colbert revealed that they had been planning the rally long before reddit’s call to action, but that reddit’s enthusiasm was their green light.

The reddit community is divided on the truth of this statement, but that doesn’t change the fact that redditors turned out in droves for the rally.  In some of the pictures of the rally, you can see signs sticking up out of the crowd bearing some of reddit’s insignia, including one giant reddit alien.  And because reddit is very big on numbers and scores, the admins set up a system for trading a specially created personal code with other redditors that you could submit online to prove that you were there and met some of your fellows.

When the day of the big event finally dawned, my brother, his girlfriend, and I roused ourselves at the ungodly hour of 6:00 in order to try and secure a good vantage point.  Colbert, recognizing the rally’s proximity to Halloween, had suggested that rally-goers wear a costume that characterizes one of their fears.  My brother, who is tall and lengthy of limb, straightened his long blond hair and dawned a black hat to become Jay and his girlfriend sported Silent Bob’s overcoat and beard.  I don’t know how frightening Jay and Silent Bob are, but they sure did get a lot of comments and some attention from press photographers.  It was fun to watch people’s faces on the metro as they recognized the costumes.

Getting up early turned out to be a wise move, and we ended up being in the second section, able to see people on stage, if only as little action figures, though we tended to watch the nearby jumbo-tron.  At some point I remarked that if I had been watching from home I would have had a couch to sit on (as well as a bathroom, a woman nearby pointed out).  Yes, there were port-a-johns, but it wasn’t worth fighting the crowd to get to them.

And yet, as we stood for hours waiting for the event to get under way, there was a sort of palpable sense of anticipation and camaraderie.  It seemed that, like me, a lot of people had made the journey to come to the rally because, watch from the comfort of their own homes though they could have, they wanted to be there, to experience it, and to show their support for the cause of rationality.  It felt good to be more than just a passive observer for once and to see such dramatic and tangible proof that you are not the only one out there who is frustrated and who wants to improve the situation.

In the end the estimated number of attendees was 215,000, covering the mall pretty much entirely from the Washington Monument to the Capitol.  When you compare that to Beck’s rally, which got around 87,000, it makes you feel like your presence there really helped to make the event significant.  Historically speaking, it’s anyone’s guess how this little shindig will shake out.  Will I be telling my grandkids I was there?  Probably, but I don’t know if they will have heard of it or care.  For the moment, I’m just pleased at the prospect of some momentum towards a saner national discourse.

The rally itself was supposed to start at noon, but it really didn’t get underway until 1:00.  Michael and I were a little miffed when The Roots came on at noon and played a 45-minute set.  We bemoaned the deception, worried that it would turn out to be the Rally to Restore Entertainment, or the March to Keep Distraction Alive, but we were momentarily placated when the Mythbusters showed up and got the whole crowd to jump simultaneously so they could record its seismic effect.

Then the rally properly started.  Jon Stewart came on stage and was joined by Stephen Colbert, who entered like a Chilean miner from a capsule embedded in the stage.  The next hour and a half was a non-stop stream of entertainment with the usual clever satire underlining it all.  Sanity and Fear awards were given out to various media luminaries, Stephen Slater promised to be less impulsive in the future, Yusuf Islam’s “Peace Train” battled Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” and there was a giant Stephen Colbert Puppet.

But at the end of the rally, as you doubtless have heard, Jon Stewart took about 15 minutes to do something that Stephen Colbert’s persona rarely allows him to do: be serious.  Stewart spoke fervently, eloquently, and passionately about the return to sanity he envisioned for America.  The gist was that we have allowed a proportionally insignificant, albeit loud, fringe to hijack the national discourse.  He pointed to the 24-hour news networks that make everything black and white and thus make it difficult to compromise or admit that one’s opponent might be right.  He made an excellent point, that the media is meant to be a magnifying glass that helps to illuminate issues, but that in recent years the media has been turning that magnifying glass onto too many things that don’t matter and onto too few that do.  Poignantly he said, “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.”

Anyone who watches Stewart’s show with any regularity should be no stranger to this theme, but it was such a powerful thing to hear someone go against the popular narrative and speak up for respect and rationality.  I’m generally a pretty sentimental guy, and I definitely got a little misty at certain points.  The truth of Stewart’s words was sharpened by its  contrast to the bombastic, inflammatory, sometimes oblique rhetoric of so many pundits.  For someone like me who is, as an American, so accustomed to being embarrassed that these people purport to represent us, Stewart’s speech awakened the coals of a patriotic fire that I thought had long since been extinguished.  I walked away from that rally and that speech unspeakably happy to be an American and with a realization that we should not be ashamed of our problems, but rather that we should be tackling them every day and taking pride in the progress we make.  Jon Stewart is the kind of person whom we should be electing and sending to Washington, and I hope such an unfortunate fate never befalls him.