Proud Again

Jesse | Jan 28, 2009

It was cold.  Marrow chilling, teeth chattering, joints aching, face numbing cold.  It was the kind of cold that shot right through seven layers of clothing and that even the bodies of over one million people packed tightly together couldn’t ward off.   And yet for hours upon hours on January 20th more people than I have ever seen in one place came and stood and waited.  I found myself among them wondering why.

The night before we went out to the mall expecting to find it packed with people partying.  But except for a pair of entrepreneurial college students selling hot cocoa and chocolate chip cookies, the mall was empty.  Even so, despite the lack of people, something felt different.  It was as if the moonlight and the grass themselves knew that the next day was to be set aside from that one and, perhaps, from all others that had come before.  There was a still, quiet anticipation, a watchful waiting, a perhaps imagined but nonetheless palpable quivering in the still night air.

The next morning we headed out early to stake a claim to a spot near a giant screen on the mall.  And though we were five hours early the lawn was already nearly full.  The concert from the day before played on the screen while we waited.  The crowd sang along to “Lean on me” and “In the name of love”.  But this was no concert.  No one was braving this cold for recorded songs on giant screens.  So why had they come?

The obvious answer is that they wanted to be a part of history, to be there for the inauguration of a new president.  And while surely this was part of it, it was not all.  Never before had there been this large a crowd, though popular men had come in times of crisis to take the oath in years past.  And so I wondered, at heart, at the core, unconscious or conscious, what was driving this unimaginably large crowd?

It was only as our new president spoke that it finally became clear.

As a kid I loved to sing patriotic songs with my elementary school choir.  As a high school student I stood on the baseball field, hat held to my heart, and felt chills as the national anthem was played.

But for a long time there has been a dulling of that pride, a tempering of it with the knowledge that those stars and stripes had come to be used to justify torture, to imprison people without trial, to lie and to conceal.

And now, finally, here was hope of change.  This was not about demagoguery.  Barack Obama is no diety.  But after 8 years of bull headed threats he offered a new way forward.  Instead of labeling an axis of evil he offered to reach out a hand.  Instead of justifying the violation of rights he told us that our liberty and our security are not mutually exclusive.  Rather than trying to make science into a political tool he promised to respect it once again.  And after eight years of wincing at a president who struggled to put together a logical, let alone eloquent, sentence, here, finally, was oration appropriate for the leader of a great nation.

Despite aching feet and numb hands, this is why we had come.  To stand shoulder to shoulder with a multitude of every age, race, religion, nationality, class, gender and sexual orientation, all aching from the cold, but with a greater ache still—an ache, a yearning, to start anew.  And so we stood together filled with a desire deeper even than the chattering bones to feel proud of our country once again.

Redemption and renewal do not happen overnight.  But as the notes of the star spangled banner rang out at the end of the ceremony, the return of long absent chills marked the beginning of a new road.