By Pam Hersh Special Writer
Even though I saw nothing, heard nothing, and felt like an ant crawling through a jungle thick and overgrown with humanity, I had a great time at Jon Stewart’s-Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear this past Saturday, on the Mall in Washington, D.C. I even got to be with George Clooney for six hours.
I do not think George was at the rally (although who knows?, but I met him on the cover of Amtrak’s magazine, “Arrive.” I stared at him for three hours on the train going to Washington and for three more hours on the return trip. I fantasized how George, known for his humanitarian efforts, would have respected me for participating in the Sanity Rally — which was one of the more insane things I have done since 1967, the last time I attended a rally with hundreds of thousands of people.
As I arrived at the Trenton train station Saturday morning, I was feeling uncharacteristically satisfied with myself. I was a hip, cool grandmother, participating in a rally that was featuring Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s fan base, described by The New York Times as a “young,” “youthful,” Generation X and Y, not aging baby boomers like myself.
When I got on the train, however, I felt as though I were looking in a mirror. The train was filled with multiples of me — grandmothers from Princeton area who had, in the 1960s and 1970s, cut their politically progressive teeth (that are now dental implants) at civil rights and anti-war rallies. Two women covered their gray hair with baseball caps, inscribed “Woodstock.”
I saw local political activists Barbara Coe, Sally Maruca and Suzie Wilson, wearing one-of-a-kind rally buttons hand-crafted by a local artist. I sat next to a woman — a self-described non-Tea Party Republican from Austin, Texas, part of the Texanity for Sanity group attending the Rally. Like me, she was meeting her daughter and granddaughter at Union Station, to form a multi- generational statement against the “insane rhetoric,” destroying our country, she said. The abundance of older females on the train led me to experience the Stephen Colbert message for the rally — fear. I was afraid that the toilet facilities would be woefully inadequate. And my fear was well-founded. The lines into the Union Station ladies room snaked nearly the entire length of the station. The ladies’ room line got tangled up with the line for Starbucks — a fact that intensified my fear, i.e., the more coffee consumed, the greater the need to go to the bathroom. On the Mall, huge blobs of people hovered around the rows of port-a- potties, making it seemingly impossible to get near them.
The bathroom situation, a crisis for me and my granddaughter, led to a creative solution. We abandoned the rally for a while and visited the National Archives, where we saw the toilets, the gift shop and some amazing historical documents,, i.e., the Magna Carta, the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. As my grandson butt- scooted along the floor of the museum’s rotunda, my daughter, son-in-law and I tried to explain to my granddaughter the significance of the documents that established the founding principles of our nation.
And while doing so, we got to the heart of why we all made the effort to participate in the rally. We wanted to be counted among the people who believe it is possible to build a great nation with sane dissent, rather than insane insults. The rally promoted commitment to those documents in the National Archives — to emphasize working together to accomplish what is best for the country — without the ugly polarization that seems to have infected the nation.
To quote Jon Stewart, “This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times …We can have animus and not be enemies … Because we know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light, we have to work together. And the truth is there will always be darkness, and sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the Promised Land. Sometimes it’s just New Jersey. But we do it anyway, together. If you want to know why I’m here and what I want from you, I can only assure you this: You have already given it to me. Your presence was what I wanted.”
It is insane to think the state which produced “Jersey Shore” also produced Jon Stewart —Lawrence High School graduate Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz, who has become a national leader for sanity in the process of solving the nation’s problems. So here’s to productive political discourse — and more potties, and an end to potty dialog.
A longtime resident of Princeton, Pam Hersh is vice president for government and community affairs with Princeton HealthCare System. She is a former managing editor of The Princeton Packet.
