Hey, Glenn Beck, I was at the March on Washington [View All]

[babylonsister]

http://www.salon.com/books/civil_rights_movement/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2010/08/26/march_on_washington_glenn_beck_open2010
Thursday, Aug 26, 2010 19:01 ET

Hey, Glenn Beck, I was at the March on Washington
The "Restoring Honor" parade tarnishes an event whose shared humanity was unlike anything I've felt before or since
By A.J. Calhoun


Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledges the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial for his "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963.
This piece originally appeared on A.J. Calhoun's Open Salon blog.

snip//

The world was in the process of being changed, and I was, had I chosen to frame it this way, trapped in the event. I didn't feel trapped, however, but cradled.

The rest, of course, is history, one of the most stunning gatherings, public addresses and dramatic sociopolitical moments in the history of the Republic.

I shook hands, held hands, laid my hands on the shoulders and had other hands laid on mine, of people I'd never met and even a few I had, as we steadied each other. By that point if one was there, nothing else mattered. One was lost, absorbed in something vastly larger than a single self.

One.

Less than five years later I would watch large portions of my city destroyed by the rioting we'd anticipated in advance of the great march. But that isn't this story. That is another story.

It is for this reason I am more than incensed by the lying "act of providence" that caused Glenn Beck to "accidentally" choose Aug. 28 for his "Restoring Honor" rally of right-wingers, Tea Partiers, neoconservatives, fascists, the delusional and the truly wicked, the New Kluxers disguised as patriots wanting something, something they cannot or will not identify openly.

Should Beck's rally start and end without incident I will be gratified. Should lightning strike it I will also be gratified, and probably converted to a belief in some sort of Zeus-like being who sits in the sky. Or maybe I'll just believe more in statistical probability than I ordinarily do. At any rate, such an unlikely event would be interpreted by Beck's followers as some sort of indictment, and not anything they could possibly blame on us librul socialist Muslim commie perverts.

My plan is to follow the route of the Rev. Al Sharpton's group, which will walk from Dunbar High School to the site of the to-be-unveiled statue of Dr. King.

I know my place.

Would that Glenn Beck knew his. He'll find it soon enough, on the junk heap of history. But Beck is not the problem nor his undoing the solution. It is all on the people who watch, listen, whoop and holler at Beck's incomprehensible yammerings.

Strangely, I feel 18 again. Maybe I never really stopped feeling that way.