By Michelle Cathrine Perry
Dear Jon,
Thank you for holding the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. A few friends and I drove nine hours Oct. 30, 2010, to support the rally at the National Mall in Washington D.C. We were groped by a crowd of cross-dressers, cursed out by the native D.C. drivers and were tempted to climb a Port-A-Pottie, but it was well worth it.
According to Stephen Colbert’s estimate, the rally summoned a crowd of about six billion people. CBS News tried to correct him with a conservative estimate of 215,000, but I’m going to go with Colbert on this one. From dodging babies in strollers to finding 10 different stripe-shirted Waldos, it was great to see such a diverse multitude of people get together for a cause.
But seriously, Jon, never have my cheeks grazed so many man boobs in my life. It was insane.
A man from Los Angeles flew in to D.C. to get video coverage for his blog. He held a sign that read, “How did my president get so dark?”
Witty.
There were quite a number of facetious signs. My personal favorite was one painted with a phrase in Arabic and then underneath it read in English, “Relax, it just says McDonald’s.”
Mr. Stewart, you should know that if fear is a sign of respect, you scare the s*** out of me. I agree with your words, “The country’s 24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
It’s hard to make sense of a media-driven-partisan-divided-“You actually check your facts?”-time in America. It’s also great to hear someone so eloquently address the issue as you did Oct. 30.
Kudos, somebody needed to say it.
I am so tired of the constant conservative-versus-liberal arguments among the cable news stations. Last time I checked, we were all Americans. I think you said it best when you said that the American image the media and political personas try to sell us is actually “us through a fun house mirror… the kind where you have a giant forehead and an ass shaped like a month-old pumpkin and one eyeball.”
Thank you for addressing that point. The constant conservatives-are-right-and-liberals-are-wrong or vice-versa mentality is further distracting us from moving forward, and let’s face it, we really need to be moving forward.
I’m not the only one that thought this, Jon. Megahn Wolff, a fourth-year writing major, said, “The show humbled me with the great sense of unity among such a divided nation, and I think that was the rally’s main purpose. Fear can divide people, but sanity can bring them back together.”
I spoke with a rallier after the event, however, who was not as pleased, who said, “I wish there was more hilarious racism.”
Can’t win them all, Jon.
While Bill O’Reilly, Bill Maher, Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann may not have been on board with your plea for sanity, I and thousands of others thank you for restoring it. Thank you for holding a rally that was not meant to pull us further to the left or further to the right, but simply to remind us that we, as Americans, “work together to get things done every damn day.”
Thank you for not pointing fingers, but simply pointing out that “from gay men who like football, to straight men who like “Glee,” there’s no one more American than we.”
Awaiting “more hilarious racism,”
Michelle
