Of course today’s inauguration of Barack Obama as our nation’s 44th President is all kinds of historical. That’s a given.
This morning I had to drive about an hour to do a drop-off for work in Santa Monica, so I caught pretty much everything in the car, listening to NPR. And as I drove down Santa Monica Blvd., I couldn’t help but cry. Like, literally cry at the magnitude of today’s significance. And for some reason, the ensemble classical piece by John Williams seemed incredibly fitting in tone. When Itzhak Perlman started getting all virtuosic on his violin, there was such a freeing sense in the music. All the disparate instruments (and how disparate were they? I mean honestly: piano, violin, cello, and barely-there clarinet?) seemed to be going nuts with their own lines but were still playing together as a unified whole and I started crying. I cried in my car because I had no other way of expressing my immense joy.
For what feels like the first time, I am absolutely 100% proud to be an American. I wear the badge with honor now and feel as though the country is finally headed in a direction that I can get on board with. And I think that sentiment is true for most of my generation, so if nothing else, Obama has been successful thus far instilling a sense of patriotism back into the population at large. I felt today that I wanted to pursue a career in politics. Like I wanted to enact change. Like I wanted to become an active citizen and stop being passive about issues I care about. And this is from someone who isn’t generally moved to do such things.
I also found Elizabeth Alexander’s poem to be quite fitting as well. (Whomever programmed this thing did a top-notch job.)
But on an even more serious note:
That hat? Honey, no. That is a bedazzled bow. HSN would turn that away with the note “too tacky.” Love you, Aretha.
