the infamous trip to crawford has come and gone. I had originally intended to blog about it on thursday, but I guess I’ve been giving myself a little bit of breathing room.

let’s rewind back to wednesday. rob and I were pretty excited at the mere possibility of riots, civil disobedience, or something of that nature. we had spent so much time hyping up the event that we forgot to check the nights forecast. now, if you don’t live in texas, lets just call texas weather “unpredictable”. so, we had robert check the forecast, and surely enough there’s a 70% chance of rain, and an expected 1 inch of downfall. this did not bode well for our 15 minutes-to-be. naturally, as we were leaving..the rain started pouring in dallas. instead of leaving straight for crawford, we stopped by my apartment and called the crawford peace house. a nice lady answered and explained to me that the rain was supposed to hit north of crawford, and it was sunny as any normal texas day could be. so without further ado, rob and I headed towards crawford.

i’ve always liked driving rather long distances. there’s something totally liberating about the open road and the wind in your face. the drive lasted two hours plus change, but it hardly seemed it. we enjoyed comedy and old school impossibles on the ride down. once we arrived, we found a place where a few cars had parked, and there was a crawford police man ready and willing to talk to us about the event, and share a few laughs. we parked the car on the side of a small barely paved road, and proceeded to walk across a narrow bridge over a serene creek. not 5 paces after the bridge, we see a conservative protest sign that would at least make you stop and chuckle. apparently the crawford police were enforcing the fact that no one could have a protest sign up unless they had a permit. conveniently enough (for the liberals), the only people with permits were on street corner a half mile up the road.

once we passed the now defused conservative protest sign, we walked into the grounds apparently on the wrong side. a few nice ladies stopped us and redirected us towards the donation table (aka entrance) that was giving away buttons for the “suggested” 8 dollar donation. we actually ended up donating $20 because the old man handing out buttons didn’t count out change, but i figured it was $2 extra for a good cause, and at the very least couldn’t hurt my karma. we entered a semi-large crowd of liberals sitting on lawn chairs and singing along to a few kumbaya style songs with live acoustic performers. throughout that entire first hour before the movie started i had a nagging cartman voice in my head .. “Damn.. Hippies..”. rob ran off for a while with the camera to get some extra pictures, but they all turned out like crap. this boy has apparently never touched a camera as i had to show him a few hundred times how to use it, but we still love him . while we were sitting around listening to hippy music, some girl approached rob and they started talking for a little bit. apparently rob left with her email address, and tried emailing her later.. only to have it bounce. he must’ve given her a great impression .

before the movie started they had to inform us that michael moore actually wasn’t going to be there. most people didn’t really care, but i thought it spoke volumes about moore’s character. a man who will openly ridicule the president in a letter inviting him to see a movie that totally defames him in his own back yard. this same man, doesn’t even show up to the showing of his own movie. way to go idiot.

now it was time to sing the national anthem. i sang proud and true, as i rarely ever do now days. it was kind of perplexing though, as there was no flag to speak of.. it made holding your hand over your heart and honoring the spilled blood for freedom a tad bit harder. alas, they did find a flag, and waved it.. as soon as the anthem ended. as soon as the anthem was finished, it was cue time for the movie. rob and i had already seen the movie together and were already getting somewhat ansy when we started hearing “No more Moore!” over and over from the conservative protestors about a block away. this is when the night started getting fun.

i was the first to leave my seat. i wanted to put a face on these conservative protestors and see what they had to say. for about 10 or 15 minutes i walked around the group of protestors.. observing their mannerisms, taking a few pictures, asking them about their opinions, and watching reporters interview them. one of the loudest protestors kept repeating things like.. “Moore is a terrorist”, “Anti-Bush means Anti-America”. being kind of stupid, i tried challenging him to a test of wits. well, after about a sentence of me asking questions he started yelling.. “You can’t argue with a liberal!!” over and over. i had my taste of blood and i liked it. i regrouped a bit after rob came, and this is when the real debating started.

rob started first with a true blue christian extremist. i jumped in on the debate after a while, but this guy makes a southern baptist preacher look timid by comparison. he definately wasn’t the debate for me. as soon as the focus on the debate had gone back to rob, the nice older ladies started drilling me about the things i was saying. it was then i got my moment to shine. the 3 ladies and I debated everything from john kerry to gay marriage and back again. it took a while for the defenses to drop, but once they realized that liberals are people too, i started getting through a bit. one by one the crowd around me started to fade, and i too started feeling sleepy. once my debating was over, i found rob again, still debating with a group of college conservative kids. they were all pretty cool guys. rob was declared the “smartest liberal there” by a few guys, go rob!

at the end of the night i walked away satisfied that i had opened up some minds a bit to alternative view points, and had gotten my fair share of political debate. definately a night worth remembering, even if there was no riots ;).