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Washington, D.C. -- Lansing Town Councilwoman Kathy Miller was among the estimated 215,000 people who crowded onto the Mall for 'The Rally To Restore Sanity' last Saturday.  The rally was Comedy Central's anchorman Jon Stewart's humorous response to Glen Beck's 'Restoring Honor' rally which only attracted 40% of the number of people who attended Stewart's rally.  Miller says that Stewart did restore sanity, at least on the Mall Saturday.

"I think it was very sane there," she says.  "To have that many people and for it to be so low key.  If anything was loud it was laughter.  But nobody was yelling or saying anything nasty -- it was amazing."

Stewart's invited people to come 'who are too busy to go to rallies' to celebrate 'people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn't be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it’s appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles.' 

Miller says that the Mall was a sea of people, but that the crowd was well behaved and in the spirit of the thing.


"At one point a friend and I stood on the stairs that go up to the art museum," she says.  "We looked out and you could not see an empty space.  When you tried to get through you were like a sardine trying to get out of the can.  Everybody was incredibly polite, incredibly nice.  There were a lot of signs, but even the signs were more funny than anything else.  And some of them were right on."

She notes that the rally attracted younger and older people, but noticeably missing were 35 to 55 year-olds.

The rally was merged with 'The March to Keep Fear Alive,' Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert's parallel event.  Miller says that Colbert was hysterical, but her favorite part of the rally was Stewart's speech in which he told the crowd that their coming had restored his sanity.

"We live now in hard times, not end times," Stewart said. "And we can have animus and not be enemies.  But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country's 24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems. But its existence makes solving them that much harder."


Tony Bennett sang 'America The Beautiful' after Stewart spoke, finishing the three hour event.

"I liked Jon Stewart's speech at the end," Miller says.  "Some people are complaining that he should have been more heavy handed on how the election is being financed, but I thought it was perfect."

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