We’ll I’ve finally recovered from my 12 hour drive home from DC and the recent Reason Rally. I’ve been trying to get my thoughts together on the experience.
First, We arrived early so that we could spend some time around DC, I’ve never been to the Capital and so we went everywhere we could. I will say I was rather pleased with the Metro system and really wish we had one here. Think of all the time I would save every day, and all the sleep I could get!
Friday evening we caught up with some local friends and had a bit of dinner, which was very cool since I got to eat with ThunderF00t from YouTube.
You can hear me whistling in the background…
Anyway, that was the beginning of the weekend. From there it just got better, we made it to the rally early despite the rain.
The exact head count seems to be up in the air, somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000.
The rally was awesome, just do a search and you’ll find links to speeches by Jessica Ahlquist, Greta Christina, Taslima Nasrin, Mythbuster’s Adam Savage’s, the Amazing Randi, and Jamie Kilstein…Oh yah, and someone named Richard Dawkins…plus many, many more. Really, it doesn’t take much to find the rest of the speakers, and you really should, these people were great!
It was kind of a sausage fest, but I was really happy to hear almost every male speaker call for more women speakers at the next rally, and the women who were there really kicked ass. There was one I didn’t understand why she was there, but meh, and Bill Maher’s video definitely wins the lame-o award. At least Penn Jillette recorded original material, Maher just slapped together some old clips from his show. They weren’t even new New Rules.
The only other downside to the event were the protesters, all 12 of them. I guess the Wesboro Baptist Church did show up, but they didn’t come close to the rally for some reason, and they didn’t stay very long. From all accounts I can find they got to the rally late, there was only about four of them, they didn’t talk to anyone, and they left soon after arriving. I guess since they weren’t getting the attention they wanted they took their ball and went home.
The rest of the protesters were a little more tenacious. They refused to go to the designated area set aside for them, which I agree with. Protesters aren’t animals to be pinned up and watched with armed guards on horseback. That’s sick.
Instead, they roamed around freely mingling with the rest of us, and of course, arguing with us.
They told us we were going to hell, that Jesus would save us at the same time he was damming us, awesome, where do I sign up?
I really tried to stay away, and I even convinced a few people to not feed the trolls. But then this happened…
I got wrapped up in the awesomeness of it, in that I watched AronRa and then ThunderF00t school Eric Hovid (Ken Hovid’s son). It was…epic…
Anyway, so what I have taken away from this whole event is that I really need to step up my activism, as do we all. So I propose a letter writing campaign, to rebut the crappy coverage of the rally!
The first article in the main stream that I read was this piece of crap from USA Today. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I expect journalistic excellence from them, but this was something I’d expect from a right-wing religious rag, not a paper trying to pretend they are actual news. So it got me thinking, many of the speakers at the rally all but begged us to become more involved. To me that means become more visible, and becoming more visible is writing letters to the crappy newspapers who write biased articles. Oh, and I’ll be sending it to my local papers as well.
I want you to do this too, I want you to write your own rebuttal to this, and any article you’ve read with such a horrible slant, and send those letters to all your local papers as well as the paper of the article. Let them know you’re and atheist, let them know you’re a real person, let them know you’re not ok with being marginalized just because you don’t believe in an imaginary sky daddy. Use your voice and be heard!
Post your responses here, and share you’re Reason Rally experiences here as well.
In closing, here are a few more pictures from the rally, enjoy!
BlogoPinkoBitch 
I was at the Reason Rally and i was also at Stewart’s rally last year. I can assure you that there were mor people at the Stewart rally, but there’s no shame in that.
I’m just reporting what the announcer guy at the Rally said on Stage…