... and I was THERE! This I will say for the rest of my life as people talk about the day Barack Obama became president.
January 21st 2009... Today I am home with a nasty cold- my battle scar from braving the crowds and the freezing temperatures yesterday. So I'm hauled up in my bed, sipping tea, and while not so thrilled about the aches and coughs and pounding of my head, I'm glad for some space to digest the past 24 hours- I was a little preoccupied with the actual events of yesterday so my photos are not brilliant; but I will post them just to prove (show off really) to you that I was in fact one of the 1.9 million people in DC yesterday...!
I spent the night before at Rita and Juans so that we could get into DC early and easily via bus and metro... So 6:00 am here we are waiting at the bus stop- (yes friends, that is RITA jumping with excitement at 6:00 o'clock in the morning!)
R&J live off the last metro stop on their line, so while it was crazy, we did get on the metro and made it into DC just fine. Unlike many whose stop was in the middle of metro lines... The streets were absolutely packed with throngs of people heading toward the mall. All the Obama paraphernalia you could dream up was available for purchase on the side of the road- from Obama boas to buttons to sneakers...
We made good time and found a fairly decent spot just in front of the washington monument looking towards the capitol (4th jumbotron back). In the hours before the ceremony, they replayed Sundays concert from the lincoln memorial- featuring you know- U2, Springsteen, Pete Seeger (for real!), Usher, Beyonce, Forest Whitaker, Tom Hanks and the like. Oh, so FUN!Rita catching a birds eye photograph:
The masses as seen from the ground:
"Mr President" (and the crowd goes WILD):
It was absolutely thunderous being in it all.
Snippets of Swahili could be picked out here and there as we wove through the masses- everyone has a piece in this to be particularly proud of it seems.
The aftermath: (which, seriously now, weren't they listening when Obama called on all of us to take better care of our world?)
The sun setting on our bus ride home:
The masses as seen from the ground:
"Mr President" (and the crowd goes WILD):
It was absolutely thunderous being in it all.
Snippets of Swahili could be picked out here and there as we wove through the masses- everyone has a piece in this to be particularly proud of it seems.
The aftermath: (which, seriously now, weren't they listening when Obama called on all of us to take better care of our world?)
The sun setting on our bus ride home:
A couple of things that struck me: there were kids everywhere, little itty bitty freshly picked ones, and bigger ones too. There were a lot of older people as well. One couple standing next to us... probably in their sixties but as giddy and happy as the sixteen-year-olds... Another such couple had been there all weekend. There were NO arrests (confirmed later on the news)... and no protestors that I saw. People wore their issues of course- some decked out in support for Palestine, others calling for the end of the war in Afghanistan or Iraq, there was gay pride and of course your token street preachers... but from what I could tell, people were just plain jubilant.
The most beautiful and moving part of the actual inauguration for me was the Rev. Lowery's benediction.
"And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion not exclusion; tolerance and not intolerance."
What a day. What a brilliant, shining moment of reconciliation.
4 comments:
Yeah, I thought about that too...the aftermath part. I guess some things are just unavoidable.
we were watching very enthusiastically from afar... thanks for sharing your firsthand experience!
So did you happen to see any other Rosslynites there? One MG was there was well as Baraka, maybe some others as well. Glad you go to go! What a neat experience!!
So glad you and Rita were there to rock on behalf of the rest of us who were rockin from afar! The girls and I were at the Pittsburgh Children's Museum butI'll never forget pausing to watch some of it at lunch and seeing those little girls lined up staring transfixed at our new president!
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