November 1, 2010
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Sanity and/or Fear.
I haven’t been on here in a month. I have had plenty to say, but no time to say it.
I have started substitute teaching at South High Community School in Worcester, MA.
I haven’t been scared or threatened like everyone jokes to me when I tell them I work there.
I have had the best time working there so far though.
I want to share my month experience there so far, but there is a far more pressing story to share right now:
On October 30th along with 250,000 other Americans I went to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. I drove down with two closer friends Derek and Nicole. I was happy to see that they were motivated to go as well. When I told people that I was going they either hadn’t heard of it, pretended like they knew what I was talking about or just didn’t care.
The drive down was invigorating. I drove the whole way, all 9 hours (8 to Fredricksburg, MD to drop off Derek and Nicole and another hour to Arlington where I was staying). The last hour I saw all the other license plates that weren’t DC area. New York. Massachusetts. Connecticut. Vermont. New Hampshire. Illinois. Ohio. Pennsylvania. Some cars said: “Honk for Sanity” or “Sanity or Bust.” We smiled at each other knowing and felt the excitement. At one point I point “Suspicious Minds” by Elvis on repeat and started rocking out way too hard, and ending up singing the repeating final chorus to a Middle Eastern taxi driver in crawling traffic on Rt. 66.
The morning of I woke up hung over in the fetal position on a poorly constructed corduroy love seat in my friend Eric’s window-less basement room. We showered, ate a quick breakfast at a small short order coffee place and got to the Metro station at 10:15am. While we waited a cute young girl named Anna dressed as Where’s Waldo approached us with three geeky, awkward 19-somethings, one with a Dollar Store ape mask. They asked us if we were going to the rally. Turns out the four of them had met on Craigslist and drove down together from Illinois. The cast from “The Big Bang Theory” were from Ohio and Illinois with Anna being from Detriot. Eric, our new friends and I squeezed ourselves on the Metro and were sexually touched the whole way.
Subway banter in situations like this can be flat and turn into dick-ish comments. This ride was not the case. If the car wasn’t going to burst from people, it was going to from hope, excitement and curiosity. Despite all of our butts touching each other and inadvertant hand holds when the train jerked everyone was able to joke. There was a 6’7” man standing in the middle of the train who had a giant jack o ‘lantern smile and scraggly black hair crawling out of a khaki hat. He helped take pictures of how ridiculous the car was packed and let us know how much longer till we had to get off and kept us laughing or laughed when we joked. We accepted him as our God from Foggybottom to Smithsonian on the Orange line.
As soon as we reached the ground above us the electricity ignited our eyes. The amount of people that were already there at 10:36am was overwhelming. We and “The Big Bang Theory” scoured the Mall to find a good place to watch and rally from. After much debate and numerous stops to read the hilarious signs we found a spot right on the corner of 4th and Independence, about 200 yards from the stage. There we were corralled in.
The signs were the first sign for me that America still was cool. People are just funny. If you looked into the Rally at all you have now seen that the signs were one of the many highlights.
I became the Ambassador of our area. I introduced everyone to everyone and people came to me with their questions and concerns and time keeping. In my district we had a 19 year old Arab named Amin from DC, a unbearably beautiful woman from San Francisco named Jenny, her very cool friend Gina from Annapolis, MD, three Portuguese coeds from Chicago; one of them had a smile that pierced my heart, her name was Lilly, a woman from Warwick, RI, two LARP-ers from West Virginia, our Metro friends and a man named Aaron from Pennsylvania. We were a family as we laughed, danced, clapped, cheered, understood, sang, agreed, questioned, smiled, flirted, jumped and talked.
“If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.” -Jon Stewart 10/30/10.
Never did I feel more American. Never did I feel more comfortable. Never did I feel more at ease than I did that day. And while it wasn’t Martin Luther King Jr. speaking or Bob Dylan singing or Barack Obama inaugurating or Glenn Beck asshole-ing, it felt right.
This was our generations Woodstock. My kids are going to find out The Roots played and ask me where I was and how it was. And I’m glad I have that experience to share with the future. Their teachers are still going to ask them where I was when 9/11 happened like our teachers had us ask our parents where they were for JFK’s assassination. But this will be a positive, unbiased, sane experience to share. And I think was kind of the idea. Maybe it doesn’t make a giant change immediately, but that future generations can see that their predecessors were just as frustrated with injustice and the potential of America. That America can be something more than a fat, greedy place. That we can save ourselves and we ARE self-sufficient. And that we can be the great country we have always been destined to be.
