If you were at the Obama rally, you know it was a mob scene. People were getting soaked, pretending they were disabled, pretending they were press, yelling, and standing in a line that was at least a mile long… literally.

            My main point is that in gathering together at this rally, the insanity and worst characteristics of every Obama-mania struck person were more apparent than ever before. I found it ironic that for all the “environmentalists” there, there was trash everywhere, overflowing from the trashcans and littered on the street. And people that claim their sovereign ability to make decisions reasonably blindly got into a line that went all the way down Sunken Road. The people at the end of that line did not even know 100% that they were in the line to see Obama. The line snaked from ball circle down college walk around the bell tower and down double drive, onto College Avenue, down William Street, and then finally trickled down Sunken Road; it might have been more complicated than that, but I wasn’t going to walk the whole length looking.

            And of course, other people were profiting from the event. Vendors sold Obama merchandise to Obama fans hungry to “show their support.” You could really see the whole scene evolve into a complete mess. I got there at three o’clock and the line was already on William Street. When my boyfriend and I got up to where his parents were standing at the gate by the press entrance, it wasn’t too crowded. He and I went to the nest briefly for some food, and when we came back, it was still reasonable.

            It got really bad around five, though. The place was a mad house. There was a line of people in wheelchairs waiting to get in and at one point a lady was screaming that she needed a policeman because the crowd was “crushing the disabled.” Of course, to shut her up, they let her in, which doesn’t make any sense to me, but she wasn’t shouting for the disabled on the other side of the fence, that’s for sure.

            The press that were supposed to be getting in at that entrance were being suffocated by people pretending to be them and they all drastically dialed their contacts on their blackberries. It was truly in the democratic spirit of things to be uniting these uptown yuppies with toothless poor people.

            The scene only got worse. People were screaming like it was going out of style. The kid in charge of the press check-in table was a student at Mary Washington, in the Young Democrats. He didn’t have a voice loud enough to move people away, so I helped by screaming that people need to back off if they ever want to get in. It didn’t work though. Their reason switch was turned off and they were circling like sharks that smelled blood.

            Eventually, the clouds came over. I said aloud, “There it is everybody. Get ready.” The heavens opened up and it poured onto us. There were mobs and mobs of people and children in trees. There were more people than I had ever seen in my entire life. Eventually, my boyfriend and I left so we didn’t catch our death, because, of course, they lied to us all and said we couldn’t have umbrellas. We tried to move to Trinkle so we could just dry off a little and let the rain pass. We got turned away, “Sorry guys, this part of campus is closed off,” a curly haired Australian in a long line of people shouted, it was a chain of the Young Democrats linking arms like they were in protest, keeping us out. It was a pretty good Berlin wall metaphor. I told them they were all going to catch their death for some guy and I walked, soaked and entertained by the hilarity of the situation, back to my boyfriend’s apartment where we dried off.

            I just find it so ironic that people were acting so animalistic for the messianic Obama that was going to save our country. The man who was supposed to keep us from chaos brought us closer to it. There is a line in Plato’s Republic, book VI, about living the philosophical life; Socrates says, “Now, the members of this small group have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and at the same time they’ve also seen the madness of the majority and realized, in a word, that hardly anyone acts sanely in public affairs and that there is no ally with whom they might go to the aid of justice and survive, that instead they’d perish before they could profit either their city or their friends and be useless both to themselves and to others, just like a man who has fallen among wild animals and is neither willing to join them in doing injustice nor sufficiently strong to oppose the general savagery alone.”

            My point in writing this is that regardless of the cause, be it Jesus, Mohammed, McCain, Obama, Ron Paul, or even Socrates, people are going to be crazy. People are not going to be rational, and people are going to be partaking in the “madness of the majority.” And it’s disgusting. All this said, I didn’t stay for the speech and I saw how waiting forever could have united some people in their mutual misery of waiting for Obama, and those are my only disclaimers.

 

Tags: Obama

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