I went, I saw, I rallied on the Mall part II the Rally

We were late getting out the door of the hotel on Saturday, but with these kinds of things, if you are not there at O dark thirty, or butt crack of dawn, you are not sitting in the front row anyways. I am getting up in years and I was not up to a 3:30am wake-up call. We moved slowly but surely to the Metro and headed downtown. My only problem was that there is a Starbucks RIGHT NEXT DOOR to the Metro station but the Metro is as clean as it is because they will arrest your ass for eating/drinking on the train. With a heavy heart, and far too little caffeine, we went downtown.

I had map quested the journey beforehand, but the crowds tended to agree to get off at the Metro Center stop. There appeared to be a great deal of confusion as to where the actual rally was to be held but I was sure the crowd was headed to the wrong end of the mall. We got off with the crowd at Metro Center and headed out of the subway instead of connecting to another train. As we headed for the mall, I found a Starbucks whose line never moved. Seriously, you know a million gazillion people are headed to the mall for a rally and you have ONE person working the Starbucks?? Really???!?? A second one came out from the back room or restroom, but the line never moved. I finally gave up and in true tourist fashion, we stopped at a truck and bought hot dogs and diet sodas for breakfast.

We arrived at the mall about 10:30 and I forced us into a spot about 1/4 of the way back from the stage. We could see the stage and the people on it, but the jumbotron behind the first like 25 rows (?) of people blocked most of the action for us. Fortunately, there were speakers and a jumbotron a few yards in front of us so we saw and heard EVERYTHING! After we camped out in our spot, I made the brave journey forth to buy souvenirs, figuring that by the end of the rally all the good shit would be long gone. Noone was sure how big this thing was gonna be so I went with my original theory of ginormous. I was right. By the time I got back from buying schwag, it was 11:30 ish and the crowd appeared to go all the way back to the reflecting pond at the other end of the mall. Crowd estimates of 200,000 were on the light side of the guess and not the far side.

What pleased me the most about the entire experience were the people we met. Yes, there were some angry radicals from both sides. The kind that truly believe the louder you yell the saner you appear. Also, volume is directly connected to accuracy of your facts. But, for the most part, the crowd was composed of really cool people just looking to hang out and have a good time. There was a great deal of debate about what this rally was supposed to "mean". I don't know that it was ever supposed to "mean" anything, but instead, provided an opportunity for a large number of like minded individuals to get together to show D.C. that we were out there and would not shut up and go away. You can go to just about any site and find pictures of the signs that people carried. Most of them were very true, very funny and highly irreverent.

Where we were standing, and yes, we pretty much stood for hours (although I sat down a bit too), we were in the middle of groups of friends that came together. One large group to the left called themselves, "Mothers Against Insanity (?) Doing Something". The shirts acknowledged that yes, they were the MAIDS, but the back of the shirts said, "Don't worry, the moms are here." Priceless! The group to the right of us was a smaller group of hippy moms who, may or may not, have had small plastic baggies in their purses, and who passed around small bottles of hootch and chocolate candies. The moms on our left and the hippy moms on the right hooked us up with snacks, sunscreen and a few laughs.

For anyone who did NOT attend or watch the rally on TV, I will simply say that I am hoping like hell they release the thing on DVD. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that the entire rally could best be characterized by the moment in which Jusef Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) was singing "Peace Train" only to be interrupted by Ozzy Osborne with "Train to Hell(?)". Yeah, it was like that.

My complaints about the rally had nothing to do with the rally itself. I had lived outside D.C. and worked in D.C. for a few years, so I was very familiar with how things run when there is a march or rally in the city. What shocked and amazed me was the fact that the city seemed totally unprepared for what hit them. It was as if they had NEVER experienced a large rally before in their lives. AND, the Marine Corps Marathon was that weekend as well and their heads were still up their asses about that one. The Metro ran very few trains AND they were running really short trains. Even the CTA runs extra trains with more cars when there is a Cubs or Sox game. I know they had no real clue about how many were coming, but even I knew that there would be more like 200,000 people. The next day I heard that on a regular Saturday, WITHOUT an event, they could expect about 200,000 people riding the Metro before 3:00pm. The day of the rally they had over 400,000 through in that time. It took us HOURS to get home because we had to wait for trains. The ONLY advantage to going to the wrong end of the mall, and keep in mind those people could not see or hear the rally, was that they got on the trains before the attendees did so they got home earlier.

Next post, the day after and THE moment with Rahm.