The Rally to Restore Sanity

From my HuffPo piece on the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear:

They arrived on buses from nearby city centers and faraway small towns. There was Brooklyn and Philadelphia, but there was also Boise and Purdue. They flew in from Florida and Quebec and, as caricatures might, perhaps rolled their eyes at the electronic banner that welcomed them to Ronald Reagan National Airport.

They slept on the couches and floors of their friends. They brought signs and placards and Halloween costumes, a tableau with varying levels of irony, and cameras, oh yes, cameras and Hipstamatic phone apps -- so many Smartphones that the National Mall became a massive cellular dead zone for the crush of amateur documentarians. They stood, packed too-tightly together in the autumn sun (many unable to see or hear the event), driven to the District by something inchoate: a material event promising only nonmaterial dividends. They clambered up the trees on 7th Street to get a better view and to be viewed getting a better view. They came to see old friends or to satisfy some neglected civic guilt before the (allegedly) inevitable post-November 2th political winter pushes them back into hibernation.