Huge crowds at Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” freedom rally — organized to give thanks to U.S. troops — left Washington, D.C., on Saturday night pleased by the theme and the turnout – as thousands in attendance returned home carrying a message of making America better.
The rally — which Beck and other organizers said they didn’t want labeled as such because they wanted the event to remain non-political — focused on healing the scars that the nation has suffered as a result of its disreputable moments in history.
“Let’s be honest, if you look at history, America has been both terribly good, and terribly bad. It has been both, but we concentrate on the bad instead of learning from the bad and repairing the bad,” said Beck, who has a radio show and is host of Fox News’ “Glenn Beck.”
“We have a choice today, to either let those scars crush us or redeem us,” he said, speaking from the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech 47 years earlier.
Beck turned the heads of the estimated crowd toward the opposite end of the Lincoln Memorial to make his point.
“If you look at the Washington Monument, you might notice its scars. … a quarter of the way up it changes color. Look at it. Look at its scars. How did the scar get there? They stopped building it in the Civil War. And when the war was over, they began again. No one sees the scars of the Washington Memorial, the Washington Monument; we see what it stands for,” he said.
Beck had tried to fight off accusations that the event — which attracted many supporters of smaller government and lower taxes — was meant to be political. He specifically asked that the audience not bring political signs, and for the most part people seemed to cooperate with the request.
Indeed, Tommy LaRussa, the St. Louis Cardinals manager who attended the event, said he didn’t feel it was political in nature at all.
“It was beyond gratifying. I was inspired. There were a lot of things that inspired me. It was more religious, much more religious (than political),” he said afterward.
La Russa’s team was playing the Washington Nationals Saturday night, and before the game, he said he had received complaints from the Cardinals’ offices in St. Louis about his participation, which also falls on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in New Orleans.
Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols, who was given an award at the rally for his off-field charitable, said he thought its purpose was to show that Americans give back, something the Dominican Republic-born star does through organizations he’s founded.
……Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate who has helped energize the Tea Party movement founded on the idea of less government intrusion, was greeted from many in the crowd by chants of “USA, USA, USA.”
“It is so humbling to get to be here with you today, patriots. You who are motivated and engaged … and knowing never to retreat,” she said. Palin later said estimates of tens of thousands was a serious undercount.
Palin told the crowd she wasn’t speaking as a politician. “No, something more, something much more. I’ve been asked to speak as the mother of a Soldier and I am proud of that distinction. Say what you want to say about me, but I raised a combat vet and you can’t take that away from me.” It was a reference to her son, Track, 20, who served a yearlong deployment in Iraq.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/28/thousands-expected-glenn-beck-rally-civil-rights-leaders-protest-event/
More:
Glenn Beck joined “Fox News Sunday” for his only interview after the “Restoring Honor” rally that he headlined in Washington, DC on Saturday. The event was held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and some reports have crowds estimated at between 300,000 and 500,000.
On what he hoped the attendees of the rally would come away with, Beck said, “If people awaken and turn around and see that we have lost our way, and they do something about it in their own lives, not through politics but in their own lives, then it’s a — it’s an important day. Otherwise, it was just a nice day out in the sunshine.”
Much was made this week about how Beck’s rally fell on the same day as the civil rights movement’s historic march on Washington, which included Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have Dream” speech. In response to some of the criticism he received, Beck said that he wanted to reclaim the civil rights movement, which he sees as being taken over by political forces.
“How about who is reclaiming? People of faith, reclaiming from politics. I read headline after headline after headline this week that — the damage that I have done to racial politics… Race should not be in politics. Race is a — is a negative that is a heart condition, quite honestly.”
http://fns.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/08/29/beck-on-washington-rally-president-obama/
Related articles:
http://www.breitbart.tv/fringe-group-national-mall-jammed-for-beck-rally-estimates-from-300-500-thousand/
http://www.breitbart.tv/restoring-america-a-view-from-the-crowd/
I’m not much for the ‘spiritual’ message, but I do support Americans uniting to take this country back and toward the right direction. Those people who attended, and those who could not, all have one purpose in mind: To stop an out-of control Dem autocracy with their tax and spend orgy, their power grabs, and their trashing of the U.S. Constitution.
That first step will be taken in November.
Oh yeah, an afterthought:
Al “race baiter” Sharpton laid an egg:
http://www.breitbart.tv/sharptons-speech-draws-crowd-large-enough-to-fill-most-of-football-field/
There was a small contingent of leftwing moonbats who showed up and pulled stupid shit like asking a group of black conservatives, “What happened to your African religion? You’re supposed to be muslim”, and why they affiliated with Christianity, a “white man’s religion”.
More at Breitbart: