Folks,
Given a couple days to chew on it, I thought a bit of a wrap-up and critique of the Reason Rally was in order.
I spent the day prior to the rally wandering the areas surrounding the National Mall playing tourist and gawking at cherry blossoms. It was good to get this done on Friday because come Saturday, the rain had begun denuding the pink and white petals.
Rain was the lone issue making rally attendance uncomfortable. Some brought chairs, but I foolishly forgot mine at the place where I was staying. In the end it turned out not to matter because sitting on a chair meant having the view of the stage and video screens obscured by people standing in front of you. Standing for the full 9 or 10 hours was indeed tiring.
My only other gripe has to do with the speakers. There were too many of them, meaning none of them had more than 15 or so minutes to speak. The longer talks by the more popular speakers would not be seen by anyone not attending the AA convention. Short talks lend themselves not to erudition, but more to brief, bitter statements and short cheerleading stunts. This, with a couple of notable exceptions, is pretty much what we saw and heard.
Hemant Mehta, one of my regularly blog reads, was an early speaker and he offered a rather positive message which included a call for atheists to run for public office. Next he introduced high-schooler Jessica Ahlquist who just won a Federal District Court case against her school involving a xian prayer display. Hemant had the honor of presenting Jessica with a scholarship check for more than $62,000. Funding for most of this came in small donations from a chip-in widget posted on several atheist blogs, including my own. Another $9,000 came from sales of the “Evil Little Thing” T-shirts.
Before leaving the stage, Jessica addressed the crowd, telling us with a big smile on her face that we were all Evil Little Things to her. What an incredibly brave and remarkable young woman. You can be assured that I did not have that kind of courage, poise and grace at 16 years old.
Nate Phelps, estranged son Westboro Baptist Church pastor Fred Phelps, offered a moving few moments of reflection in which he condemned the barbaric views of his family. The most re-quotable statement said something like, “My heart goes out to the millions who see and hear the cruel message of my family. A message that is met with tacit approval by too many in this society. A message that seeps into their hearts. A message leaving them to wonder why a creator made them gay just so he could punish them. It’s a terrible, terrible waste.”
It was entertaining and fun to be here and thrilling to see so many travel from such distances to attend. The semi-official attendance count as accepted by both CNN and FOX was 20,000. As noted in my earlier message I’ve posted a few photos and amateur videos of the rally on my blog. Standing on the ground it was difficult to take a photo with sufficient perspective to make an estimate, but veterans from the Park Service, District Police, the event organizers and news reporters all had better views and gave somewhat similar estimates.
In the end I don’t care. The lowest estimate comes from the breitbartosphere, where Dan Rheil claims maybe 6,000. Even that is a crowd of which I would have been proud to be part of. This is the one and only rally of its kind. The organizers have no plans to repeat the action. Probably a good thing because repetition would likely dull the impact of this one.
It was a once in a lifetime event for me, and I wouldn’t have missed it for all the tea in China. By this afternoon I’ll be back home and back to the daily grind. Retirement less than three years away.
Donn
