I'm not sure what it was about, either.
But we all came. From the farthest-flung reaches of the nation, we heeded the call. For what? I wasn't sure. Neither was our host. And he admitted it. And that felt good.
I do know that I feel better now, having gone. I felt good when I got up at 6am to hike to the Mall and stake out my place. I felt better when I met people around me, while we exchanged small talk about where we were from and why we had come. People shared food with hungry strangers who didn't bring lunch. People made room for other people to sit down. And my personal favorite: it was chilly, and my hands were cold, so I was rubbing them together. One of my neighbors noticed this and lent me a pair of gloves until the sun could burn off the chill in the air.
I felt better knowing that a quarter of a million people felt the same way I did, and it felt really, really great to know that the feeling we all shared WASN'T a chest-thumping, impassioned anger, even if we couldn't quite place what it WAS. People wanted to be reasonable, or at least happy. You could see it in the signs.
There were hundreds of thousands of us, but not one single riot or arrest. Everyone (for the most part) left the Port-O-Potty seats down. When a woman in the section in front of us wouldn't put her "Department of Peace" sign down so the rest of us could see, someone behind us passed forward a note asking her to be considerate of those behind her. We handed the note off to a volunteer, and behold-- in a few minutes, she put her sign down.
And honestly, I felt relieved when the host of the event admitted that even he didn't know specifically why we had all gathered. It transcended words. We all felt immeasurably better just knowing that there were thousands of people around us who all agreed that things were out of hand. We demonstrated, simply by arriving, that an idea doesn't have to play on fears or anger in order to get a widespread response. That it is, in fact, possible to unite people by the merit of an idea rather than the demonization of an other.
And it felt great.