Inauguration Day
Eight years ago today, I took the subway back from my then-boyfriend’s apartment in Manhattan, writing bitter poetry about Inauguration Day on my palm the whole way home. I tuned in to the swearing-in of George W. Bush with tears fluctuating between standing in and pouring from my eyes.
This was way before I ever engaged in politics – I voted, and that was the extent of it – and yet even I knew that things were not going to be good.
Well, I’m sitting here tearing up into my coffee again for entirely different reasons, as I listen to the ceremony on NPR.
Yesterday I picked up my friend’s 5-year-old daughter from school, and she showed me a coloring project she’d done to commemorate Martin Luther King on his holiday. She told me that she thought he was a very smart man, and that she was really sad that someone killed him – and that if he were alive, she would have let him in her house to protect him from the people who wanted to kill him. She doesn’t care that he (or anyone, she was clear) is black.
I guess what’s bringing me to tears today is the hope that the inauguration of President Obama is a sign that you don’t have to be 5 years old to know that judging someone by skin color is dumb.
Well, this is it. This is our moment of hope – a threshold between the reality of national politics that for some has been a continuous string of nightmares, and the future filled with all the hope and change we’ve been waiting for – and all the things that we don’t know yet. I feel confident that things can only get better from here.
They are swearing him in now – and I’m crying again. I know that 8 years from now I’ll laugh at my silly tears instead of seeing them as foreboding of what was to come. Since I’m stuck for words in an emotional torrent right now, I will just say in the words of my daugter Sami, who is wise beyond her tiny years: YAY BAMA!
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YAY PRESIDENT OBAMA!!!
Sami – this is for you, and for your grandchildren!!!
noelle´s last blog post..An Amazon.com MUST BUY
I had to post the entire speech – for inspiration in the future. AMAZING DAY!!!
noelle´s last blog post..An Amazon.com MUST BUY
The best moment may have been the Bushes flying away in the helicopter. Our long national nightmare is finally over. A new era has begun. We will make this a better world for Sami and her generation.