"Day After Day, They Send My Friends Away"

This morning I watched Jon Stewart's closing speech from yesterday's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. I really like the fact that so many people got together to support the idea of seeing one's ideological opponents as people. I think Stewart is correct, and the number in attendance to the rally as well as the interest its garnered, help to confirm it, that most of the country really is tired of two sides in the political arena utterly entrenched and uncooperative. I don't know how relevant this is to actually getting things better, as I think it's pretty clear wealthy, private interests controlling the government are entirely responsible for the uncooperative culture in Washington, not ideological stubbornness. The bombastic rhetoric is just a veneer. We already knew congress is consistently voting against the majority public preferences when it comes to healthcare and civil rights.

But a couple things bother me about the Rally to Restore Sanity. Keith Olbermann's tweets didn't make him come off as a great fan of it, his main gripe apparently being a sense of false equivalency, which has been Stewart's problem for a while. The idea that because one side wants to define marriage as between a man and a woman, the other side must be doing something equally as bad.

And I just can't help being bothered by someone asserting a definition of sanity, especially when Stewart's complaints are often very vague and ultimately created by years of making fun of the news media and politicians for being truly stupid. There's too much of a liability, in my opinion, for someone to now label someone "insane" to discount them without thought--it's pretty much the same kind of philosophy that got Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez heat, about which Stewart complained. Maybe a "Rally to Restore the Importance of Careful, Rational Thought" might have been more appropriate, though more cumbersome.

And, as an insane person, I can't help feeling indirectly slandered.



Happy Halloween, everyone.