Reposted from Daily Kos
The last time I went to a rally in DC was May, 2000, with my sisters and families, for the Million Mom March. This time it was just my husband and I, and I was hoping to meet some fellow liberals by meeting up with the DailyKos group.
We searched our closets for something orange, but didn’t find anything except my husband’s Orioles hat. I went to the local thrift store and didn’t find anything suitable. I considered dyeing some old white teeshirts orange. The local Harris Teeter sells Rit dye in every color of the rainbow, but not orange. I found a box of dye marked “tangerine” at AC Moore, and was about to start loading the washing machine, but my son had managed to scrounge up some orange tee shirts, so I aborted the Maytag.
I’d signed up on the One Nation website to pick someone up at the Dulles Airport, so we picked up Joe at 10am. Joe is a young man from Oakland, and it was great to meet someone enthusiastic enough to fly in from California for this cause. We took the Orange line in from Vienna, VA. There were a lot of people wearing tee shirts with “One Nation” and holding signs. One large group had tee shirts that said “One Nation, Oct. 2, 2010: Texas”. As I watched them struggling to figure out the Metro ticket machines (as we were) I felt like hugging them for coming.
I’d been apprehensive that there wouldn’t be much of a turnout since nobody I knew in Maryland or Virginia was going, but I was happy to see a fairly large crowd when we got to the Lincoln Monument. We could hear the speakers but not see them very well, but there were large screens throughout the mall. Some music played between speakers; Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration”, helped to set the mood, and later, “Everyday People”, by Sly and the Family Stone, which seemed appropriate, and is also one of my favorites. There were a lot of good speakers, most I didn’t know, but a few I knew — Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Harry Belafonte. Julian Bond and Dick Gregory were introduced, though they didn’t speak.
I was hopeful that we would encounter a group of orange-clad Kossacks, but we never did find the others. After two hours of wending our way through the crowd on both sides of the reflecting pool, we encountered one person — Genius at Work — who asked if there was a reason we were wearing orange, and when we told him we were looking for the DailyKos group, he said he was too, and he’d already looked pretty much everywhere, so we suspected we weren’t going to find the group that afternoon. He decided to go in the direction of the Washington Monument, and we were headed back toward the Lincoln Memorial, so we didn’t spend any time together.
We hung out with Joe for awhile, and then ran into a friend from Maryland who works for ASME.
On the way back, we made the mistake of going to the Smithsonian metro station. There was a long, long, long line and it took us 45 minutes just to get inside the station. Of course it was mainly people riding the green and red lines to get to their buses or Union Station. There was an announcement inside apologizing for the delay, and explaining it was because of the large crowd today. That made me smile. Once we were inside, it didn’t take long at all to get on the orange line, since not that many people were going in our direction (Loudoun County, VA).
It was a beautiful day, the crowd was beautiful, and I was very glad I was there, if only because we added two more bodies for the news cameras aireal views. I hope that one day I’ll meet up with a DailyKos group, but I probably won’t be wearing orange.
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