Restoring Honor, 8/28/2010

Photo below from Bill4DogCatcher.com

The niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Alveda King, gave a speech, “I, too, have a dream.” After being introduced by Beck, Dr. King told the crowd she was thankful that Beck had used his popularity to put on an event about “restoring honor” – focused on “the content of our character and not the color of our skin.” H/T Freedom’s Lighthouse.

Photo AP. Click on the image to view full size. TheRightScoop has an uncropped aerial photo here. [The link has been corrected. The photo is the second of the two aerial photos.]

The HillBuzz Boyz attended, too:
8/27/2010
First Impressions on the ground here, in the leadup to the Restoring America Rally tomorrow

8/29/2010
Sunday Open Thread: August 29th, 2010

There were EASILY a million people at the Glenn Beck Restoring Honor rally in Washington, DC yesterday. And the state media does itself, or Democrats, no good by lying about it.

My favorite thing I saw at the Restoring Honor rally yesterday: people brought trash bags and made sure the garbage was taken out as they left, so that the rally area was CLEAN after we all departed

…It was humbling, to me, that it didn’t occur to me to bring garbage bags too.  I intended to make no mess, take all my trash with me, and not contribute to any mess that was there…but I was not aware enough to realize I, too, should have been prepared to help clean up as well.

That’s a life lesson, there.  I, and you with me, need to be taking garbage bags to big events I attend.  I need to not only enjoy the event, but do my part to clean up afterwards.  I need to take that step, and take responsibility for what’s happening around me…and urge my fellow citizens to do the same thing.

We ALL need to provide leadership like this.

Even if it’s leadership as simply as providing garbage bags at moments that need it…times when you’re part of what’s standing between an Obama Inauguration-grade filth storm and keeping our public spaces as clean, pristine, and ordered as they deserve to be. (Read the complete article at the link.)

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At HotAir.com Allahpundit wrote a dignified, insightful essay about the event. It’s our favorite article of the dozens written over the weekend, and it is especially endearing as it is composed by a man who professes to be an atheist.

Maybe…

* * *

Mr. Beck made a surprise visit on Friday to a convention held by FreedomWorks, a Tea Party umbrella group, for Tea Party supporters. He received a thunderous welcome from a crowd of about 1,600 in Constitution Hall.

He told the crowd that he had begun planning his march on Washington a year ago, thinking “it was supposed to be political.”

“And then I kind of feel like God dropped a giant sandbag on my head,” he said.

“My role, as I see it, is to wake America up to the backsliding of principles and values and most of all of God,” he said. “We are a country of God. As I look at the problems in our country, quite honestly, I think the hot breath of destruction is breathing on our necks and to fix it politically is a figure that I don’t see anywhere.”

***
In a way, the rally today mirrored rallies held for then-candidate Barack Obama in 2007 and leading up to the election of 2008. Both this rally and many of Obama’s featured mesmerizing speakers, who chose to inspire audiences by rhetorically empowering them to take matters into their own hands.

While Beck’s rally emphasized belief in God, Obama’s generally emphasized himself as a savior of the American people. This, I believe, was the contrast the talk radio and television personality was trying to achieve. Beck’s rally, and the speakers who addressed the crowd, were continually thanking God and Beck for bringing such an inspiring crowd together…

Only toward the end of the program did Beck refer to Democrats, Republicans, and independents. But it still wasn’t political. It was a unity call, imploring everyone to come together and unite to “restore honor.” It was a post-partisan moment. Similar, in a way, to Obama’s 2004 DNC speech, when the then-state senator from Illinois suggested that we should not remain isolated in a “red America” or a “blue America,” but should come together as the United States of America.

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We need to think about the success of Beck’s rally Saturday and ask what it says about the lack of moral authority in this country today. We also need to wonder what it says about us as a culture that so many Americans on a Saturday in August and more than two million a day via Fox News come to Beck and apparently hear something in his hodge-podge of elementary-school history and mishmash of moral platitudes and bromides that they find meaningful.

Moral authority — that’s what the rally was really about. That’s what the bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace” at the end of the rally were all about. That’s what all the talk of standing on “hallowed ground” was all about. That’s what the repeated use of words like “honor,” “integrity” and “trust” were all about…

That’s what what was so powerful about November 2008 in Grant Park when Barack Obama took the stage on election night: Millions of Americans thought they were watching someone who brought moral authority to the White House. I know I did.

Sadly, millions now feel Obama has since lost it with too many morning-after flip-flops on moral issues, entertainment TV show appearances, and days on the golf course as the economy struggles.

***
“Restoration” is a theme he has a gift for: a gift not only of analytical insight but of personal experience with balancing justice and mercy, and distinguishing between self-deception and realistic hope.

And he’s right about this, too: America can’t be set on a better course solely with changes in federal policy. Law and government don’t – can’t – make the people good. They don’t make us eligible for liberty. Our law and government are only as good as we are. It’s the people who have to change. And spiritual revival never looks like something organized by State Department protocol; when people are changing from the inside, there are rallies, hortatory preaching, gabfests, sorrow, joy.

I urge my fellow conservatives not to despise this phenomenon or be disparaging about it. All our futures depend on the character of the people around us. Fear, defensiveness, and moral weakness in the people are the best friends of the tyrant. None of us can resist the siren-call of statist collectivization single-handedly. It is not embarrassing or over-the-top for people to gather in public to affirm that there’s such a thing as good character, and that we can’t do without it. It is meaningful and life-changing to many. It is necessary.

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Update: Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs, “More Proof by Half”

MLK’s famed 1963 “I Have a Dream” rally was held on the same ground…

…Sharpton’s rally, which the [media] clowns positioned as the anti-Beck rally, “attracted” 3,000 and was given the same media coverage as Beck’s “Restore America.” Is it any wonder the American people are misinformed?…

Update 2: Grand Old Partisan writes, “Martin Luther King would have been proud of the Restoring Honor rally”

…This is Martin Luther King’s Dream:

“I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

…I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

…This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true…

Update 3: Did any of the dopes from Lame Stream Media wade into this crowd at Al Sharpton’s rally and ask them why no white or Asian people were attending? Doesn’t that qualify them as racists if we use the same yard stick by which 9/12, Tea Parties, and 8/28 have been measured?

This photo H/T Doug Powers at MichelleMalkin.com who wrote:

Reporters never seem ashamed of the fact that they’re singling out black people and essentially calling them stupid right to their faces without knowing anything about them (that’s kind of racist if you ask me), and a CBS reporter certainly didn’t shy away from doing so yesterday:

CBS News: “I’m noticing that there are not a lot of minorities here today, why do you think that is?”

Black woman at Glenn Beck rally: “They’re probably over there with Al Sharpton.”

Update 4: Gates of Vienna, “A History Lesson on America’s Spiritual Yearnings”:

Watching Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” Rally yesterday on C-Span, it wasn’t hard to guess ahead of time what the dependable MSM denigrations would be:

1. Downsizing the total numbers of people in attendance.
2. Mocking the religious themes Beck presented.
3. Questioning Beck’s sincerity in stressing a non-political rally.
4. Demanding we believe the Rev. Huckster Sharpton’s rally had the same significance.

Because Americans generally aren’t taught their own history, and often don’t know how to go about learning it from original sources, they’re stuck with what the media says, and often was the media says is full of bias while being studiously empty of real content.

Beck’s rally could only have deeply embarrassed and angered them. He trampled their boundaries: talked about religion, shed some tears, got personal about his own failings, and sermonized about – gasp! – looking for the good in ourselves and in one another…

…If Beck’s rally is viewed merely as a one-off, a quirk of the Tea Party drones, etc., ad nauseam, this will be directly due to the intellectual poverty of our commentariat. Their ignorance of important parts of American history, their refusal to accept as valid anything which lies beyond their personal belief system, and their overweening hubris prevents them from studying the past in order to understand the present.

Is there a more intellectually bankrupt or morally impoverished group than those who people our Left-dominated institutions — and of whom the media are only the most obvious culprits? Can they be reformed and awakened?

We’ll see, won’t we?

Update 5: At GlennBeck.com, “How newspapers covered the 8/28 Restoring Honor event”

Update 6: Marooned in Marin offers an excellent account of the day, with video, including the “bright lights” of the Left who tried to infiltrate the fringes of the event.

Doctor Zero at HotAir.com offers, The Honor of a Great People.

Matthew May at American Thinker: The Education of Glenn Beck