Today I attended my first Michele Bachmann rally [View All]

When I learned a few days ago that Michele Bachmann was going to be holding a “Kill the Bill” rally at the Minnesota State Capitol I knew that I had to be there. While I have my problems with the bill that is currently being pushed through Congress, this rally was obviously about something much larger than this particular bill. The people holding this rally were not just against the current bill, they were against any government assistance which provides health care to those who are less fortunate and that is a position which is deeply immoral and needs to be challenged.

There were not a lot of people who were too excited about going to a Michele Bachmann rally with me and quite frankly I was not at all excited about the idea myself. My friend Coleen was not too excited about going out there either, but she agreed that it was important to make sure an opposing viewpoint was heard and so she made her way to the Captiol with a banner for us to hold.

One of the first things I noticed when I arrived was two men being kicked off the Capitol grounds by police because they literally brought pitchforks to the event. While I have heard people speak about “torches and pitchforks” metaphorically on many occasions, this was the first time I had actually witnessed anyone carrying them to an event. After seeing the pitchforks and hearing the angry chants of “Kill the Bill! Kill the Bill!” I knew that this was a riled up crowd and they would probably not be too happy when our banner was unfurled, but it had to be done.

Coleen arrived a few minutes after I got there and we decided to walk up onto the Capitol steps. The rally was being held on the mall in front of the Capitol so the steps were positioned directly behind the speaker's podium making our banner easy to see from the crowd.

One side of our banner read “Health Care Not Warfare” while the other side read “Health Care not Wealthcare”, and for the first few minutes we were able to hold it without any issues. We had a couple Bachmann supporters come up with us to politely express their disagreement, one of them actually seemed pretty willing to listen to our views and was not entirely opposed to what we were doing. Another woman who had her three daughters with her confronted by telling us how many people in the insurance industry would lose their jobs if single payer was passed, she seemed deeply concerned about the jobs of those in the insurance industry but then she revealed to us that she did not have insurance and neither did any of her children. She proudly boasted that if anyone in her family got sick they would not expect help from anyone else, they would get through it on their own. I sincerely hope that this woman's family never has their ideology challenged the hard way, I have no doubt that they would immediately seek help if their daughters were in need as any good parents would but my hope is that they never have to seek that help. It was sad to see this woman taking her family to cheer on those who don't care about her family's lack of health care and I hope that she soon realizes the agenda of those who sponsored this rally.

After just a few more minutes of standing on the steps the Bachmann supporters decided they wanted to silence our message and a group of them showed up on the steps to harass us. It started when a couple of people stood directly in front of the banner to prevent the rest of the crowd from seeing what it said. We moved a few feet to the left and they moved along with us, we moved to the right and they followed. No matter where we walked this group moved right in front of us to make sure that no dissenting signs could be seen, but we were not about to let them silence us.

We kept walking back and forth and they kept following, we were often able to get our banner in sight just long enough for the crowd below to be able to read it before the Bachmann thugs blocked us again. We kept moving because we wanted people to see that this group was intentionally trying to silence our message, by trying the block us and causing all that movement on the steps the Bachmann supporters were unintentionally bringing a lot more attention to us and making our message even more noticeable than it would have been if we had just stood there without facing such obvious harassment.

Coleen and I decided to move from the steps and circle around the rally, as we stepped into the crowd more Bachmann supporters started to march in front of our banner, I sarcastically thanked them for “marching in solidarity with us”.

At one point a woman joined the crowd and started yelling at me “Why do you want to take away our freedom!!!” I tried to point out to her that I was not taking away her freedom, but she was not exactly being very respectful of the first amendment when she was trying to cover up our banner to prevent dissenting opinions from being expressed on public land. She did not seem to get my point that freedom was about a lot more than the freedom for insurance industry executives to make huge profits.

We kept walking around for about an hour until the rally ended, the Bachmann supporters would try to block our sign and I would quickly change directions so that our sign was once again visible and they had to turn around to get in front of it again. I did not see a lot of video cameras in the area, but my hope is that someone caught it on tape because it would make a great YouTube that would really demonstrate the lengths the Bachmann crowd would go to to prevent our message from being heard.

As the rally started to wrap up and Coleen and I started to walk away from the crowd of about five hundred people we heard an announcement from the stage that “4,000 people attended the rally today and don't let anyone tell you otherwise”. This was a blatant lie and the fact that the announcer had to add “don't let anyone tell you otherwise” told me that she knew it was a blatant lie. I later heard an estimate of 1,000 people and while this seems very high to me I could at least accept it as being within the accepted perimeters of what could be considered a fair estimate. Five hundred to a thousand people is a pretty big turnout for a rally like this and the organizers could have chosen to give an honest estimate and they would have been able to brag about their turnout, but instead they had to inflate their estimate to such an absurd level that it should have shown anyone who was observing the rally honestly that they were being lied to. I only hope that some of them realize that the number of people was not the only thing they were being lied to about.