Reflective Post 10

Having never watched any of Jon Steward and Stephen Colbert’s shows before, I was not sure what I was expecting yesterday when I arrived at the rally/march at the National Mall. Since their names would usually come up during conversations, I knew that they were political commentators but I did not know the kind of satirical messages they presented to their audience.

After waking up from three hours of sleep the night before, my group and I set off on an early adventure at five in the morning that would eventually last twelve hours. Since the bus were not running at the time, we decided to walk to the Tenley metro station. Not knowing that the station opened at seven, we decided to camp out and get some coffee while we waited.

Upon arrival to the Mall and seeing the crowd beginning to form, we knew that the place was going to be packed and in a few hours, it did. Tired and restless, we decided to throw ourselves down and take a nap before the show began.

With an estimate of more than 250,000 attendees, we could feel the crowd’s energy ready to burst once the events began.

While I enjoyed the performances and events from The Roots, John Legend, and Sheryl Crow, Adam Savage & Jamie Hyneman (from MythBusters), and Don Novello, there were some that were not as entertaining. However, I thought that the message the rally presented definitely put aside our differences in political ideologies and made it clear that we should view/discuss politics with a more reasonable attitude. One of the things that I found most powerful was Steward’s closing speech when he mentions that “we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus, and not be enemies. But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country’s 24-hour, political-pundit perpetual-panic conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder.” It is our differences that makes us all unique. It is what makes us American. But when we put all of our energy in arguing which one is right and which one is wrong, we lose our focus in actually making a different and solving the problem.

In the end, I am very glad that I was able to attend the event on Saturday. And while one of my initial reasons of going was to “have a good time” like Steward said, I feel that I left the Rally with a different perspective when viewing politics and voting.

"we live now in hard times, not end times."

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/10/31/31rally-blog4/31rally-blog4-articleLarge.jpg