Some Actual Displays Of Sanity And Civility At The Jon Stewart Rally (Updated)

By Irin Carmon  |  October 30, 2010 | 9:09pm
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At the outset, a rally asking for less of something and at least partly centered on a television cult of personality didn’t seem terribly inspiring. But the people I saw there today actually seemed to take civilized discourse seriously.

Very quickly, media people on Twitter declared that it was as white as the Tea Party rallies. This conclusion appeared drawn from watching a glimpse of them on television. (What was it Stewart said about the media?) I’m no knee-jerk defender of The Daily Show‘s record on diversity, but that seemed to be utterly false based on what I saw walking around the rally.

These t-shirts read, “I Love America” in Arabic.

Really, guys. People of every color.

The concepts of the two rallies, juxtaposed.

“Gay parents have a 0% abortion rate.” This is true.

This one didn’t exactly make sense to me, but I just love Antoine Dodson.

And Mad Men. The only real “enemies” I saw called out were Tea Partiers, Glenn Beck, and Fox News.

Mostly, protesters stuck to the message from above, which was a rally that was also an ironic statement about how rallies suck as a form of discourse.

Despite the unmanageable crowds, I never saw the message of civility waver. Even when people were telling each other to shut up because the sound system was so terrible, they were so polite about it. Maybe there’s hope for America after all.

Update: And here’s some lesbian shitass repping — courtesy of commenter SlayBelle.

 
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